This is my calendar for next week. There are fewer than 6 hours of meetings on it.

1 of those hours is dedicated to customer calls (I might get a few more booked between now and then).

1 of those hours is a standing monthly meeting, but it’s kind of a critical one (our monthly Growth review).

The rest are 1:1 catchups with various teammates. These are each ~monthly by default, but we move them around based on when it’s convenient or there’s something timely to touch base on.

One is at 8pm after my kid goes to bed. Yeah, that’s a little weird, but sometimes I’m most productive at night and so a casual catchup with @Michael Eckstein is a nice complement to some work I might do that night so I can handle preschool dropoff/pickup that morning.

I’ve also got an orthodontist check-up on Thursday morning. I didn’t need to rearrange anything to make it happen, because I had no other meetings that day.

For a staff-level PM like me, this might seem… a little off. And I get it! In my last role, my calendar was a giant 8-5 block of meetings virtually every day. But we don’t at @Buffer – we default to async.

And it’s been so liberating! I am able to actually find the time to do sustained periods of strategic thinking, or collaboration, or get those customer touch points in (arguably more than I’ve ever been able to do in my whole career as a PM).

That doesn’t mean my calendar is always empty – we have a few standing meetings, and even more ad-hoc calls that pop up from time to time – but the focus is on the work. Even in my most meeting-heavy weeks, I’m meeting for far less than I’ve ever had to in a previous job.

And if a meeting comes up, and someone isn’t sure what we’re going to use that meeting for… we just cancel it. Simple.

I think this works in far more businesses than people realize.

Cancel your meetings. Propose canceling someone else’s meeting. Just do it.