How You Can Stop Scheduling Useless 1:1 Meetings
Avoiding useless 1:1 meetings coming from people who want to talk to you is relatively easy. But how can you avoid them when it’s you who needs to get a hold of someone?
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In the previous articles, How I Cut the Events on My Calendar by 40% and Got a Promotion and How to Avoid Unnecessary Meetings Without Being Rude we have introduced the Meeting Avoidance Framework (MAF) and the Meeting Avoidance Matrix (MAM), that will allow you to get rid of unnecessary 1:1 meetings other people schedule with you.
How can you obtain the same result — no scheduled 1:1 meetings — when you need to talk to people who appear to be unreachable?
Calendars have been ingrained in our life for millenia, dictating the productivity pace of our society. Until today, planning and scheduling are unassailable productivity pillars, almost synonyms of efficiency.
However, with hybrid work becoming a mainstream trend, informal office communications turned into scheduled 1:1 virtual meetings, contributing to multiplying the total amount of meetings by a factor of 2.5x [Microsoft Teams Research — 2021] and thus making calling someone even harder: people are always busy following their back-to-back planned day and never answer.
We have seen that clogging your workday with a myriad of calendar events limits your productivity (there is only so much you can accomplish with a coarse-grained amount of calendar slots), and people are pushed to work overtime to perform the tasks that matter.
Following the MAF and MAM frameworks, hybrid workers can:
- Make their day more fluid, which means higher resolution than the traditional amount of daily calendar slots.
- Be less dependent on the antiquated calendar: they have less meetings constraining their days.
- Take back possession of their life: they can now dictate the pace of their day and work on the right emerging priorities, not undergoing outdated scheduled nuisances.
However, it’s only one side of the coin.
On the other side, you have to avoid being the one scheduling 1:1s when the people you need to reach out seem to be all-in with their calendar.
Did you know that every day 2.4B workers waste 250M hours trying to get to a live conversation?
That corresponds to an opportunity cost for our society of $3.3B/day… Huge!
What can you do to avoid coordinating availability and scheduling?
Sadly, nothing… You can no longer walk to someone’s desk, or wait to see a person come out of a meeting room. When someone is so much into calendars, the only way is to schedule time with her. You need to open your email app, create a new event, add that person, open her calendar to figure out when both of you are available, negotiate an earlier slot than the first available one — yes, she blocked some focus time and her calendar does not reflect her full availability—create a virtual meeting to associate to the invitation, and finally hit send.
5+ minutes went by, at least! Was it worth it to spend time and effort to have another meeting constraining your day and pushing you to work overtime to complete your tasks?
Are we really hopeless?
No, there is hope! You just need the right tool to avoid scheduling 1:1 meetings. Surely, that tool isn’t your calendar, let alone a calendaring assistant, which makes it even easier to schedule, making the problem bigger.
Would you mind if I talk to you about a new product without being too salesy?
Awesome, thanks for keeping an open mind!
Tweelin is the first assistant of its kind. It allows you to make a wish to talk to someone, and get connected at the right moment, magically. No more scheduling, texting back and forth, or missed calls.
Why is it relevant?
Because if you and your team use Tweelin, then:
- You don’t need to “manually” implement any MAF or MAM
No more dodging of incoming 1:1 meetings, because people won’t need to schedule time with you. - You don’t need to hunt down people all day to get to talk to them
Whether it’s a coworker or a customer, it doesn’t matter. You don’t call them in vain. - You don’t text them back and forth to find a moment to talk
Say goodbye to endless “when can we talk?” message exchanges. - You don’t spend time figuring out calendar availability, then creating and sending a meeting invitation
Simply because you don’t need any calendar for that call/meeting.
Tweelin works with non-users
There is no doubt that App-based communications give their best when all users involved have the app installed on their smartphones (tip: tell your friends to get Tweelin!). However, even though the person you want to talk to does not have Tweelin, you can still gain considerable time savings by leveraging the non-user engagement flow.
When you make a wish towards a non-user, Tweelin allows you to send a message that contains a special link to the Tweelin web app. When the receiver clicks the link, the web app opens up showing your available slots. The receiver picks one or more slots, indicating that she would be available to talk during such slots.
Important: nothing gets scheduled! Semantically, the selection of multiple slots works like a message exchange where the users give each other their availability for an impromptu call, without the time and hassle of an actual message exchange.
A better future awaits
Ok, let’s tie it all together!
With the Meeting Avoidance Framework (MAF) and Meeting Avoidance Matrix (MAM) we have seen in this article series, you can make your day more fluid by dodging inbound scheduled meetings, but you can’t avoid scheduling yourself, because you don’t have a better solution to offer to the calendar enthusiasts you need to talk to.
With Tweelin, you have a cool way to engage with calendar enthusiasts that will show them that newer and better options are available.
If you and your colleagues use Tweelin you don’t need to bother with implementing MAF and MAM, at all — no need to book focus time anymore. Meetings will be avoided by default, through a new way of working that will not only boost your company and personal productivity; it will also give you time back to focus on what matters earlier in the day and thus improve your work-life balance.
Imagine a future where you use Tweelin to effortlessly talk to anyone: your boss, your teammates, your partners, your customers, your plumber, your gardener. You don’t have to chase those people all day, as you do today.
How many mental resources would you be able to dedicate to something more productive?
How much of your memory will be freed up from thoughts like: “I need to talk to that guy before the end of the day”?
How many less post-its will there be on your monitor that remind you to call someone?
I am confident that, by now, you realized this is a viable solution that delivers on its promise.
So, what can you do to make your work-life harmony better today?
Why shouldn’t you try?
Thank you so much for reading until this point! I believe you now have 2 options:
- Do nothing and go back to wasting considerable time coordinating calendar availability, scheduling meetings, attending back to back meetings without enough time to go to the bathroom, and working overtime on the tasks that pay your bills.
- Give it a try, download Tweelin for Android, make at least 3 wishes and see if it works for you. What can you lose? A few minutes invested today may dramatically improve your work-life balance.
By the way, did I tell you that Tweelin is free?
Well, now that you know I guess you have no excuses, don’t you?
Download Tweelin for Android
