Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by your calendar ✋
TLDR: it's possible to add intention, focus and ultimately, make your calendar a driver of your efficiency.
Let's be honest. There’s nothing sexy about calendar management, but doing it well can make a serious difference in your life and like we've said before, it (in conjunction with your org structure) may be leaving billions on the table.
We recently partnered with an EA and did this exercise for their CMO's calendar and have some big wins (and lessons) to share.
TLDR: it's possible to add intention, focus and ultimately, make your calendar a driver of your efficiency.
We started by taking a hard look at the baseline. How was this CMO actually spending their time? Was it on true business priorities that directly drive business outcomes? Or was the calendar crammed with a bunch of internal “alignment” sessions, meetings-that-should-be-emails, and fire drills?
It’s like when you look at your Screen Time results on your iPhone and have to face the reality of the current situation head on – it hurts.
**This example doesn't even show double bookings**
Once we knew that baseline, we created a new calendar skeleton to work from. We heavily leveraged Molly Graham’s awesome thinking and made recommendations on how to simplify, delegate, consolidate, and block from there.
Then, we counted the wins:
⏰ Saved 13 hours in recurring meetings per month – that’s 143 hours per year or almost a full month’s worth of time… for one executive! Imagine if this EA shared what they did with their peers and they cleared this time across the entire C-suite and leadership team.
🔮 Added predictability. This CMO has six direct reports who they meet with for 30 minutes every month. Originally, these recurred on their own schedules and were frequently moved or rescheduled. Now the CMO has one hour for 1:1s blocked at the same time every week – and they rotate through the reports.
🏃Helped the EA become roughly 30% more efficient with calendar management. With a skeleton in place, they now know exactly how to organize the CMO’s day when new requests come in. And they're able to better align the CMO’s schedule against their priorities thanks to a much deeper understanding of what those priorities are.
If you're looking to do something similar with your calendar, your team's calendar, or your CMO's calendar – we're always game for a quick chat. (Especially now that you've got all that free time back, right?)
