The Tyranny of the Calendar
Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. Charles Richards
Humans have always looked to regularity—the stars for navigation, the seasons for survival—but somewhere along the way, we took it too far. Instead of using time as a guide, we now let it dictate our every move.
We pack our days with back-to-back meetings, endless to-do lists, and deadlines. Lots of arbitrary deadlines. Why do we do it? Because the calendar insists. It is a tyrant we have voted to rule over our lives.
A packed schedule has become a status symbol, as if busyness equals importance. The fuller our calendars, the less we actually accomplish. We stop thinking, innovating, or engaging in deep work.
“9AM: time for the team’s daily standup”
Each day begins with a calendar invite. The all-hands meeting. The daily stand-up. The team check-in. The sync.
It’s early, but somehow, we’re already behind. The calendar demands a status update minutes after we have all come back from the weekend break.
We sit through meetings that should have been an email, nodding along (or off?) as someone recites bullet points from a slide deck. Later in the afternoon, the calendar has generously blocked off some focus time. But that’s not how focus works.
You cannot summon good ideas on a schedule. They show up when they feel like it: while you’re making coffee, walking the dog in the rain, or answering a child’s bizarre-yet-brilliant question. Innovation does not happen because it’s 3PM or because the quarter is nearly done. Creativity thrives in unstructured moments. But the calendar does not leave room for such respite anymore.
“Thursday afternoon is 1:1-palooza”
Do we have anything to discuss? Not really. The calendar says it’s time for the weekly check-in with team members, so here we are.
We could cancel. But no one dares defy the calendar with its sacred ritual of recurring meetings. So we exchange pleasantries, rehash the updates from Monday and chat about the expected updates for next Monday, and count down the minutes until someone says: “Sorry, I have to drop for another meeting.”
“Q3: what can we still ship?!”
What are we shipping before the end of the quarter in… (checks calendar)… three days? Something customers actually need?! Instead of focusing on quality and releasing when it’s ready and tested, we rush to get something—anything—out the door before the quarter ends. We could wait another week to polish the feature and be sure it’s ready for prime time, but that’s… (checks calendar again)… Q4. No can do. 30 September and 1 October are aeons apart in corporate time.
“November, when next year’s plans need to be locked in”
A deep-tech startup I worked at insisted on a quarterly OKR process for a prototype before even the foundations of it existed. Before we knew what was at all possible. It was mid-November. The prototype was due in January. Why? Because of reasons that sounded like commitments but turned out to be arbitrary dates commanded by the calendar. But why January? Because December sounded impossible and January somehow did not. After all, it’s a whole month extra, if you ignore the holidays…
We had to plan our goals for the following year, before we even knew if we could make a prototype work. In fact, we still had a month to figure out the basics. A lot of insights from experiments can be gained in such a timeframe.
By the time the company actually had something, it was more of a lab prototype than an actual product that could be shipped to customers. It also had little to do with the original plan. It was more than six months late. But hey, at least we had quarterly OKRs. Useless? Yes. But planned uselessness, so perfectly OK(R).
The week right after setting the OKRs for the next year and before that year had even started, we had an OKR status update meeting. Was this for Q4 still or already for Q1? Who knows! The only real accomplishment? Screwing around with a spreadsheet.
And once the quarter’s OKRs are locked in, it’s time to reshuffle priorities! Time to throw the carefully made plans into the rubbish. Strange how urgent yet entirely unforeseen requirements always pop up right after OKR season. The irony: the reprioritization is predictably regular. It’s probably a recurring reminder on an executive’s calendar.
While we’re at it, maybe we’ll even do a reorg to spice things up! These are always announced with “There is no perfect organizational structure, but we believe…” The ellipsis is when it’s the best time to zone out until the awkward silence that follows “Any questions?” Oddly enough, no one ever explains what is wrong with the current structure and how the new one is better, or even what it is the new structure is supposed to achieve and how they intend to measure that.
No executive ever measures the success of a reorg, because the reorg is the point. At least for whoever came up with it. It’s a ploy to consolidate power or to provide more human resources for an executive’s pet project, which they only learned about when Manager Monthly magazine landed in their mailbox after the holidays. And there you have the reason for why reprioritizations always happen at inconvenient times: publication schedules and the postal service.
“The fiscal year: time to plan—again!”
The start of the fiscal year varies in companies, yet it never matches any convenient moment in the planning calendar. Even though executives know when the fiscal year begins, they still scramble to set budgets. Every. Single. Year.
Well, time for teams to craft plans without knowing the rules of the game. And afterwards, OKRs have to be adjusted. It’s a circus, and the calendar is the ringmaster.
“Born in April of 1995? Say no more!”
Astrology is the idea that your birth month dictates your personality. Yes, it’s nonsense. But then again, that’s so typical of Pisces to say!
Oh, and if you think using a birth month to determine personality is ludicrous, try applying the same logic to entire generations. That’s how companies categorize people, by the year they happened to be born in. Millennials are lazy. Gen Z is fragile. Gen X is cynical. Boomers are out of touch.
Thanks to the calendar, we can pretend that hundreds of millions of people across cultures are similar. It is nothing but corporate astrology. Ugh! I could not be more millennial.
Time to take back control
What if meetings only happened when they were needed? What if launches were based on readiness, not quarters? What if we said no to invites without agendas or too many participants?
The best moments in life are often unplanned. The best ideas come when you least expect them. We desire the stability that comes from the predictability of the calendar, but we also need time away from the tyranny of it to embrace spontaneity.
The calendar is there to serve us, not to make us its slave. It’s time to take back control.