If you’re feeling overwhelmed, bored, or burned out, career coach Megan Hellerer suggests starting with a surprisingly simple place: your calendar.
Your calendar, she says, holds “the receipts of your life.” It tells the unfiltered story of how you’re actually spending your time—not how you think you are.
Hellerer, author of Directional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life, argues that a packed schedule can look productive on the surface while quietly preventing you from making progress toward what really matters. When your days are filled with back-to-back meetings and endless obligations, there’s little room left for strategy, creativity, or long-term vision.
Her solution? A calendar purge.
To create space for meaningful and fulfilling work, Hellerer says, we have to intentionally reduce the things that drain us.
How to Do a Calendar Purge
1. Audit your calendar honestly
Start by pulling up your calendar and reviewing everything from the past month—and everything already scheduled for the next month. Make a list of every single commitment.
This exercise forces an honest look at how your time is truly being spent, not how you wish it were spent.
2. Rate each activity by how it makes you feel
Next, rank every item on your list on a scale from 1 to 10 based on how excited—or unexcited—you feel about it.
Imagine waking up on the day of that commitment. Do you feel energized? Neutral? Or do you immediately think, ugh?
Pay attention to patterns. You might notice that certain days, types of meetings, or recurring obligations consistently rank low. For example, maybe all Monday meetings leave you drained, or certain check-ins spike your anxiety.
Three Ways to Address What’s Draining You
Once you’ve identified the activities that weigh you down, Hellerer recommends choosing one of three approaches.
1. Cancel it
The most straightforward option is to remove the activity altogether.
While you may not be able to cancel mandatory work meetings or performance reviews, many personal or optional commitments are easier to let go of. If a class, event, or routine no longer serves you, you’re allowed to simply stop doing it.
2. Improve it
If cancellation isn’t possible, look closer at why you dread the activity.
Is it the timing? The format? The people involved? The lack of purpose?
For example, if a weekly team meeting disrupts your most productive hours, asking to move it to a different time could dramatically improve your experience—without eliminating the meeting entirely.
3. Find an alternative
Sometimes the issue isn’t the task itself, but how it’s done.
Could a meeting be replaced with a thoughtful email or shared document? Could a standing check-in become biweekly instead of weekly?
These changes don’t have to be permanent. Hellerer encourages treating them as experiments—try something new, observe how it feels, and adjust as needed.
A calendar purge isn’t about doing less for the sake of it. It’s about aligning your time with what actually supports your energy, goals, and values.
When you intentionally clear space, you make room not just for productivity—but for fulfillment.