Renegade Global CEO Amy Jo Martin Explains How Cutting Meetings Can Help You Soar

Have you ever been in a meeting and wondered, “Why am I here? This could have been an email!” If so, you’re not alone. New York Times best-selling author and CEO of Renegade Global Amy Jo Martin knows the feeling. She says that by wasting time, we are actually wasting our lives.

The solution, Martin says, is what she calls “calendar integrity.” She takes a red pen to her planner, cutting anything that isn’t essential. The result? Unimaginable growth.

“You have to get lighter to get higher,” Martin says on a recent episode of the Corporate Competitor Podcast. “It’s kind of like an airplane.”

For Martin, there is a major difference between bandwidth and capacity. The first is how much work you can fit into a day. The latter is your ceiling as a leader or creative person. “I would say we tend to overestimate our bandwidth and underestimate our capacity,” Martin explains. “We have 24 hours in a day. They’re finite…This is our bandwidth. But our capacity…we can always fly higher.”

It’s important to trim whatever is weighing you down, emphasizes Martin, a former social media advisor for Shaquille O’Neal. She trims and trims her schedule, as if pruning a tree. “Then all of a sudden, you just feel like a different human when you have a little time to think,” she says. “You realize the ROI of what that not only feels like, but the ROI of the literal output, and it just starts to shift your frame.”

Martin learned this lesson at a difficult time in her life—when her son Lincoln was in the NICU for three months. “Overnight, my output, in terms of working time, decreased by about 80 percent,” she says. “I’m just next to his incubator.” Yet, what she found in that moment of crisis, was that her company doubled in size because she learned how to refocus how she spent her time—indeed, how she lived.

The founder, investor and CEO talked about all this and more on the podcast, including:

• Your time is a vote. Martin believes we vote with our time. But we can also change our vote at any time. It’s important to take a critical eye to how you are voting. “We vote with our time for the life that we live—period, full stop—whether that’s the life we want or the life we don’t.”

• Manufacture bravery. Sometimes, the best-selling author says, you have to step through the elevator door. That’s what she did when she agreed to work with Shaq. “We can learn to manufacture bravery and actually stand up and go to the elevator,” Martin says. “That micro moment of that sliding door and stepping across the starting line into that elevator changed my life.”

• Be yourself. These days, everyone is trying to be a brand. But Martin believes it should be the other way around. She offers, “You don’t brand yourself. You are yourself, and that creates your brand.”