Cancel as Many Meetings as You Can
Raise your hand if you currently feel like your brain is suspended in goo — like all fragments of thought have to swim through some thick, noxious muck to come together into something more coherent than Aghgdfjksghjhdskg.
Actually, no. Sorry. You don’t need to raise your hand. Don’t expend effort today on anything you don’t really, truly need to do.
That applies to meetings, too. Especially meetings. What is a meeting if not a concentrated chunk of time in which you’re expected to be the smartest, most creative version of yourself? Who is that today? Who’s going to be that tomorrow, after what will most likely be an extremely long night?
Look at your work calendar for this afternoon and tomorrow. Is there anything on there that absolutely needs to happen? Cancel or bump whatever you can. For anything you can’t, keep it as short as possible.
Clearing your calendar is both self-care and team-care, as my colleague Michelle Woo wrote yesterday. It’s also just realism. And bring honest expectations to the time that you’ve now freed up: You and your colleagues might use those newly open minutes to talk about how you’re feeling, or you might use them to doomscroll, or to anxiety-bake, or simply to sit there and type Aghgdfjksghjhdskg into Slack. You wouldn’t get much more than that done in a meeting right now, anyway.
