The tyranny of an agenda

or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the chaos"

or, "Don't cancel that meeting yet!"

If you work in a big company, chances are you have a lot of meetings.  I have lots of meetings.  I use Outlook religiously for meetings--even meetings with people outside my company.  Hell, I use my Outlook calendar to book time for things like dates with my wife, time with my kids, etc.  This is basically the only way I can ever remember to show up for anything.

I also have lots of work to get done on a regular basis.  I use Outlook to block out time to do that work.  If I think something will take me two hours of uninterrupted time to do it, I find a block of two hours and put a placeholder there.  Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of something I'll drop a block of work time on my calendar with "Todo" in the title, and in the body will be a bunch of other things I need to to block out time to do.  Blocking time to block time.  It's all very meta.

When that calendar starts to fill up, the first thing I usually try to do is skim it over, looking for optional meetings.  It usually goes like this?

1. Did I organize this meeting?  Am I running it?
2. Ok, I'm not running it, but will people be asking me for my opinion?
3. OK, I probably won't say anything, but will I learn something at this meeting?
4. double book right over it...

Sometimes though, I have a meeting that I did organize but doesn't have an agenda.  I might have booked the meeting a few weeks ago, expecting something to pop up.  Alternatively, the reason I booked it in the first place might have been taken care of.  These are really tempting candidates to cancel and get the time back.

Don't cancel them.

These sorts of no-agenda meetings with people who I apparently had sufficient cause to book a meeting at some point often end up the best conversations I have.  Ad-hoc meetings with no agenda are free to ramble a little.  They don't follow a script, so unanticipated topics organically bloom.  Some of my best projects have erupted from these unpredictable volcanoes.  I'm running out of metaphors to mix here.