Are you willing to embrace Calendar Zero?
Why - if you add the ending of one-to-ones - your future work week will be transformed
‘There’s this concept called inbox zero, where everyone tries to get to their inbox down to zero. But I would suggest that a more noble pursuit is that of calendar zero’.
Last week I had a brilliantly energising conversation with Howard Lerman, a serial entrepreneur who has launched an intriguing new product called Roam.
Roam styles itself as the ‘office of the future’ offering a visual interface of what colleagues are doing at any moment. This includes giving insight into who is meeting with whom and allowing you to quickly click on colleagues to request to chat with them.
Roam is built around an important point of disagreement with the world, that a calendar should have zero recurring meetings on it. He explained to me that the original idea of recurring meetings was that we would feel aligned with colleagues but the reality is that the create a gravitational drag on organisations. Getting anything done takes weeks, months or years. Companies aren’t set up to get things done.
Recurring meetings were meant to create alignment, but in reality they sap momentum. They become placeholders for progress rather than engines of it.
Lerman said to me that this is often the way that successful leaders run their own calendars, ‘One pattern I’ve seen from some of the most successful people I know is that they don’t really keep calendar. They don’t schedule very much at all. It doesn’t mean they don’t do anything. Let’s not get confused into thinking that putting stuff on a calendar is actually being productive’.
The idea of Calendar Zero resonated strongly with what I took from the latest Microsoft Work Trend Index that I discussed last week. In that report Microsoft say that the future of work will be untethered from some of the habits of today, that work will be less about the org chart and will be more about workflows.
Jobs will be fixated on the task on hand and trying to move as quickly as possible to execute on it. Presumably the habitual and the repetitive aspects of work will be subject to some degree of automation.
Lerman isn’t alone in suggesting that we need to change how work is done.
In the last year the CEOs of both Nvidia and Airbnb have declared that they now consider one-to-one meetings to be bad practice. Brian Chesky says that one-to-ones are a missed opportunity for collaborative learning - that group discussions on problems are much more effective for created common organisational approaches than two people meetings.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang famously has 60 direct reports and has been in his role for 32 years. Last year he was asked about his approach to management by Stripe founder Patrick Collison:
Huang explained his philosophy: ‘I don’t do 1-on-1s, and almost everything I say, I say to everybody all the time. I don’t really believe there’s any information that I operate on that only one or two people should hear about… I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, that empowers people. And so that’s number one… Number two, if the CEO’s direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you’ve removed in a company is probably something like seven.’
Collison pushed back: ‘1-on-1s are where you provide coaching, where you maybe talk through personal goals and career advancement’.
Huang responded: ‘I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. In fact, this is a really big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this?… We should all learn from that opportunity… Half the time I’m not right, but for me to reason through it in front of everybody helps everybody learn how to reason through it. The problem I have with 1-on-1s and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning. Learning from other people’s mistakes is the best way to learn.’
In 2024 Nvidia ranked at number 2 on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work chart (and has retained a top 5 position for the last four years). This stat is hard to fully separate from the fact that stock’s meteoric growth has left the workforce chock full of millionaires.
I chatted to someone about these ideas this week and they told me there was no way their company would be willing to make these changes. It poses a temperature test for us all. We can all preach that the future is going to involve change, but when we’re presented with it we baulk.
The tyranny of the calendar is so embedded in our working lives that challenging it feels heretical.. But if we want faster, freer, more focused organisations, then maybe the most radical move is to start deleting recurring meetings - and seeing what is left.
Reminds me of the bread baking stage of the Pandemic:
The graduate market is tanking. Is this an early warning sign of the impact of AI or just the standard recessionary indicator of a downturn asks Derek Thompson? (He also tackles it in his podcast). The answer is that we don’t know yet but it’s a scary one to watch. The Wall Street Journal also covers this suggesting that graduate unemployment is significantly up on last year
It’s not just graduates tech hiring is also in a huge slump
Workers are interrupted every 2 minutes during the workday - a total of 275 times a day (from the new Microsoft report) - I’m talking to Alexia Cambon from Microsoft for next week’s podcast
Co-op staff told to keep cameras on for meetings after cyberattack. There’s one interview question that can stop North Korean hackers coming for your firm: “how fat is Kim Jong Un?”
It amused me no end to see that one of the biggest uses of AI at consultancy firms was to generate PowerPoint decks. When clients realise that’s all they get for their money there’s surely a correction coming to those sectors?
If you’re a small business or run accounts for one then I can’t recommend the product I use enough. Ember is a beautiful, intuitive interface that I’ve used for several years (I actually tested all of the big ones). Brilliant service from the team there too. (FYI Any new referral commission I get on that link will go to the Red Cross’s appeal for Gaza)
As mentioned above I chatted to Howard Lerman this week. I was blown away by this discussion - it captured exactly what is wrong about current work, and why back-to-back meetings are going to lead to many organisations missing the opportunity of this vital moment.
This is an essential listen - about where work is imminently going and how Howard's philosophy is building his fascinating new product Roam to serve the company of the future.
Full transcript on the website
