13. Intentional Calendar Design

A full calendar creeps up on you. It wasn't until I became a product manager that I started to have weeks with 20 or 30 hours of meetings. As I started to lead other PMs it got worse. Soon, I was working nights and weekends to try to catch up with the things I was not getting done during the week.

Then one day, I was riding a train from Berlin to Amsterdam with spotty wifi. There was no way I could join any calls. So I stared out the window a bit. Northern Germany is pretty flat and boring. I opened a book I had been meaning to read, but kept rereading the same page. I let my mind wander a bit. I poked at my mail and different documents.

And then 90 minutes later, I had checked off a bunch of longstanding todo items, had some insights on how to help my team, and come up with a new approach to a nagging problem. And there were still a few hours left.

And I wondered, why was I not making time for this every week?

Context

You (or one of your PMs) are routinely beginning the week with more than 20-30 hours of scheduled meetings on your calendar.

Whether you're on Google or Microsoft, your calendar software has one design goal: to make it easy for others to book meetings, to fill every last available minute of the working day.

It is not designed to help you have a productive week.

To some extent, we can still function in 'default mode', by blocking out the occasional work session or working into the evening. But eventually, every product person reaches a point when they are tapped out.

For me, it was the end of a Tuesday in which I'd had 13 meetings. My head was spinning. I was out for a walk with my wife at dusk, and my brain was saying, "Wait a minute... what was that that Dan said at 11:30?" I had literally no time to process or reflect on anything that had happened.

If you do not design your week, your colleagues and calendar tool will pack every hour with meetings.

Repeat after me: Google Calendar is not an AI.  Its only goal is to fill all the slots.