In this episode of The Effective Statistician, I tackle the challenge of a packed calendar head-on.
If back-to-back meetings, endless calls, and constant interruptions leave you with no time for deep, meaningful work, you’re not alone. I once averaged 37 meetings per week, so I know exactly how overwhelming it feels. I break down why our calendars spiral out of control, the real cost of this nonstop busyness, and, most importantly, three actionable strategies to reclaim your time.
If you’re ready to take charge of your schedule and work smarter—not just harder—this episode is for you!
Key points:
- Meeting Overload
- Root Causes
- Impact
- Strategy 1: Priorities
- Strategy 2: Meeting Practices
- Strategy 3: Saying No
- Long-Term Approach
- Bonus
Take back control of your calendar and focus on what truly matters. Set clear priorities, improve meeting practices, and say no to unnecessary commitments. These strategies will help you create more time for deep work, reduce stress, and boost productivity.
Listen to this episode of The Effective Statistician now and start making real changes today. If you found it helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues so they can also take charge of their time!
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Transcript
Struggling With A Full Calendar?
Alexander: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of The Effective Statistician where we dive into practical strategies to help you as a statistician, as a data scientist, or any other quantitative scientist in medical research to work smarter, better, Not harder. So today we are tackling something that is very common, a fully packed calendar.
If your days are consumed with back-to-back meetings, endless calls, lots of tasks at the same time, you are not alone. And this episode is for you. And I know exactly how that feels. I once counted all my meetings that I had on average in a week, and it was 37 point something, 37 meetings per week on average.
And I know that there’s lots of companies [00:01:00] out there that have this meeting culture, like everything needs to be done in a meeting. I know about leadership teams, high paid leadership teams that were creating and reviewing slidesets together in meetings, in their leadership meetings. If that sounds familiar to you, yeah, maybe it’s not that extreme, but you have a full calendar, then this episode is for you.
We will speak about why your calendar feels out of control The problem it causes and three actionable strategies to fix it. I think, let’s talk about some reasons why your calendar is always full. I think there’s one is this kind of culture of availability. We all have an open calendar and pretty much everybody can book a meeting to you.
Yeah. So there’s [00:02:00] no hindrance or things like that. It’s just that everybody can book a meeting. Everybody can invite lots of people to a meeting. Yeah. If you want to spend 100 euros, you need to have a supervisor approval. But if you want to set up a meeting that costs thousands of euros, everybody can do that.
And that, and then people have this kind of. urge to always say, yes, if I’m invited, then I need to also attend this this meeting. And it’s maybe also the expectations that everybody that is invited actually attends. And now there’s a really big systemic issue is poor meeting practices. Most meetings lack a clear agenda and involve people who don’t need to be there.
And that [00:03:00] leads to, endless discussions. And then there’s also some kind of personal factors, likely. Maybe you are not really clear on what are your most important tasks. Do you really know what are your goals and what your supervisor and your step supervisor expect you from focusing on? Another personal factor might be, Fear of saying no and fear of being rejected.
Do you feel like you’re obligated to attend every meeting? Do you feel like you need to respond to every request immediately?
I’ve been there. Give yourself some trace, but be honest with yourself. Are you clear? Are you really clear on your goals? Have you, do you know them by heart? Do you? Do you have them visible on your [00:04:00] desk, so that all the different actions that you do are aligned with your goals that your supervisor agreed to?
These are a couple of problems, why, or reasons, why your calendar is always full. Now, there is couple of problems with it. The first is, if you have a fully packed calendar, there’s no room for you to do the deep and focused work that actually moves the needle. When do you have a couple of hours to really read through a protocol and design a really good study?
When do you actually have Time to think proactively about things instead of reacting all the time. When do you have time to tackle the problem of what, which estimate actually makes most sense? Or [00:05:00] to do some more complex things like some simulations or some more complex programming or doing something that is a little bit more innovative.
Full calendar. also leads to increased stress. No pauses, no breaks, little time to, or no time to recharge. People working through the lunch breaks. Yeah, this is unhealthy. And then the last cost is probably the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is what could you do instead with your time? You could innovate.
You could improve processes. You could decrease waste. You could actually drive something forward. That is. Really important to you and hopefully to your company. Now let’s dive into three [00:06:00] strategies that you can take to get back in control of your calendar, to get back into the driver’s seat and not in the back of the car.
So the first thing is set clear priorities. What matters most? And you get that informed by Guess what? Your goals! And then block time in your calendar so that you can work on these things. Regularly have a look into your goals. I look into my goals every day and then I can know, okay, for these things I can say yes to and for these other things I can say no to.
And don’t think just because I’m not self employed that is anything more easier. Yeah. No. As someone that is self employed, you have amazing number of opportunities you can go after. [00:07:00] And you need to say no to most of them. Every yes needs to be defended by a thousand no’s. And I don’t know who’s that quote from.
I think Steve Jobs, but I’m not very sure. Decline, So that’s the next step. Improve your meeting practices. Meetings are often the biggest time drain. And not everything where a meeting is called to actually demands a meeting. Lots of meetings can be actually made better by working simultaneously on a document or whatsoever.
Also, any meeting where your purpose, where the purpose of the meeting is not clear, decline it. Just say, I’m not sure how I will contribute to this meeting. Decline it.
Suggest things like, okay, can we have a short call [00:08:00] instead of a long meeting? Can we work on a document together? Things like that. Help a lot. And so that you don’t have to wait. Everything open with meetings. Schedule your time to protect your calendar. So put meetings with yourself into the calendar. Every morning, maybe that is your time where if you’re working in Europe, the U. S. is not yet awake and you can put some hours of focus time every morning where you just do the deep work stuff, not the shallow work like emails and things like this, but the stuff that requires you to have High cognitive tasks that are over a longer period of time.
It’s amazing what you can achieve when you’re not interrupted. Strategy [00:09:00] number three. No, say no. Saying no is a super powerful skill that helps you protect your time and your energy. Just be polite when you decline requests. I can’t attend this meeting, but I’m happy to provide input beforehand or afterwards or things like that.
Yeah. You need to defend your boundaries. I had at one point rule. Anyone, can only book a meeting outside of, specific hours if they are VP or above. And I know that there’s some kind of inflation of of titles. Yeah. And that’s more and more people get VPs. Then just adjust it so that, Only really important people you talk to, let’s say after 6 p.
m. or after 5 p. m. whenever, makes sense for you or before 8 a. [00:10:00] m. depending on where you work. In which time zone, yeah. So the three strategies are set clear priorities, improve meeting practices, and learn to say no. Now, it is really important that you take back control of your calendar. And I know this will not happen overnight.
Yeah, so you can’t say, Ah, I heard this episode by Alexander and by tomorrow everything will be different. No, it will probably take a little bit of time. But if you constantly work towards that, and you have a clear goal, So you can achieve a lot of things. Now, I’m actually running a webinar on the 5th of February.
So this is very soon as this episode comes out. And there we’ll talk about lessons from my book on how you can be more effective. And by the way, the book is [00:11:00] available on Amazon. Just search for how to be an effective statistician or search for data science and Schacht if you can more easily remember this.
And then you should find my book on Amazon and you can get it as a Kindle version, a paperback or a hardcover. See you. Get this webinar into your calendar so that you learn how to survive in this world where the pressure, constantly increases. And believe me, this is not an episode in terms of, Oh, it will go away.
It will stay very high pressure for the rest of your career. So better you work and better you learn. That’s how to deal with this pressure. So sign up for this workshop and all for this webinar, by the way, it’s free. So you can also tell your colleagues about it. See you at the [00:12:00] webinar.
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I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
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