I Treat My Calendar Like a Code Review

At some point in the last decade, the standard advice about calendar management became "block time for deep work." Reserve mornings. Protect your focus hours. Put a wall of calendar events around the time you actually need to think.

I've tried this. It sort of works, the way most productivity frameworks sort of work — for a while, until life fills back in around the edges and you're back where you started.

What's worked better for me is something I started thinking of as a calendar code review: every six weeks or so, I look at my recurring commitments and ask the question I'd ask about code that's been accumulating — does this still need to exist?

Code that nobody intended to keep forever tends to stick around. The function that was "temporary" six months ago. The feature flag that was going to be cleaned up "after the release." The meeting that was called for a specific reason in Q3 and is now just infrastructure that people show up to on autopilot.

Recurring calendar events have exactly this property. They get created for reasons — a regular sync with a collaborator, a standing review, a check-in with yourself — and then they persist long past the reason. Because canceling a recurring meeting requires a decision, and not canceling it just requires showing up.

The asymmetry is the problem. The path of least resistance is attendance.

My calendar review is genuinely a code review in method if not in tooling. I pull up the recurring events. For each one I ask:

If this didn't exist, would I create it today?
What breaks if I remove it?
Is there a smaller version of this that does the job?

Question one catches the majority of stale meetings. Questions two and three catch the ones that feel important but might be over-engineered. Some meetings exist at 45 minutes because nobody pushed back when the invite was created; a lot of them are actually 20-minute conversations that expanded to fill their slot.

I also look for meetings that are solving a problem that something else now solves. A weekly review call that made sense before I built a better async status system. A daily check-in from a period when I was more worried about a particular project than I am now.

The thing I've noticed: a significant fraction of my recurring commitments survive on the assumption that canceling them would be awkward. Not that they're valuable — that removing them would require an awkward conversation.

That's not a good reason to have a meeting.

The awkward conversation usually isn't, by the way. "I was reviewing my recurring stuff and I think we can handle this async — does that work for you?" is not a crisis in my experience. People often seem faintly relieved.

I'd estimate I remove or reduce two or three recurring things every six-week cycle. That doesn't sound like much, but it accumulates. The current version of my calendar is lighter than it's been in years. Lighter in a way that has measurably more uninterrupted stretches of time.

I don't track this rigorously. I'm not going to start.