I am implementing a radical change to my scheduling: my default is going from saying yes to a meeting request to no. For a long time I have tried to meet with pretty much everybody who sincerely reached out to me. Sometimes it would just be a short meeting, sometimes I would push the meeting out for quite a while but essentially I made myself available. I have met a lot of interesting people that way over the years. And I did it because rightly or wrongly I felt being accessible was a way of contributing back to the startup ecosystem which has been very good to me.
It always meant that my schedule was a fuller and more harried than I would like it to be but it seemed workable. Over the course of 2013 though that has broken down. Maybe I am just getting old or maybe it is the bit of incremental time spent on homeschooling, or the number of requests has grown – whatever the reason, I reached a point where my schedule became entirely reactive with no time to think and no time for pro-active scheduling of meetings which should happen but didn’t.
So why not just make a change of degree? Because flipping the default means I have to make a conscious decision about every meeting. I made this decision towards the end of last week and have been starting to act on it with requests that have come in over the weekend. It will take a while for my schedule to clear up but I am already adding gym time to it which feels good (and is all too necessary).
