In the last few months, the term intentional inflexibility has come up online. Barnaby Lashbrooke, in the article titled Is ‘Intentional Inflexibility’ The Key To Workplace Productivity? proves that it has become a necessary evil nowadays to be uncooperative so that we can use our skills and limited energy where it matters. Intentional inflexibility is an umbrella term for many activities, such as email replaying, meeting attendance, and minimizing distractions.
Here, we focus only on the aspect of attending meetings and how you can become more selective in that sphere. It goes without saying that those recovered should be used for deep work. This is an easy way to improve your efficiency.
How do you improve your selectivity towards meeting attendance?
Firstly, let’s address the elephant in the room - many of us are deeply not assertive and can’t stand even the thought of declining an invitation to a meeting. While we can’t help you holistically with being a people pleaser, here are some tips to become more selective:
First, analyze when your work performance is best. We are looking for at least two hours of uninterrupted concentration, during which you can give in to deep work. (More about deep work and focus time here.) After defining these parts of the day, you can create a polite and well-founded but firm declining response template on your mail, which you will send to everyone who proposes a meeting in those sacred hours.
Secondly, analyze the last few weeks and months in your calendar if you can. Search for two types of meetings you should be able to resign from:
- Snowballing meetings. These types of meetings have been on your calendar forever, honestly, you can’t even remember when and how they started. We call them snowballing meetings because they tend to grow significantly through the years, and after a significant amount of time, you are buried underneath them. Most importantly, those meetings are usually irrelevant to your present responsibilities. So even though it feels like meeting an old friend after all these years, we recommend giving those up.
- Remote-work meeting. Of course, we don’t refer to every single meeting you attend during remote work, just the ones that result from the fact that you can’t see eye to eye with your co-workers and chat for a few minutes with them. In any other situation, you would have seen each other during a coffee break and resolved your issue. So maybe a few sentences on Slack are enough, and you don’t have to attend those meetings?
How can we help you?
exec.ninja can’t fight your battles for you but can make being assertive a bit easier. First, our time-managing executive assistant can protect your focus time at all costs - if you choose to prioritize it before meetings. Thanks to that, you don’t risk any fifteen minutes long meetings interrupting those most efficient hours of the day. You can also ask exec.ninja to reject conflicting invitations for locked events automatically. This way, you can avoid at least some unpleasant responsibilities, resulting in creating your new, more assertive persona.