My Calendar Has Developed Hostile Intent

At some point a calendar stops helping you organise work and becomes the work.

Mine has developed strategic depth. A meeting about priorities is protected by a preparation call, followed by a debrief, followed by a short alignment because the debrief created questions.

The colour problem

Colour-coding was meant to create clarity. Now the week looks like a military map produced by a coalition with no common doctrine.

Blue means internal. Green means external. Red means urgent. Purple means I no longer remember, but apparently it owns Thursday afternoon.

The empty square

A free hour appears. I approach carefully. Within minutes it is colonised by somebody asking whether I have “a quick thirty minutes.”

There is no such thing as a quick thirty minutes. There is thirty minutes, the context-switch before it, the recovery after it and the suspicious note you write during the call because the person has said, “We do not need a formal action list.”

A full calendar is not evidence of importance. Sometimes it is evidence that the organisation has replaced decisions with attendance.

I have started protecting empty space with the same seriousness other people protect steering committees.

The calendar is not pleased.