Why You Never Have Time for Your Most Important Work
When filling up your car with fuel, how do you know when it’s full? Well, the fuel filler nozzle clicks off. A sensor triggers the fuel to shut off.
Yet did you know that the sensor is programmed to trigger when the fuel tank is 85 to 95% full? There is an intentional air pocket left in the tank to accommodate the fuel’s natural expansion due to heat.
Now ask yourself: how do you know when your calendar is full? Do you have a safety gap to allow for unexpected events that will naturally occur in the week?
Most people do not, and that’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script |429
Hello, and welcome to episode 429 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There was a time in the 2010s when hustle culture took hold, and the dream was to become the next “tech-bro”, as they were called. This meant working 18-hour days, seven days a week, with calendars bursting with meetings and every minute scheduled for whatever work these dreamers did.
It didn’t work. Pretty soon, the hustle culture trend morphed into a self-care trend, when rest and relaxation became the priority, not the stuffed calendars and 18-hour days.
Remnants of these trends still exist. There are people adopting AI and building apps today, in the hope that they will be the next hyper-successful business leaders. And a cursory look around YouTube will show you plenty of videos about slow living and mindfulness.
And as with most things, there’s a happy medium somewhere that, when found, brings you the success you wish for without the burnout, stress and overwhelm.
To find that happy balance requires one observation. Your natural capacity. And that’s what this week’s question is all about.
So, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks, hi Carl, what would you advise someone who never gets round to doing their most important work because their calendar always fills up with meetings. I was promoted last January, and since then all I seem to have been doing is sitting in meetings every day. I never have time to stop and think about strategy or even reply to my messages and emails.
Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.
This is a very interesting question, as you may have noticed, I’m a little obsessed with calendars.
That’s because it dawned on me a few years ago that it doesn’t matter how many tasks are on my task list or how many articles, notes or reports I should read if I never have the time to do or read them.
The only thing that really matters each day is how I will spend my time. And that means the only productivity tool available to me is the calendar.
You see, your calendar is honest. It cannot lie to you. All you get are the 24 hours each day, and you plot out how you will spend the hours.
Now, I know it’s not always that simple. Some of you will discover that people can schedule meetings on your calendar without your knowledge, and many of you will likely already have some recurring meetings that happen every week or even every day.
So, technically, it’s unlikely that you will ever begin with a blank calendar.
However, if you allow someone else to control your calendar, that is where many of your time management and productivity problems begin. You bypass a key part of managing your calendar—the decision stage.
Let’s break this down.
When someone makes a request on your time, you have a decision to make. It’s a simple yes/no decision, but it’s an important decision all the same. Do you say yes and accept the commitment, or do you say no and reject the commitment?
If you say no, that’s it. It goes no further, and it doesn’t end up on your calendar. If you say yes, you make a commitment, and that commitment goes onto your calendar.
This applies whether it’s a meeting or a task. Tasks still require time. They may not initially go on your calendar, but they still need to be done, which means you will have to find time to do them at some point.
So, every time you take on a new commitment, you are putting more pressure on your capacity.
Your capacity is the work you can realistically do each day or week. And we all have a capacity.
Now, this introduces an issue most people miss. Every commitment you accept has a time cost beyond the actual thing itself.
A one-hour meeting, for example, often requires some preparation time, and then you need to be in the place where the meeting is being held, even if it’s an online meeting.
I do my coaching calls using Zoom, and for each session, there is at least fifteen minutes of prep time and 2 or 3 minutes to set up the computer for the call.
Today, I have four coaching calls; that means I need to find an additional hour beyond the four hours of calls. It’s not four hours; it’s five.
You might think the proposal you must send today will only take thirty minutes to finish, but that does not take into account interruptions, the possibility that you need to ask someone for further information, and then have to wait for them to come back to you before you can finish.
There’s a good chance that your thirty minutes turn into 90 minutes.
What all this means is that if your calendar is packed with meetings and time blocks without any buffer time, you’re going to go beyond your capacity for the day.
This relates to the difficulty we all have predicting how long a task will take. We don’t know. Not with any degree of accuracy.
And that’s because each day is different, with different distractions, emergencies and interruptions.
For me, recording and preparing a YouTube video generally takes six hours. Yet, yesterday it took me eight.
