Calendar Audits: Reclaim Your Work Time

How to Audit Your Calendar for Meetings that Don’t Provide Value

This month, A Climate of Change is focusing on something that takes up roughly 40% of our work time- Meetings. While meetings are a necessary part of any business, if executed poorly, they can also be a major source of wasted time and energy. According to a recent professional survey, professionals spend an average of 3 hours per week in poorly organized meetings, costing companies $399 billion in the US alone. This figure does not reflect the opportunity cost of not spending that time on more productive or meaningful tasks and therefore the total cost of time wasted could be considerably higher.

If you want to reclaim your time and focus on what matters most, we recommend you perform calendar audits on a regular cadence. Typically we find quarterly works best, but you may find a different structure that works best for you.

What is a calendar audit? It’s a way to identify meetings that don’t provide value. Once you identify meetings that are of little to no value to your business function, you can either eliminate that meeting altogether or make improvements to increase a meeting’s clarity, function and purpose. You will be more productive because you won't lose time by task switching and you’ll reclaim precious minutes or even hours in your work week. Having more curated meetings that add value and fewer meetings that do not are also shown to improve employee engagement and retention.

Here are steps you can follow to audit your calendar:

STEP ONE:

Create a list of recurring meetings. Review your calendar and either list or categorize meetings that happen on a regular basis, such as weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc. These are the meetings that are most likely to become stale or unnecessary over time.

ProTip: Color code these meetings in case you want to review them in a future audit. A recurring meeting may add value now, but perhaps not next quarter when the meeting’s primary directive is over, your team is more tenured, etc.

STEP TWO:

Meeting Length: Assess the length of each meeting. Are you scheduling more in 15, 30 or 60-minute blocks? We recommend keeping meetings to 45 minutes or less. Longer than that and you risk having a lot of filler information.

STEP THREE:

Schedule with intent. Ideally, every meeting on your calendar has a clearly stated purpose and adds value to your work/organization. Ask yourself the following questions about your recurring meetings. If you can’t answer these questions- that's probably a good indicator the meeting has run its natural course.

• What is this meeting for

• What does this meeting produce

• What value does this meeting add
  

STEP FOUR:

At this stage, you have identified all your meetings that don’t serve a purpose or add value. Now you need to work with your peers and colleagues to determine what can be improved and what can be eliminated. **See our bonus blog post on how to have meetings with purpose and value.

Eliminate or improve the meetings that don’t provide value. The sixth step is to take action on the meetings that don’t provide value. You have two options: either eliminate them altogether or improve them by making them shorter, more focused, more engaging, or more relevant. You can also consider alternative ways of communicating or collaborating, such as email, chat, or project management tools.

Need more guidance? We recommend you use these resources:

• Calendar Analysis: How to Audit Your Time & Productivity: A comprehensive guide on how to audit your calendar for meetings and other events using Reclaim’s AI scheduling app.

• Clearing The Calendar: How To Identify And Avoid Unnecessary Meetings: A practical article on how to identify and avoid unnecessary meetings using clear written communication and smart scheduling tools.