Are you the master of your time or are you being mastered by others?

As a recruiter I felt having the possibility to be on a volunteer video call was great. Because being obliged doesn't allow you to book calls with potential candidates !

Adam Edwards Melinda Honeychurch

Additionally, I think it's a good strategy to ask yourself "What am I going to contribute to this meeting?" before you accept the invite. If you are only going to be a "listener", you might want to consider to just read the notes from the meeting instead. Furthermore in my experience the majority of people tend to schedule meetings for a default time setting e.g. 30minutes rather than thinking about how much time they will actually need. Questioning that could reduce the overall meeting time during a day drastically. To get control over the own schedule, it could also help to make yourself available to larger groups with sort of daily office hours. They are invited to ask their questions there, rather than to schedule separate 30min meetings during the day - where applicable of course. For me personally, my "relaxation quotient" over my own schedule changed a lot in a positive direction when I set my default settings to "auto-decline events that book over existing meetings". That often happens when people schedule group meetings and don't check individual calendars. As a consequence I found myself shifting stuff around and rushing from meeting to meeting all day. Since I changed that setting people seem to consider my calendar more respectfully. And lastely, adding blocks for thinking time, but also things like a lunch break etc. do clear the brain are important in my opinion. Allowing less time to be scheduled by default, results in fewer, but more meaningful meetings in the end in my experience.

I know what you are talking about, Marc. Working 100% virtual with teams and colleagues is a completely new situation to most of us. Especially for the more relationship driven characters, it is an enormous challenge: communication via Skype, telephone and other channels ?degrades‘ the senses we learned to use for analysing komplex situations. Our habit is to seek personal interaction to gather a maximum of information that is difficult to grasp, like body language, team spirit, etc - by the way the most important reason for extensive travelling in the past in my case. I think it is a quite obvious reaction to substitute personal interaction for more communication time (the ?interesting calls’ you mention) and this is really time consuming. Now: how to cope with the new situation? For me the solution is: How can I find the right balance between gathering enough information but also feeling efficient? And another question: if I travel less in the future, how much time will I gain from doing so? I am definitely counting on a positive balance here!

Hi Marc, challenging times! All the time management expertise of the past seems to become obsolete. The step back is essential to ensure a calm and supporting leadership. It becomes more important than ever to focus on the relevant topics and concentrate on results rather than on pure activity. Saying No becomes an important skill. Saying No to one topic means saying Yes to the other topics.