August really is the Sunday of summer. It’s the moment we realize the easy days are slipping away and we’re about to jump headfirst into the busy routines of fall. There’s a drop in temperature (finally), but there’s an uptick in commitments. All of a sudden, your Google Calendar is a rainbow of colors with all the meetings you’re expected to attend, and you don’t know how to catch your breath. That’s why it’s so important to spot the signs of overcommitment early. With the right strategies, you can prioritize meaningful collaboration over constant communication and reclaim your time.
Why fall feels so overbooked
Several factors contribute to the fall meeting overload.
A big one is the desire to catch up after a lighter, more relaxed few months. Summer tends to run at a slower pace thanks to vacations, lighter schedules, and fewer meetings. But come September, everyone begins to feel the pressure to reconnect and make up for lost time. The projects are urgent and the deadlines are looming.
There’s also no escaping that back-to-school energy. August and September bring a renewed urgency to reset your routine and start working toward new goals. We’re setting Q4 targets and prepping for the end of the year. The concentrated burst of energy can result in crowded calendars, especially when everyone feels it at once and starts scheduling their own ‘important’ meetings.
The looming end of the year can also increase the pressure that leadership is feeling. Fall is typically the last push before year-end, so more meetings are an obvious way to drive accountability and make sure everyone is hitting their targets. But in reality, stacking meetings back-to-back stalls progress more than encouraging it.
The cost of overloaded fall calendars
Feeling overwhelmed isn’t a you problem. 80% of employees feel overworked and close to burnout. According to research from Asana, a lot of this comes down to:
- Having too much to do and not enough time
- Saying yes to too many requests
- Too many urgent, last-minute requests
An overloaded calendar doesn’t just cause in-the-moment stress—it also leads to productivity issues. When employees spend the day jumping from one meeting to another while they squeeze in actual work when they can, they experience lower productivity and limited creativity. In the worst-case scenario, the constant chaos can result in high turnover.
Red flags that your calendar is out of control
How do you know if your calendar is helping you or holding you back? The biggest warning sign is your gut—you shouldn’t feel constantly overwhelmed by your work to-do list. Sometimes you can identify an unsustainable schedule, but sometimes you need a reminder of what balance actually looks like. If you recognize the signs in the list below, it might be time to make some changes.
No time for deep work
When most of your day is taken up by back-to-back meetings, there’s little time to complete any strategic or creative work. As a result, the tasks that require deep work sessions end up squeezed into nights and weekends. Work/life boundaries become nonexistent and you’re soon on the fast track to burnout.
Constant context-switching
Constant context-switching is a hidden but very real cost of overloaded fall calendars.
Every time you switch from one task or meeting to a different event, it forces your brain to reset. It means new information, a different focus, and new people to work with.
Jumping from a project kickoff call to a budget review can be overwhelming in and of itself, but one of the biggest issues is in the way meetings fragment your workday into short blocks, leaving little room for uninterrupted work. Instead of getting into a 2-3 hour deep work session, you might be able to dedicate 30-40 minutes during four different periods. It’s hard to get in the zone when your mind is pulled in three directions most of the time.
Research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain your focus after a switch. Multiply that by 5 or even 10 switches in a day, and you’ve immediately lost hours of focus. On top of that, the cognitive load of switching from one context to another can be mentally draining and steal whatever creativity you had left.
Unnecessary meetings
These days, it’s not even that the meeting should have been an email; it could have been a Slack thread. The meeting culture found at far too many organizations can convince you that the only way to talk through an issue or update your colleagues is through a 30-60 minute meeting.
Overcommitted + exhausted team members
It can be hard to push back on meetings in general. And if you’re an introvert or a people pleaser? There’s no way you’d rock the boat. Few people feel comfortable declining a meeting invite or speaking up when they’re overscheduled and overwhelmed. A packed calendar is a one-way ticket to decision fatigue and reduced engagement.
5 fixes to encourage collaboration without the chaos
A packed calendar is (almost) never necessary to do your job well. If you want to prioritize collaboration without bogging down your schedule, there are a few strategies you can implement.
- Declutter meetings
The average employee attends between 8-17 meetings a week, and they consider 71% of those meetings to be pointless. It’s time to get ruthless and start decluttering those weekly check-ins.
Step 1: Run a meeting audit. Look at all recurring meetings over the past month and ask:
- Does this meeting have a clear purpose?
- Could it be async?
- Who truly needs to be there?
Step 2: Eliminate or combine low-value meetings. Go ahead and axe any standing meeting with no clear purpose. For the ones that need to stay, look at how you can combine similar topics to consolidate time.
