The 75% Problem: How I'm Taking My Diary Back

I opened my diary the other morning and did something I'd been avoiding for a while. I counted.

Roughly 75% of my week is meetings. Some of them had been booked two or three weeks earlier — dropped in by people who, quite reasonably, have access to my calendar. And here's the honest part: I looked at a good number of them and had no real idea what they were for.

That's not a scheduling problem. It's a leadership problem, and it's mine to fix.

For a long time I treated a full diary as a badge of usefulness. Busy meant needed. But a meeting is one of the most expensive things an organisation does — you're taking several people's most finite resource and spending it all at once — and most of us book them with less thought than we'd give to ordering lunch. If I'm serious about leading well, I can't keep letting my time be filled by default and then quietly resenting it.

So this isn't a rant about meetings. Meetings aren't the enemy. Unowned, unprepared, purposeless meetings are the enemy. Below are the handful of changes I'm making. None of them are heavy. None of them need a governance framework or a working group. They just make meetings earn their place.

1. Put a gate on the front door

The first fix is the simplest: stop letting anything land in my diary without a reason attached.

I've started using a Microsoft Bookings shared booking page, with the link sitting at the bottom of my email signature. Instead of someone finding a gap in my calendar and dropping a mystery meeting into it, they book through the page — and the page asks them questions first. What's this about? What decision are we trying to reach? Who else needs to be there?

You can set custom fields so people can't book without telling you the purpose. That one requirement changes the whole dynamic. It's not about being unavailable — it's about making "what is this for?" the price of admission. Half the meetings that would have appeared uninvited quietly resolve themselves the moment someone has to write down what they actually need.

If you want to set one up, Microsoft's own walkthrough is here: Set up a shared booking page in Microsoft Bookings. Takes an afternoon, saves you hours a month.

2. Make people bring the thinking, not just the problem — GPS

This is the one I care about most, because it's changed how my team and I work together.

When someone wants to meet about a problem, I ask them to come using GPS: Goal, Problem, Solution.

• Goal — what are we actually trying to achieve? (Improve the process, reduce the delay, fix the handover.)

• Problem — what's genuinely in the way? The governance, the history, the workaround that's become permanent.

• Solutions — and this is the crucial bit — don't bring me one. Bring me four or five.

Then we sit down and talk through their options together, and I coach them towards the best one.

Notice what that does. It stops meetings being the place where thinking starts — usually the least efficient possible use of a room full of people. And it quietly develops the person. Nine times out of ten, by the time someone has worked up five solutions, they already know which one is right. They didn't need me to solve it. They needed a sounding board with a potentially different perspective.

That's the version of leadership I want to practise. Not being the answer machine everyone queues up for, but building people who arrive with answers of their own.

3. Send the thinking before the meeting, not during it

If a meeting needs data, the data should arrive days before the meeting does.

We recently ran an analysis of our GP appointment slots — how they were being used, where the pressure sat, what wasn't working. The old instinct would have been to book an hour, present the numbers cold, and then watch everyone form their first opinion in real time.

Instead we sent the analysis out first and asked people to add their comments in advance. By the time we met, everyone had already sat with it. Nobody was reading a slide for the first time and stalling. We spent the meeting deciding, not absorbing.

The rule is simple: if there's anything to read, it goes out ahead. People should walk in ready, not walk in blank.

4. Build in buffers

This one is almost embarrassingly small, but it's made a real difference — and there's good science behind it.

Back in 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab ran a study where they put EEG caps on people and measured their brain activity across a day of meetings. The finding was blunt: back-to-back meetings cause stress to accumulate through the day, and they actively erode your ability to focus and engage. Short breaks between meetings let the brain "reset," so you arrive at the next one calmer and sharper rather than more frazzled than the last. In other words, cramming your diary doesn't make you more productive — it makes you less so by mid-afternoon.

So I now build in a ten-minute buffer before each meeting and a five-minute buffer after.

The ten minutes before is prep time. Very often the data I need for a meeting is something I read a week or two earlier — and honestly, I need to recap it before I can walk in and use it properly. That ten minutes lets me refresh my memory, work out what I actually want from the meeting, and turn up with a point of view rather than a blank stare.

The five minutes after is action time. So often a meeting ends with one thing I need to do straight away — send an email, kick off a piece of work, get the ball rolling on something before it stalls. Those five minutes let me do it there and then, while it's fresh, so it doesn't quietly fall off the list and get forgotten by the end of the day.

A quarter of an hour of breathing room around each meeting is the cheapest performance upgrade I've found. If you want it to happen automatically, Outlook will even shorten your meetings by default to carve out those gaps for you.

5. Minutes and an action log — every time, then shared

Finally, the least glamorous habit and one of the most important: write it down, and send it round.

The barrier here used to be effort — nobody wants to be the one scribbling notes instead of thinking, and minutes written from memory an hour later are half-fiction. So we've taken the effort out of it. As a GP practice we use ambient scribe technology (we use Heidi AI, but there is Copilot or Plaud etc), and we've built our own meeting templates for it. Our template has the same fixed structure, and the last item

is the action log.

That does something quietly powerful. The actions are captured as we go, in the meeting, and we agree them out loud there and then — so everyone leaves with the same version of events. Straight afterwards, those actions get cut and pasted into the follow-up email, each one given an owner and a due date. No ambiguity about who's doing what by when.

And here's the bit that actually makes it stick: when something needs following up, the action goes into the calendar or digital to do list. So it's not floating in an inbox somewhere hoping to be remembered — it's sitting on a date, easy to find, impossible to lose.

Because that's the whole point. Being able to go back and see what was supposed to happen is what stops the wheels spinning. Without it, people simply forget, nothing moves, and you end up holding the meeting again — which means the meeting existed for the sake of being a meeting, and nothing else. A meeting with no record, and no owned actions, is a meeting you'll be having twice.

The real point

Strip all of this back and it isn't really about meetings at all.

It's about treating people's time — including my own — as something worth protecting. It's about coaching people to think for themselves rather than booking an hour to think at them. And it's about being honest enough to look at my own diary and admit that a lot of what fills it, I allowed.

None of these changes needs sign-off. You can start any one of them tomorrow. But together they've turned my meetings from a thing that happens to me into a thing I actually lead.

I'll take that trade. My diary is 75% meetings. I'd like every one of them to be worth showing up to.