I had the great opportunity at Slack to explore how I set personal boundaries and to challenge norms and expectations around meetings. Then I set out to share these explorations with the world.
The article
At my second agency job, my creative director gave me a piece of advice I’ll never forget: “You control your calendar—not the other way around.” Yet it took me years to understand how to actually put this into practice.
Since I knew others faced a similar struggle, I wrote up some advice with a very targeted title for our design team blog.
“How to say no to meetings without feeling guilty” struck a chord with all kinds of people and codified some solid ways to say no for people who, like me, knew they needed to wrangle their schedules but not how to do it with grace. It even inspired its own TikTok spinoff from @mandyansari.
The talk
In 2023, at Slack’s SXSW activation space, I was given the chance to spread my message further. “Taking control of your calendar” at Slack Studio Live was my first speaking gig, where I expanded on the advice from my article to offer a comprehensive look at how to manage your calendar.