The Calendar Slaves

Corporate's most jovial subset.

Years ago, in what feels like a different professional era for me, I worked with a dude named James. He was a HR Director. I only worked at this specific gig for about 16 weeks, i.e. four months. James did not take any vacation during this time (typical American). Literally all 16 of the Mondays that I worked with him, his calendar looked like the one you see above. He would get to work around 8:30am on Monday and, essentially, his entire calendar was blocked until maybe 4pm Friday. There was an outside chance for a few white spots/gaps, but not many.

There are a couple of different schools of thought on all this. I don’t want to spend a ton of time here, but we can walk through it for a second.

“Meetings are essential to business”

This is a statement — and school of thought — you often hear from people that spend their entire week in meetings. They are saying it because they are justifying their existence. That’s Tier I.

Meetings are important, but more importantly, well-run meetings are important. A bunch of middling, BS-y, low-context meetings all week is horrible. Because then people need to find time to do the work in between the meetings, because meetings are not work. They are an aspect of work, but most of us still have something we “ship” or “produce,” and we need to find time to do that. When all we do is sit in meetings, that’s much harder.

Now, the thing is, meetings won’t go away anytime soon. They are very comfortable to the human brain because they make people, especially bad managers, feel as if there’s now a degree of “accountability,” i.e. “We are all on the same page here.” In reality a lot of meetings actually regress the idea of a team being on the same page and confuse 9/10 of the people in the room, but we don’t like to discuss that side of it.

The importance of a given meeting