Boss Blocked Her Calendar for 'FAMT' – A Relatable Truth

The Problem with Endless Meetings

Is there anything worse than clocking in to work and seeing your calendar jammed full of random, and seemingly pointless, meetings? If we’re honest, most of them could’ve been an email, and it feels like actually being able to get your head down and get any task done is near to impossible.

But one senior leader at a UK sports organisation shared her simple workplace hack that has freed her up to plow through her to-do list. According to reports, the woman was fed up with being dragged from one meeting to the next, so instead she blocked out the last Tuesday of every month in her calendar with the label “FAMT.”

Many assumed she had a standing meeting with a client, so they were all shocked when she revealed what the abbreviation stood for: “F**k all meetings Tuesday.” Others in the corporate environment have also confessed to doing this, with some sharing their own experiences. One person, Bobby (@bobbyyy_ok), said it was her “winning secret,” adding: “You start scheduling fake meetings just to get a few minutes of peace. Who knows ‘busy’ could be such a great excuse.”

It’s brilliant really, but isn’t it also a little depressing that we’re having to resort to a fake meeting, just to get our job done?

The Rise of Fake Meetings

Jim Moore, an employee relations expert at HR consultants Hamilton Nash, says this trick is an old habit in a new form. “One of the great hopes of the post-Covid hybrid working world was that it might kill off the curse of presenteeism, and the need to ‘perform’ by working long hours to impress the boss,” Jim explains. “But just like a horror movie villain, presenteeism was never really dead, and now it’s back in a new but strangely familiar form.”

Remote working in a post-Covid world has had a big knock-on effect on productivity, according to the expert. “Remote working created the freedom employees need to get their work done, but it also made managers more anxious about checking that work is getting done,” Jim explains. He adds that because we rarely now have “informal conversation” at work, meetings have “proliferated.” “Managers now schedule meetings to get updates instead of walking over to someone’s desk,” he adds.

This constant stream of meetings makes it near to impossible to defeat the mountain of actual work that’s piling up. “By blocking time with a fake meeting, employees are just defending themselves against being booked into endless real meetings,” Jim says. “It’s a sane solution to an insane problem, and it’s a cry for help for diligent employees.”

The Gossip Factor

But there’s also the ones who are scheduling meetings, not for work purposes, but for a good juicy gossip. One TikToker posted: “When you schedule a fake teams meeting to gossip.” Many replied saying “I love to gossip on company time” and “y’all couldn’t wait until lunch? A whole fake meeting? I do the same thing.”

For HR expert Jim, this is obviously much harder to justify when you simply want a chinwag. “Technically, deliberately deceiving your manager about your calendar could be considered misconduct, but in reality it’s management that has a problem, not you,” he says. “Managers who are obsessed with monitoring staff create a breeding ground for dishonesty. Leaders need to trust their employees to manage their own time, and incentivise productivity, not looking busy.”

So, if you see a suspicious meeting in a colleague’s calendar, it might be best to look the other way.

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