Transcript
Transcript: Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: Managing Your Calendar
[0:00 A man with a white mug in front of him.]
Joseph Silva: Hello, my name is Joseph Silva.
[0:02 Title "Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: Calendar Management" appears next to an animated coffee mug.]
Today I would like to discuss the management of your calendar with respect to meetings.
[0:12 Text appears on screen "Joseph Silva, Former Director General, Human Resources, Privy Council Office"]
[00:23-1:00 a white banner appears and stays at the bottom of the screen, with the text "Canada School of Public Service".]
It is an issue that all Executives face and managing this is critical if you want to have enough time with staff and enough desk time. Otherwise, you're dealing with extending your work days into evenings and weekends. And, never catching up.
I learned along the way that I needed to be strategic in terms of which meetings to attend while making it a priority to try to make time in my schedule for staff, desk time, and emergencies.
I'd ask myself what meetings I had to attend and which I could get away with not attending or perhaps delegating to someone else to attend on my behalf. The question was: is that meeting worth my time?
It's clear you can't avoid meetings with your superiors, critical stakeholders, and clients, but we do get roped into many other meetings that may not be good Return on Investment when we are sacrificing critical time that could be better used to keep up with office demands, remain connected and available to our staff, and being able to deal with emergencies.
This is not easy. But it's critical for our well-being as executives. Wasted meeting time results in time away from families in the evenings and weekends. Or having a detrimental impact on our health.
With this strategy I was able to have a better work/life balance vs what I had seen from my predecessors who always had their calendars full of meetings. It can be done.
I do hope that you find ways to keep some open slots in your calendar and hope that it translates into more time with your family on evenings and weekends and much less stress.
[1:40 Title "Cup of Joe with Joseph Silva: Calendar Management" appears next to an animated coffee mug.]
[1:49-1:59 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
