Overscheduling is Killing Your Productivity (and What You can do About it)

For some association leaders and executives, a packed calendar can feel like a badge of honor. For others, it is a necessity created by limited staff support or too many priority projects. Whatever the reason, back-to-back meetings, email overload, distracting travel, and constant interruptions have become the norm.

Being overscheduled is a productivity killer. Here’s why:

1 Busy Doesn’t Equal Productive

Just because your day is full doesn’t mean you’re getting meaningful work done. In fact, when every minute is spoken for, there’s no time left for strategic analysis, decision-making, or creative problem-solving. And isn’t that what we are supposed to be focusing on?

As leaders, we must find ways to work deep thinking into our schedules and not work at too fast a pace. I love the work of Cal Newport on this topic. His book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, builds on Deep Work and emphasizes moving away from busy work toward meaningful accomplishments. I highly recommend his books and podcast.

2 Meetings Are Eating Your Margin

An hour here, 30 minutes there — it adds up fast. Meetings pull execs away from higher-value work. Without time to reflect or recharge, decision fatigue sets in, and quality starts to drop.  While meetings can be valuable, they also disrupt our ability to focus. If you are a subscriber to Harvard Business Review, you have seen many online articles on this topic, including this one that highlights that attending too many meetings can be highly stressful and tiring, leading to decreased productivity and quality.

So, let’s not waste our valuable time on ineffective meeting practices. Optimize meetings by requiring your team to have a clear objective/meeting purpose, well-structured agenda, start and end on time, conclude with action items, and ensure notes are taken and shared. Of course, you also have to demonstrate the self-discipline to employ these practices yourself.

3 No Room for Strategy Thinking

Overscheduled leaders are often stuck reacting rather than proactively driving change. There’s little space to think strategically, mentor team members, or explore new opportunities when your day is a sprint from start to finish. Leaders must make time for strategic thinking, we all agree. But how?

Dorie Clark’s The Long Game: How to be a Long-term Thinker in a Short-Term World is an excellent resource on this (link is to the YouTube presentation, but the book is a great read). The book discusses the importance of creating white space for strategic thinking, among other methods. I also recommend her TED Talk (from TEDxBoston) on the real reason we feel so busy every day.

The Fix: Ruthless Prioritization and White Space

First, fiercely protect your calendar. Block out time for focused work, limit recurring meetings, and empower your team to make decisions without constant check-ins. Building in white space isn’t a luxury, it’s a leadership necessity.

Secondly, set your priorities and stick to them, to avoid being distracted with less meaningful work. if you aren’t familiar with it, check out Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix, which is a framework for prioritizing your time and tasks for optimized efficiency and productivity. Delegate less critical work or look for methods to automate them.

Bottom line: To be effective, we need our personal margin to be effective leaders and productive executives. Our focus should be solidly on doing what matters most.

At AMR our core values really reflect this approach to business. Our flexibility and our casual but focused approached to association management helps us create a successful team that works well together in a positive work place. Get in touch with us today to see how AMR can help your association change the world.