Block out time for yourself

It surprises me how many people have wall to wall meetings in their calendars - yet no time blocked out for themselves.

When this happens, you won't have time to prepare for your next meeting.

You may find you're not fully focused in the meetings you attend.

And you might forget about your basic human needs: drinking water, eating lunch, taking toilet breaks, or taking a proper break from your desk.

A couple of quick tips to improve this:

1. Always block out time for lunch. If you don't do this, meetings may fill every available space in your calendar. Sure, they might get booked over lunch anyway - but it's far more likely if you don't block out the time.

2. Question whether you really need to be in a meeting. I bet if you ask this about every meeting, you'll be able to drop out of some of them at least. It's quite ok to say "I'm really booked up today and need to claim some time to work on X, can we meet another day?"

3. Shorten your meetings. Does every meeting need to be 30 mins or 1 hr? If not, trim them down and get some time back!