The Meeting That Outlived Its Usefulness

For the first six months of running YVO, my invoicing was a mess in exactly one way. Not the numbers — those were always right. The timing. Some months invoices went out within a day or two of the work being done. Other months they went out two, three weeks late, whenever I happened to remember, usually while doing something completely unrelated and thinking, oh, I still haven’t sent that.

It took me a while to work out why, because on the surface it looked like a memory problem, or maybe a discipline problem. It wasn’t. I finally sat down and actually looked at my calendar, properly, the way I’d tell a client to look at theirs, and the answer was embarrassingly simple. “Send invoices” had never once appeared on it. Not as a recurring block, not as a one-off task, nothing. It lived entirely in my head, in the vague and endlessly postponable category of things I’ll get to, alongside every other task that has no fixed home.

Meanwhile, sitting right there on my calendar every single week, was a 45 minute recurring call I’d said yes to months earlier and never questioned since. It had made sense once. It didn’t really make sense anymore. But it had a slot, a title, a recurring invite — all the markers of legitimacy that “send invoices” never had, despite one of them actually mattering more to my business than the other.

I cancelled the call. Put invoicing in that slot instead, same time, every week. That was the entire fix. No new system, no app, no elaborate process. Just moving one real thing into a spot that had been occupied by a smaller thing wearing a bigger thing’s clothes.

Invoices started going out within a day or two, consistently. Cash flow got easier to predict, which matters more than I expected when you’re the only person keeping the business running. And the odd thing is, nobody ever asked where the cancelled call went. It turned out its slot had outlived its usefulness long before I noticed.

This is the action I’d point anyone toward this week, because it doesn’t require a big reorganisation of your time, just an honest look at your calendar. Somewhere on it is a recurring thing that’s there because it once made sense and nobody has revisited it since. And somewhere in your head is a task that matters more than that recurring thing does, and has no home at all. Swap them.

If you want a hand doing this properly, the Weekly Reset template in my Etsy shop walks through exactly this kind of audit, week by week — https://www.etsy.com/listing/4492229274/weekly-reset-planner-excel-template

Your turn: what’s the one recurring thing on your calendar that’s earned its spot through habit rather than usefulness, and what would you put there instead?