Time Taming Tactics: Calendar management in professional services

Incident response is a chaotic field. Calendar clutter amplifies that chaos as a neglected source of administrative friction. Without common conventions, each day becomes unpredictable - deadlines sneak up on you and finding time for regular client calls is a famous challenge.

Here are some calendar management ideas that made my availability and meetings more predictable. Anyone in professional services may find them worth building on, and I found them especially helpful in incident response where unexpected recurring meetings materialize every day. Less intuitive stuff first.

Favor East Coast odd hours for client calls and East Coast even hours for internal calls.

A common convention for client windows and internal windows makes it easier for your team to schedule calls on the fly. An every-other-hour convention balances predictability and flexibility for your client’s sake.

But why favor client calls on ET’s odd hours specifically? Because there are more shared odd hours for coast-to-coast ordinary working hours than shared even hours – there are four shared odd hours (11, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm ET) and three shared even hours (12, 2pm, 4pm ET).

Favor starting internal meetings at the :15-, :30-, or :45-minute mark instead of :00.

This lowers the chance of a client call running over the start of your meeting and lowers the chance that you’ll be trapped in a long chain of “back-to-back” calls.

Favor week-oriented recurrences instead of month-oriented recurrences.

“Monthly” recurrences always lead to conflicts because months are variable, and weeks are static¹. Week-oriented recurrences are also easier to schedule alternating meetings on the same timeslot.

For example, I have a 1:1 with each member of a different department on a 3-week rotation, all on the same timeslot. And if you want the effect of a monthly meeting on a weekly orientation, try recurring every 4 weeks.

Schedule recurring calls with similar audiences on alternating recurrence.

For example, we scheduled a department sync for every 2 weeks. On the alternate weeks, the same timeslot is used by that department’s sub-teams for their respective sub-team meetings.

Favor timeslots that are occupied on other days.

It’s easier for attendees to schedule around different meetings that occur the same time each day (e.g., 2pm Monday, 2pm Tuesday, and 2pm Friday) than meetings that occur on different times each day (e.g., 2pm Monday, 10am Tuesday, and 3:30 Friday). This is especially important for internal meetings because client calls tend to occur the same time each day.

Favor the same timeslot(s) on different days or weeks for 1:1s.

For example, all of my 1:1s are on either 10:30 ET or 16:30 ET which makes them easier to plan for. If I were on the West Coast, I might use 18:30pm ET instead of 10:30 ET.

Consider using calendar category colors.

Category colors may make your calendar easier to interpret at a glance. These are customizable and can be set however you like. My scheme is below:

• Yellow: Client meetings
• Blue: Case-related meetings without the client (e.g., caseteam strategy, partner syncs)
• Orange: Internal meetings, except 1:1s
• Lime: Internal 1:1s
• Green: Unusual meetings that require some preparation (e.g., candidate interviews, sales calls)
• Teal: Blocks for individual work/analysis
• Peach: Personal reminders (e.g., submit expenses, walking the dog)
• Purple: Optional unavailability/OOO (e.g., coffee chats, casual lunches, soft personal commitments)
• Red: Mandatory unavailability/OOO (e.g., medical appointments, hard personal commitments)

Consider Slack’s Outlook plugin.

Two major features:

1. The plugin updates your Slack status according to your calendar, so people know if you’re in a meeting or on PTO.
2. The plugin sends you Slack messages when meetings start. This can be disabled if you don’t find it helpful.

Consider Outlook’s calendar statuses like “working elsewhere” and “out of office”.

Two big benefits:

1. These make it easier for teammates to interpret your availability in a pinch.
2. These affect the icons that show up with Slack’s Outlook plugin. For example, “Busy” shows as “in a meeting”, “Working Elsewhere” shows as “Working from home”, and “Out of office” shows as the PTO palm tree.

Consider blocking after-hours and weekend commitments.

Blocking off-hour commitments is great for team situational awareness. You can represent these blocks vaguely (e.g., “Unavailable” or “Personal commitment”) or with useful context.

For example, every Tuesday night I have a “working elsewhere” block called “League”. This is because I play in a billiard league and, while I prefer to attend, I can skip league when the team is in a pinch. But when I have an un-skippable commitment, like attending a wedding, I put an “out of office” block called “Wedding” or simply “Unavailable”.

Take stock of general trends in your team’s calendars.

Try to identify trends, like:

• Which day(s) have the fewest standing internal team meetings? The most?
• Which hour(s) have the fewest standing internal team meetings? The most?

General awareness of these trends can help either take advantage of gaps (e.g., deliberately protected time for focused work, scheduling 1:1s, coffee chats or team building) or load balance across days and hours.

Aggressively combine, cull, or lower the frequency of recurring meetings.

Each hourlong meeting is 2.5% of each attendee’s workweek, not counting overhead from planning and context switching. Look for reasonable opportunities to shorten meetings (e.g., from 1 hour to 30 minutes), loosen the meeting recurrence (e.g., from weekly to bi-weekly), trim the audience, combine similar meetings, or cancel meeting altogether (perhaps instead trying a regular email, report, or dashboard).