When it’s over…

How long is this meeting booked for?

A lot of us are slaves to our schedules. We book, or overbook our calendars, squeezing in one more thing even when we know it’s too much.

I don’t think I’m the only one who is sometimes greatly relieved when someone has to cancel or delay a call. (Though I genuinely love talking with the leaders I work with).

Today I’ve had two meetings, one a group session with a leadership team and the other an individual PACE call, that were each scheduled for 60 minutes. I had no time booked in between. That’s pretty common for me. Sometimes I realize I’ve booked 5 or more continuous hours of consecutive Zoom calls with different people.

But today both of this calls actually ended early. In fact, I’m writing this post in the gap created after the second call before another PACE call that wasn’t supposed to have any gap.

It’s refreshing.

What happened was, we had finished everything we needed to talk about.

It’s that simple. We were done so we stopped.

Most of the time it’s not like that. As someone who is very committed to ending things on time I often find myself hurrying towards the end to ensure we cover all the content. If necessary I’m fine to hold some of it back until a future call, but I’m pretty good at knowing how much to include.

Decades ago i was introduced to Open Space Technology, a meeting approach developed by Harrison Owen. One of the core principles is “When it’s over, it’s over”. The idea being that if we’ve finished our conversation there’s no need to keep going. We can end the call, take on another topic, or even choose to use the time for some casual interaction. But we get to choose.

There is something very freeing about be able to happily acknowledge that we’ve finished early and give people some time back for whatever is best. It feels like a little gift.