Run this in-office calendar pre-audit to protect maker time

Proximity will fill the empty slots first

Open your team's calendar before the next in-office week. Recurring invites from dead projects, stale updates, and old decisions are already there. In-office days will not clear them; they will make them easier to fill.

Fidelity Investments required its Boston staff to work in person five days a week. The policy covered about 6,000 employees across the Fort Point Channel office and the new Seaport headquarters. It ended a two-year hybrid setup in which staff came in two of every four weeks.

The shift was framed as a way to strengthen connection, mentorship, and learning. The aim is reasonable, but proximity also creates meetings, and those meetings tend to land in the slots that would otherwise be used for deep work.

57% of meetings were calls with no calendar invite, while 10% of scheduled meetings were booked at the last minute. Microsoft 365 users get an interruption from a meeting, email, or notification every 2 minutes on average. 48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.

The calendar does not need a new meeting to get worse. It needs a free calendar space, a nearby person, and a vague reason to talk.

The audit is a cancellation, not a cleanup

A calendar audit is a decision about what your team will stop doing. The recurring invite is the unit of cost. It has an owner, an outcome, and a length. If any of those is missing, the meeting is a placeholder for attention, and in-office days will make it harder to notice.

Run the list before the office week hardens. Each item is a fast test, and the result is a cancellation, a conversion, or a shorter slot. Do it once, before the new rhythm sets.

• Name the owner and outcome for every recurring meeting; mark it for cancellation when neither exists.
• Check whether the meeting needs a room, a screen, or a hallway conversation; convert it to a message when it does not.
• Look for back-to-back meetings with no buffer; move one or shorten it when you find them.
• Test whether the same decision could be made in a shorter slot; rebook it when it can.
• Ask whether the invitee list includes people who only receive updates; replace them with a written summary when it does.
• Scan for meetings in the 9-11 a.m. and 1-3 p.m. windows, where half of all meetings fall and many workers are most productive; move them when they block maker time.
• Check whether a recurring invite has gone without a clear decision; cancel it when it has.
• Confirm each team member has a protected maker-time block that is visible, not just implied.

The graceful cancellation is short. Say the meeting no longer has an owner or outcome. Offer a message thread for updates. Ask for a shorter slot only if a decision is still needed. The team gets a clear answer: keep it, shorten it, or cancel it.

Maker time has to be a standing appointment

Maker time on office days fails when it is treated as leftover. With no visible block, the first free calendar space becomes available for conversation. Any standing meeting can interrupt deep-work time repeatedly.

Before the in-office week starts, each person blocks a recurring maker-time slot. The block is visible to the team. It has the same status as a client call.

If a meeting lands in that slot, it needs a reason. The reason should be a decision, not a check-in. A meeting that cannot name the decision moves. One that can gets a shorter slot and a clear owner.

When the block is visible, the team can see what is protected and what is open for conversation.