There are lots of reasons where a meeting or group session that once might have been important and highly relevant stops being your top priority. When that happens you have to choose to be fully engaged or to break up with your commitments!
It could be a regular social engagement, or a working group where you were included for ‘your perspective’, or maybe it is a voluntary activity that is no longer top of your list of priorities.
We all have them, those meetings or events in our diaries that we are not really engaged in anymore, maybe you show up, but don’t really engage, other times we ghost the meeting by not showing up but not dropping off the invite list or admitting we were no longer attending.
In this article Saunders explains why you should make a formal break and provides you with four steps to go about making a proper breakup with those former commitments.
- Communicate Directly
Don’t avoid the issue, communicate directly and make sure that no one is left depending on you and not aware of your intent. - Finish your Commitments
Think through all outstanding responsibilities and decide if you are going to completed them and by when or to hand them over to someone else. Either way ensure that the you have communicated this back to the meeting organiser. - Delete all the things
Cancel the meeting invites from your calendar, remove yourself from unnecessary subscriptions or mailing lists, remove the physical and virtual clutter. - Enjoy the relief
When you tell others and yourself that you are finished up, you get to enjoy a sense of completion and relief.
Synopsis of an article from HBR by Elizabeth Grace Saunders, Published 3rd August 2020. Read the full article here: https://hbr.org/2020/08/how-to-break-up-with-your-commitments