Defend Your Time Fiercely

This community believes that the key to loving our work and to stop exhausting ourselves in the process, is to defend our time fiercely.

A big cause contributing to employee burnout comes from:

• The failure to respect others’ time. We’ve seen this manifest itself in bosses calling for meetings and discussions without a planned end time. Or long meetings in which a lot is discussed and explored, but nothing is acted upon. Or lunch meetings because, you know, who cares about your lunch? Or meetings that drag late into the evening because, you know, who cares about your own time in the evenings? Or a series of calls and texts to our own colleagues, demanding that they respond immediately to your request, because you know, who cares about your own workload? The failure to respect others’ time, and therefore the assumption that one can demand or fill it up in any way we like, comes from the fundamental belief that others’ time are inferior to ours, and therefore should be subordinate to our own needs.
• The failure to respect one’s own time. Apart from others demanding that we surrender our own time to them, we also fail to respect the precious time that we have for ourselves. We don’t get enough sleep. We don’t spend enough meaningful time with social interactions that matter. We don’t spend enough time on activities, hobbies, or interests that give us fulfillment. All this potentially compounds and cascades into a life that is devoid of energy and purpose. We inevitably tire ourselves out in the process.

The solution is to treat our own time as the most scarce and precious resource we have, and to defend our time fiercely.

This takes courage, because we need to be brave enough to question existing norms about how others should request for our time – and to change those norms bit by bit, day by day. This also takes a bit of reflection and discipline to identify and decide what truly matters to us, and to spend more time on things that matter instead of letting our own time evaporate into thin air – mostly while on social media.

No one else is as incentivized to care about and protect our own time, as much as ourselves. To achieve balance in life, we need to start defending our own time.

To stop wasting time, aim for fit-for-purpose meetings

We lose astounding amounts of precious time on poorly-organized meetings. Poorly-organized meetings take the following shapes:

• No agenda, or vague agenda. Someone usually calls for a meeting to discuss a problem or an idea, but there’s no clear outcome that needs to be achieved by the end of the meeting. Again, when there are no clear metrics, people fall back on visibly obvious proxies of signalling effort or hard work – in this case, just more empty talking and discussion.
• Agenda gets derailed. We lose focus, and we miss the bigger picture. Someone derails the conversation by going into the tactical or minor details that distract everyone else from the fundamental things that need to be solved. Worse, people start talking about what they had for lunch a few hours ago.
• Making people heard rather than solving the problem. In order to look and feel like we are giving everyone a chance to be involved and a chance to speak up, we often go round the table to make sure we include everybody’s views. But this often drags out the meeting for way longer than it’s supposed to take, and negatively reinforces the pain of long meetings in people’s minds.
• There’s no time limit. We mentioned earlier than work just expands to fill the vacuum. So if we don’t set a time limit for our meetings, our discussions will just naturally take hours. There’s no reference point for when to end, so ‘focusing’ or ‘prioritizing’ doesn’t actually mean anything.

If it’s a meeting to solve problems, then solve those problems. If the objective of the meeting is to learn about everybody’s opinions, then this meeting’s agenda should explicitly state that you want everybody to share their views. The main message here is that if we want to keep our meetings productive, we must set clear priorities, and clear timelines. Our meetings must be fit-for-purpose.

Even if we are not the ones leading these meetings, and even if we aren’t senior enough to change the way our companies approach meetings, we can shape it in small ways. Ask how long the meeting will take. Offer to set and communicate the agenda to all attendees. Be an active participant who reigns the group back if they derail. Or even ask ourselves – do we really need to attend this meeting or can we just get stuff done after people are done talking?

If you’re senior enough, experiment with new ways to keep meetings effective – perhaps even change up the physical structure of a meeting room to keep people on their feet. Or incorporate Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule to ensure that just the right people for the job are there. Or just ask yourself – could this be an email?

Make your meetings fit-for-purpose so that you’ll free up precious time to do high-quality work. We don’t have to be a slave to meetings.