Declining

A block of focus time survives for one of two reasons. Either nobody can see it well enough to book over it, or the person who books over it expects to get a reply. If other people have booking rights on your calendar and you have no standing to refuse them, you are working entirely on the second reason — which means focus time is not really a calendar problem for you. It is a correspondence problem, and the calendar settings are only the part that reduces how much correspondence you have to do. ...

Four roles belong in a working meeting: the person who decides, the people who have to agree, the people who hold information the decision needs, and the person keeping the record. Everyone else is there to be informed, and being informed is not a reason to spend an hour. ...

Nine decline messages. Copy them, change the nouns, send them. Each one comes with the situation it is built for and the specific way it fails, because a script used in the wrong place does more damage than no script at all — a message that is too formal for a peer reads as a rebuke, and one that is too casual for someone senior reads as dismissal. ...

Advice about declining meetings is almost always written by someone with an interest in you declining more of them. That is not a conspiracy; it is just that the people producing the advice are mostly selling calendar software, and their post has to end at a signup button rather than at a complication. ...

Most meeting advice offers two options: attend, or decline. Almost everything useful happens between them. The reason to care about the middle is not squeamishness. It is that a partial exit is often the better outcome on the merits — you keep the part of the meeting that was doing something and drop the part that was not — and it is granted at a far higher rate, because nobody has to concede anything. An organiser who would refuse “I’m coming off this” will readily agree to “I’ll join for the budget item”. ...

The meeting has been on your calendar for a year. You have stopped remembering why you joined. Nobody has asked you a question in it since spring, and you have started doing other work during it, badly. You cannot decline your way out of this. A calendar decline handles one Wednesday; the series has fifty more. And the silent version — quietly declining a recurring invite week after week — is the single most misread way to get out of a recurring meeting, because from the organiser’s side it looks identical to unreliability. ...

Declining your manager’s meeting is a different act from declining anyone else’s, and the difference is not politeness. It is that your manager is the person who decides what you work on. A decline is a statement that you have re-decided it, and depending on the manager, that is either welcome, unremarkable, or a problem. ...

Most advice about declining meetings is written as though the only obstacle were finding the right words. Find the polite phrasing, send it, and the meeting goes away. The words are the easy part. The hard part is that a decline is a small political act — you are telling someone their claim on you is worth less than something else — and it has a price. Usually a small one. Occasionally not. The advice that pretends otherwise is written by people who either have no manager or have not had one recently. ...