Getting Your Time Back

A few things that I have started doing to get back my time:

• Setting an agenda for the meeting with the meeting invite. Agenda less meetings create confusion and lead to people talking about random things.
• 30 mins meeting by default as a calendar invite. This has helped me to close the open points quickly to free up time for important things.
• Putting slots on my calendar when I want to get work done without any distraction. I cancel/ reschedule all meetings if they clash during that time.
• Ending meetings early or declining to attend those that do not provide any insight/actionable. I also make sure that one of the attendees or I share the actionables from a meeting with all the relevant stakeholders within 24 hours of the meeting.
• Not attending calls/meetings just because they are on my calendar.
• While talking feedback and ideas from relevant stakeholders is important, executing low impact ideas may not be the best use of your time. To avoid this, I try to make the person who proposes an idea think.
• End meetings early if you are done discussing the action items. No point extending the meeting for an hour just because the calendar invite was for one hour.
• You may wish to choose Eisenhover Matrix to prioritise your work.