Give Yourself an Hour of Found Time Every Day

If you’re like me, your time is a precious commodity and to protect it, you will even schedule appointments with yourself to keep it all from being usurped by others. If you are even more like me, your appointments with yourself will often get cancelled because someone else has an urgent issue and you can’t not help them.

If you can recognize yourself in this scenario, I have good news for you. First congratulations on setting meetings for yourself. This is a great first step to help you stay productive and in control of your time. I always begin and end the day with a meeting with myself — to review my agenda for the day, prioritize tasks, and get in my mindset. My end of day meeting is to make sure my desk is clean, papers filed, and the office ready for tomorrow, so I don’t start my next day off with clutter.

However, even with these two meetings, I often find myself without enough time to do everything in the middle of the day — even getting a cup of coffee or getting a bit of food can be challenging. One simple solution to this is to change your default meeting lengths.

Schedule your meetings to be slightly shorter than you typically make them. If a meeting would normally be 30 minutes, schedule it for 25, if it is normally an hour, make it for 50 minutes. These few minutes lost should not affect the quality of the meeting, as long as the participants know the length on the front end, but you will have five or ten bonus minutes at the end.

These bonus minutes can be used to write your reflections from the meeting, prep for the next meeting, or go for a quick walk to stretch your legs and clear your mind.

Unfortunately, most scheduling applications do not give you the option to change the default meeting lengths, and they have them set up as 30, 60, and 90 minutes. So, changing the meeting length will take some intentional work on your part, but for every 30 seconds you spend customizing your meeting time, you will gain 300 seconds of found time at the end of that meeting.

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot

-Michael Altshuler