I have a process for making my videos that I’ve developed over ten years, and I create a video every week. You would have thought by now I would be able to predict with accuracy how long a video would take to prepare. Not a chance.
My wife was at home yesterday; there was an unexpected issue with one of the tools I use for making videos, and in the middle of making the video, there was an urgent message I needed to respond to.
None of those disruptions was predictable. Yet they happened despite all the safeguards I have on my calendar and in my processes.
The job still got done; the video was finished and handed over to my video editor for cleanup and polishing.
Yet because of the lessons I’ve learned over the years, the one task I had to get done yesterday was the video. Nothing else mattered.
What all this means is that it’s important to be in control of your calendar and be self-aware enough to know your capacity. If you don’t know where your limit is, you’ll be like a fuel tank with no air pocket. You’ll burst or, worse, explode.
Not in a literal sense, but you’ll exhaust yourself, make more mistakes that need rectifying later (more pressure on your capacity) and miss deadlines, which is not great for your promotional prospects or for your business’s reputation.
Unfortunately, the solution to this is not easy. It can go against all your human instincts to be helpful and courteous to other people.
The first step is to look at your regular meetings. Ask: How did that meeting come into your life?
Some meetings are unavoidable. A weekly team meeting where everyone updates the boss on their project progress, discusses progress on various proposals, sales or other work, and alerts colleagues of any unforeseen issues or delays.
Yet, there will be other meetings where, when you ask yourself how they got into your life, you realise it was because you tried to be nice to someone, but a meeting that brings you or the other attendees no real value.
These meetings should be removed.
One-to-ones with your team members or boss may also be important meetings, as they add value to theirs and your work.
Really, what you are doing is a meeting audit. Do you really have to be in all these meetings?
Given that you are in a leadership position, you may be able to delegate some of these meetings to your team. This is great, as it helps them develop their skills, removes a commitment from your calendar, and you only need a short summary from your team member about what happened.
Next up, I would suggest putting a cap on your meetings each week. But before you do that, ask how much time, on average, do you need for strategic thinking and doing your important focused work?
How much time, again on average, do you need each day to deal with your communications?
I say “on average” because you can only work on averages. You will be interrupted; there will be days when your energy levels will be low, and conversely, there will be days with no distractions or interruptions, you’re feeling great, and you can get a lot of work done.
For example, I allow six hours for doing my videos each week. Yet, some weeks it takes me four; others, like yesterday, it can take eight. The important thing is that when the week began, I knew how much time I needed for the important work I needed to do that week.
Once you know how much time each week you want for your deeper, focused work and handling your communications, that will tell you how much time you have left for meetings and other appointments.
However, don’t be tempted to fill all that time with meetings. Hold back. There will inevitably be some emergencies that require an ad hoc meeting. Protect time for those.
So, let’s say you need 12 hours a week for your strategy work, admin and communications; that leaves you with around 28 hours for meetings.
Remember, though, you will likely want an hour for lunch, so that reduces it to 23 hours. I would push back further and limit meeting time to 15 hours a week. That becomes your cap.
Once you reach fifteen hours of meetings for the week, then you push any new requests to the following week.
I know this can be difficult to do at first. It’s more so if you’ve always said yes to meetings in the past. Suddenly declining meeting requests can cause some surprise from your colleagues.
But think about the consequences. Every thirty-minute meeting you accept, that’s thirty minutes you cannot work on anything else. Remember, there’s also the admin cost of accepting that meeting, which will likely steal a further 15 minutes from you.
A question I teach my coaching clients to ask themselves when considering a meeting is: What are the consequences of accepting this meeting request?
Another question to ask yourself is: What would happen to my email and messages backlog if I were to spend thirty minutes or more each day dedicated to working on it?
You’ll be surprised how easy it is to stay on top of it if you have a dedicated block of time for responding to your actionable emails. Sure, there’ll likely be a backlog at first, but this is where consistency soon clears any backlog.
So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps. Find your limit, limit your meetings per week and protect time for the important parts of your work.
I know, simple in theory, but difficult to do. You don’t have to do all this immediately; you can gradually reduce your meetings per week and slowly build up your strategy and thinking time.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
And just a reminder, if you want to learn realistic, practical methods for getting the most out of your time both professionally and personally, then I have places available in my brand new Productivity Academy. I will put the details of this in the show notes for you. I’d love to welcome you there.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.