Block The Time

I've had weeks so packed with meetings about the work that needed to be done that I didn't have time to do the actual work. We called it collaboration. I called it expensive.

A full calendar actually is a monument to other people's priorities, built on your time, with your name on it. Congratulations. You've been fully booked into irrelevance.

Years ago, I started blocking my calendar the way I protect anything else I actually value. Aggressively. Without apology. With the same energy I bring to a contract negotiation - which is to say, I'm reading every clause and I'm not signing anything I don't believe in.

The results were immediate. Turns out when you give yourself two uninterrupted hours to actually think and work, you solve things. Wild concept. Somebody should write a book. Several people have but nobody has time to read them because their calendar is full.

Here's the meeting math nobody does: Six people. One hour. That's not a one-hour meeting. That's six hours of organizational time spent on something that could have been a document, a Slack message, or and I cannot stress this enough - doing work that moves the organization forward.

Your best thinking has a time of day. Mine is early morning. Before the requests come in. Before the notifications start. Before someone needs "just five minutes" which has never once been five minutes in the history of human communication.

Block that time first. Then build everything else around it. Because nobody is coming to rescue your calendar. Not your assistant. Not your boss. Not the person who just sent a meeting invite with "quick sync" in the title and no agenda. That's on you.

A full calendar isn't ambition. It's just noise with structure. Block the time. Do the work. Let the results speak.

Everything else can find a slot on Thursday at 1 p.m. - when I'm in the car rider line and my calendar is set to auto decline