When meetings become the enemy of actual work. The productivity killer hiding in plain sight.
Calendar Battleship is when your schedule becomes a war zone where meetings systematically destroy the time needed for actual work. Like the game, you're firing blind at productivity while meetings sink every hour that could create value.
• Executives: 23 hours/week in meetings (vs. 10 hours in 1960s)
• 67% of professionals: Spend too much time in meetings
• Meeting growth: 8-10% annually, productivity growth: 1%
• Real work time: Happens before 9am or after 6pm
• Calendar density: Average of 3 minutes between meetings
"I'm coming home hysterical every day because I spent 8 hours in meetings and couldn't get any real work done."
"Meetings where work goes to die. We discuss the work instead of doing the work."
"Calendar battleship - just firing meetings randomly hoping something gets hit."
Just like in Battleship, you can't see what you're hitting. You schedule meeting after meeting, hoping one will solve the problem. But each meeting sinks a little more of your team's capacity to do actual work. Eventually, you've sunk all the productivity and only meetings remain.
"Let's schedule a meeting to discuss what we'll discuss in the next meeting."
Time killed: Exponential. Each meta-meeting spawns 3 more meetings.
Everyone attends but only 2 people speak. The other 8 are audience to avoid FOMO.
Time killed: 8 people × 1 hour = 8 hours of life gone forever.
Round-robin of updates that could have been a Slack message. No decisions made.
Time killed: Weekly recurring. Death by a thousand status cuts.
Planning when to plan. Discussing how to discuss. Preparing to prepare.
Time killed: Infinite regress. Never actually reaches the work.
Every meeting must justify why it can't be an email or async decision.
Schedule 4-hour blocks for actual work. Meetings cannot break these.
Every meeting must end with specific decisions and owners. No decision = failed meeting.
Calculate real cost: hourly rate × attendees × time. Make the destruction visible.
Cancel all recurring meetings for one week. See what actually breaks vs. what was just habit. You'll discover 80% of meetings were theater, not necessity.
5 targeted questions to measure your exposure to calendar battleship.
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Stop letting meetings murder productivity. Take back time for actual work.