Step 3: Shorten your default meeting length. Parkinson’s Law says that your work will expand to fill the time you give it, so even though you could get through the agenda in 25 minutes, that 60-minute meeting will somehow always take the entire hour. Consider making 25 and 50 minutes your new default meeting lengths, which returns time to employees and gives them a transition window into their next meeting or task.
Step 4: Establish a “No agenda, no meeting” norm. Every meeting should have a clear purpose and outline. Now that you’ve got half the time, you should know exactly what needs to be covered and prioritize those conversations.
Step 5: Create a new attendance policy. Only invite people who have to be there, and share recordings or notes with FYI participants. Encourage team members to opt out when they know their involvement isn’t necessary. You can even channel early Jeff Bezos and implement a Two Pizza Rule: if two pizzas wouldn’t be enough to feed the entire group, don’t plan the meeting.
2. Set shared focus hours.
Instead of just encouraging employees to block off focus hours, establish shared focus hours across an entire team or the entire company. During these protected blocks of time, employees can engage in deep work without feeling any sort of pressure to check their Slack to avoid missing anything important. Introduce it as a company-wide do not disturb policy that encourages deep, focused work.
This isn’t a new idea, and companies that have already gone this route tout its merit. Slack has a Focus Friday policy, where all internal meetings are discouraged and employees are welcome to silence their notifications. 84% of Slack employees have found the policy beneficial. Asana’s No Meetings Wednesday policy has helped employees accomplish more than on the other four days of the week.
3. Create async norms.
These agreed-upon rules help everyone understand how they can effectively collaborate without everyone being present at the same time. They combat the knee-jerk reaction to schedule a meeting for every update, so people learn to protect their time and only come together when it’s beneficial.
Here are a few examples of async norms you could establish:
- Project updates can be completed with a Slack thread.
Example norm: Post daily project updates by 4 PM in the #status channel, using this format: What I did today / What I’ll do tomorrow
- Brainstorming sessions can take place through a shared document.
Example norm: For new ideas, create a shared doc and give team members 48 hours to add comments before scheduling a meeting.
- Information sharing can often be done using short videos.
Example norm: If an update will take less than 10 minutes to explain, record a Loom instead of scheduling a meeting.
To help async norms stick, document all of them in a team playbook. Leaders should model the behavior you’re hoping to normalize, and revisit your norms quarterly to fine-tune them as needed.
Remember, async norms don’t mean you have a blanket ban on meetings, but they do mean that meetings are now the exception, not the default.
4. Establish clear communication channels
This strategy goes hand-in-hand with the async norms, but it’s important enough that it deserves its own point.
The average employee juggles nine apps per day, and sometimes their purpose can overlap. When your team doesn’t know which channel to use for what, communication gets messy. A simple question can end up as an email, Slack message, and project management task all at once.
For example, you might set expectations that:
- Urgent issues or questions go in Slack
- Formal approvals happen over email
- Project updates occur through your project management tool
- Strategic decisions require scheduled meetings with agendas
Stick your communication channel expectations in your team playbook so all the information that employees need is in a central location.
5. Use tech as a guardrail
You might think that your workday isn’t that consumed by meetings, or you might believe that meetings are keeping you from getting anything else done. Rarely do we view how our time is spent with 100% accuracy.
Time tracking tools are the best way to see where your time really goes. For example, you might find that 65% of your workday is spent in meetings, or that certain meetings always run over their scheduled time. From there, you can use that data to reshape your schedule or talk to a manager about decreasing your involvement in so many conversations.
Using RescueTime, you have visibility into meeting time vs. focus time, allowing teams to adjust based on actual data. You can also establish Team Goals to set shared objectives, which can minimize meeting overload by keeping everyone on the same page.
Build long-term collaboration habits
When meetings are the default response to address any questions, updates, or issues, it can be hard to adjust your mindset or the company culture as a whole. To remain consistent, document all of the norms and expectations you want to implement.
You may also need to ease into new collaboration habits. A win is a win no matter how small, so start with small changes that can roll into bigger transformations. Track changes over a month or other set period of time and measure the outcomes. Did your team create more breathing room? Were projects completed consistently on time? Identifying the improvements that come from smoother collaboration habits can be enough to help you stay on track and commit to the new systems.
Sustainable change requires you to adjust your mindset about effective collaboration. You don’t need to completely eliminate meetings, but you do need to ensure that every interaction has purpose and provides value to the people involved. Fall doesn’t have to feel like an endless sprint. Don’t be afraid to protect your time and energy with a new approach to meetings.