By Holly MacDonald

I’ve been a consultant for awhile and one thing that I notice is how much time my clients spend in meetings.  Day in and day out, the majority of time is in meeting rooms and the ability to do work (or even delegate the work) that comes out of meetings is non-existent because we have no wiggle room.

We all need more wiggle room in our schedules.

What’s wiggle room? It’s uncommitted time.  The norm seems to be zero (or in the negatives), but it would be better to have 20-25% of your time uncommitted.  Don’t forget, when planning for your year that you need to consider things like vacation time, regular work tasks, committed projects, recurring items, etc.  Then you add the strategic projects.  Then the wiggle room.  Overruns, unexpected team illnesses, new opportunities and crisis management require wiggle room.

Once I calculated a department was using 20% of their resources in meetings on an annual basis.  Just regular team/department meetings.  There was also no wiggle room.  Guess what?  Everyone was super-stressed because there were so many demands on time.

Sounds simple.  But it’s like losing weight.  We all know that eating less and exercising more is the sensible way to do it, but then we can’t say no when the dessert menu comes. Same goes for wiggle room.  Be disciplined and don’t schedule yourself so tightly that you can’t wiggle a little.

Holly MacDonald is an independent consultant with well over 15 years of experience in the learning & development field.  Holly is a bit of a techno-geek and can often be found playing online.  When she steps away from her computer, she spends time outside: hiking, kayaking, gardening and of course walking the dog.  She lives on Saltspring Island and is a leader in the live/work revolution.