Your work calendar is a mess. Use these expert tips to declutter and free up time heading into 2026.
With 2026 fast approaching, many people are saying out with the old and in with the new. One persistent target of many people’s decluttering efforts, and ire, is their work calendar.
Experts told CNBC Make It how you can polish up your calendar for the year ahead.
Manage meetings
One source of anxiety on many people’s calendars is meeting overload.
Especially heading into a new year, reevaluate each meeting, says Laura Vanderkam, author of several books on time management and productivity. Some recurring meetings might have outlived their utility and only persist because it’s often harder to cancel a meeting than to create one, she notes.
You might also combine meetings repeatedly held with the same participants, she says, or even shorten meetings you’re not outright eliminating.
Holding office hours, so people can bundle non-urgent questions to ask at once, can spare all parties constant “ping pong matches of messages” throughout the day, says Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on focus and productivity.
Newport also advocates for what he calls “docket-clearing meetings” at work, when a team gets together to knock out a bunch of tasks at once. For such a meeting, team members should have a communal document where they add non-urgent things throughout the week that need to be discussed; at this meeting, go through them line by line and decide on next steps for each task.
Block out time wisely
Another useful addition to your work calendar could be time blocking to preserve time for deep work, or your most cognitively demanding tasks, Newport says.
Aim for at least 60 to 90 minutes at a time of focused work without checking your inbox or other notifications.
“Most knowledge workers are quick-checking once every 10 minutes or less, which means they’re never in a state of actual deep work,” he says, referring to the constant influx of emails, Slack messages and other notifications in modern work and life. “The real productivity poison in knowledge work is those types of context shifts.”
Besides marking blocks on your calendar for deep work, you can also block times you’d like to reserve for smaller tasks, or that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable for a meeting, so people treat that time as unavailable.
As with constantly checking your notifications, giving others free reign to schedule a meeting at any open time on your calendar can create such “severe schedule fragmentation” that you never have long enough periods to really get work done, he notes. Another time management approach Newport suggests is for every meeting put on your calendar, schedule the same amount of time elsewhere for independent work.
Build ‘mini audits’ into your schedule
A calendar audit doesn’t just have to wait until the end of a year, and in fact shouldn’t, says Vanderkam. She advises doing a “mini audit” of your calendar each Friday to plan ahead for the coming week.
Look at what you’d like to get done by the following Friday, decide what steps you need to take to achieve them and pencil in time accordingly. Looking ahead gives you more wiggle room to plan around busy days, rather than having a last-minute time crunch.
“In 15 minutes, you might be able to buy yourself 2 hours over the next week,” Vanderkam says. “Any time spent planning is probably going to be paid back to you, in terms of the day going better.”
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