Strategic quitting is the practice of deliberately ending commitments that no longer move your business forward, so the time and attention they eat goes somewhere useful. For most small business owners the first and easiest candidate is a recurring meeting that everybody has stopped showing up for. You cancel it by sending one honest email.
Why is it so hard to cancel a meeting?
Because you don’t have a supervisor. When you own the business, nobody walks in and makes the tough call for you, and no boss tells you that standing appointment is dead. It’s on you until you do something about it.
So the decision just sits there. These things you’re lingering on hang around like a houseplant and weigh on you like a boat anchor. And you push it off, and push it off, and push it off. The meeting itself might only cost you two hours a month, but the unmade decision costs you every single time it crosses your mind. That’s the part owners underprice.
What does strategic quitting actually look like?
I’ll give you mine, because I’d rather show you than lecture you. I’ve been meeting with a group of other business owners consistently for years. Once a month, we’d get on Zoom and talk business. I love these people. They’ve helped me through hard times and I’ve done the same for them. But we hadn’t actually met in four or five months, because we’re all busy running our own companies and something else always won. I’m not being critical of anybody, because I canceled plenty of them myself. So I finally went to them and said I can’t do this anymore. We have to end these meetings. Let’s keep each other’s emails open, we can text and call anytime, but I need the space in my calendar and I can’t keep reserving time for this.
What happens when you send that email?
Here’s the funny part. As soon as I sent it, every one of them wrote back and said totally agree, love you, let’s stay in touch. We’d all been sitting there looking at each other, waiting to see who was going to cancel it first. Everybody wanted out and nobody wanted to be the one to say it. That’s usually how it goes. The meeting you’re dreading canceling is a meeting somebody else is dreading too, and the person who speaks first does everybody a favor. It hurt to make the decision, because it felt like closing a door on people I care about. But the relationship wasn’t the meeting, and ending the meeting didn’t end the relationship. Those are two different things, and confusing them is what keeps dead calendar items alive for years.
What do you get back when you quit?
One afternoon a month. That doesn’t sound like much until you look at how you actually work. I only work four days a week, so by my math that’s roughly a sixteenth of my time back, and to me that’s a big deal. And time is only the first thing you get. You also get the mental space the undecided thing was renting. You stop paying the little tax every time the calendar invite pops up and you think about whether to cancel it again. Running a small business is made up of big decisions, some of them great and some of them painful, but you have to actually make them. The ones you avoid don’t disappear. They just charge you interest. This is one of the six questions every owner has to answer, and it’s the one we skip most: what do I stop doing?
Questions owners ask
What is strategic quitting?
Deliberately ending activities, meetings, and commitments that don’t move your business forward, so you can put that time into the ones that do. You make the call, you say it out loud, and you take the time back.
How do I cancel a meeting without damaging the relationship?
Be honest and be specific. Say the meeting isn’t working, say what you value about the people, and leave the door open for calls, texts, and email. In my case every single person agreed and nobody took it personally, because the meeting was the thing that ended, not the friendship.
What if I regret canceling it?
Then you start it back up. A canceled recurring meeting is a calendar entry, not a burned bridge. If three months from now the group misses it, somebody sends an email and you’re back. That risk is much smaller than the cost of another year of nobody showing up.
How do I know if a meeting is worth keeping?
Look at attendance over the last six months and at what came out of it. If people keep canceling, that’s the group voting with their calendars. If you can’t name one decision or connection it produced, that’s your answer too.
Here’s the homework. Open your calendar right now, find the one recurring meeting you’d be relieved to see disappear, and send the email. It may hurt for about ten minutes, and then you’ll have your afternoon back. A room full of owners who’ll tell you the truth about what to quit is the Small Business Owners Community. That’s how you figure out what to do next. It’s why I get Fridays off.