Why you need a staggered calendar
Parent Post
How does your calendar
How does your calendar make you feel?
Is it a messy jigsaw of meetings, reminders, and urgent tasks? Or does your schedule give you space to breathe — and time to focus on your most important goals?
Here are the problems people face due to unsynchronized calenders.
Chaotic schedules Most people
Chaotic schedules
Most people run very inefficient calendars. Paul Graham diagnoses the friction between managers’ schedules and makers’ schedules.
- Managers’ schedules: time slots of 1 hour or less allow frequent touch-points across the business, as well as networking at speculative meetings.
- Makers’ schedules: units of half a day or more allow unbroken focus time to design, code, or write.
Many of us unintentionally combine these schedules. Teams sync when everyone happens to be free. 1: 1 meetings are scattered throughout the week. And there is little time for deep work. Chaotic schedules reduce our productive time by a whopping 40%.
If your reports run
If your reports run teams, ask them to lead team meetings on Tuesdays and stack their 1: 1s on Mondays. If their reports run teams, then stagger this arrangement by another day!
Why should you do this?
Individual contributors discuss priorities and challenges with their managers 1: 1 on Monday. Any roadblocks that can’t be resolved 1: 1 or asynchronously can be tackled by specific departments on Tuesday or — if necessary — by leadership on Wednesday.
Switch cost and mixing
Switch cost and mixing cost
There are two major costs involved in switching tasks.
- Switch cost: your performance slow-down when changing between similar tasks.
- Mixing cost: your performance slow-down when changing between different types of tasks.
Changing from one task to another always incurs a switch cost. But you can reduce mixing costs by batching similar tasks.
Here’s how to apply this using staggered calendars.
Staggered calendars free up
Staggered calendars free up focus time and facilitate the regular, predictable flow of information: from reports to managers to leadership.
Staggered calendarsYou could batch
Staggered calendars
You could batch your meetings on a randomly chosen day. That would reduce mixing costs and increase your focus time. But benefits are greater with staggered calendars — for you and your entire team.
Careful scheduling increases focus time and improves information flow through the company.
Here’s how it works for a 2 or 3 layered organization.
If you run a
If you run a team, plan your team meetings for Wednesday and stack all your 1: 1s on Tuesday.
Why should you do this?
Batching your 1: 1s on Tuesday leaves Monday, much of Wednesday, and all of Thursday and Friday free for deep work — the stuff that only you can do which requires your full concentration.