Tip: Cancel Meetings Like a Pro

If you came here looking for a way to get out of having meetings, you will probably be disappointed. This tip is more about the preservation of information because information matters. It is also about not driving a small percentage of your meeting invitees crazy. Or crazier. You would probably not want that on your conscience.

We all get invited to meetings that are set up as a series. Perhaps a daily project stand-up for the next three weeks or a monthly management meeting for the next six months.

Sometimes, those meetings are canceled, so the convener simply deletes the meeting invite and job done, right? That seems to be a common way, and the result is that those meetings in your calendar you have attended over the last few weeks disappear at the same time as the future meetings are wiped from your schedule.

For some, this is not a problem. There are a few of us though that will review our calendar history to reflect on where our time is going, update timesheets, or identify what we were doing when the need arises. We will look at the blank slots with a slightly puzzled expression and conclude that time travelers are changing history, which is not a good thing.

The pro tip for this is quite simple: edit the meeting series and just change the date of the last meeting in the series to the date of the previous meeting you want to hold or have held and send the update. The future meetings are wiped from the schedule, and the past meetings remain in the past.

Sometime in the future, you may thank me for preserving the past. You're welcome.