Late 2025 calendar Tetris

I just completed a semi-annual process of revamping my baseline weekly calendar. This takes weeks (intermittently) to complete. And in truth it’s not a weekly calendar—each one covers a 2-week cycle of events, since some meetings are weekly and others are every-other-week (I refuse to say biweekly because it’s not clear enough!). The result is this 2-week monstrosity (blurred for privacy reasons):

The white spaces are available for booking additional meetings. The others are already setup for regular meetings of some kind. Even the color code is complex:

• Purple = Delivery Services (our Project Management and Business Analysis team)
• Orange = GX Foundry (our digital services team)
• Red = Leadership and Management time
• Blue = Organization-Wide events
• Dark Green = Training and Development time for me or others
• Light Green = Individual Contributor (IC) and Project Management (PM) time

What sparked the major change was an increase in our organization’s in-office time, and the creation of a set schedule for all teams and all roles. Our new model is to be in the office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays (M/W/Th). For Tuesdays and Fridays we will all default to working from home, but if we’re needed at the office for meetings or other work, we come in anyway.

I know the M/W/Th thing messes with people, as they expect a Tu/W/Th pattern instead. But I like this new model. To me it works like this:

• Monday is a get-the-week-started day, in-person, with all my leadership and management colleagues. We talk turkey about projects and priorities and the week gets going.
• Tuesday hits and you knuckle down and get stuff done at home, taking on the high-priority challenges raised on Monday.
• Wednesday and Thursday everyone is in the office so you spend that time in meetings and collaborating in person.
• Friday is a “cleanup” day to do catch-up meetings, tie off loose ends, and roll over into the weekend.

My teams were already on either a 2-day or 3-day in-office schedule, so this is not a huge disruption for them. However, we also added some new leadership and management meetings, especially to Mondays, and that messed up my calendar a bit. So… I went back to the drawing board.

A few stats

• The IC/PM time I blocked off now affords me about 10 hours a week (25%) to do my own work; that’s unthinkable for an individual contributor, but I’m in a leadership role
  • That 10 hours includes a mostly-no-meetings Tuesday, which is a new luxury I hope I can sustain over time
• A full 50% of my week is already booked with standing meetings weeks and months in advance
• Not including IC/PM time, I have 7 hours available (about 18%) for additional meetings, catching up, or just doing work; so folks that want to meet have to either be lucky or have to plan well in advance
• I have 5-6 hours per week (about 13%) in 1:1 meetings with direct reports; this should ease up by the end of the year as I transition 4 folks to another manager
• By general team, my time is fairly evenly split between Delivery Services, the GX Foundry, and the Leadership group

None of this includes evenings or weekends, where I put in extra time. I have to do that because I don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done—I’m stuck in meetings rather than “working.” And it doesn’t include time spent on my #weeknotes or other online activities.

Tetris reset coming this winter

So that’s the latest game of Tetris for me. More changes will come over the winter. They always do.

If you have recommendations on how to build sustainable and intelligible calendars as a manager or leader, I’d love to hear them! I always feel like I’m alone on this island and wish it was easier.