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Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist

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Re: Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist

#6

This article speaks to the deepest parts of my soul.

Start blocking time as “tentative” in chunks, then when it gets too much adjust the chunk to fit the meetings you need / want to attend and set the rest to busy.

I’ve been doing that for the past few years I also usually have chunks set as busy for the morning end of day to make sure I get an orderly start and end of each day.

At least anecdotally my productivity has improved.

I get an hour at the start and end of each day to catch up and tie any loose ends to make things don’t fall between the cracks.

It really depends on your organization and workload tho so ymmv.

Re: Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist

#9
post #5

I truly wish I'd ever worked anywhere that would actually allow this. There are too many mandatory meetings that simply don't make this feasible for (what I would assume is) a large portion of the populace.

Are the meetings really mandatory? Or just assumed to be mandatory? I’m part of an architecture team and we’ve all agreed to implement a policy where unless absolutely required (e.g. multiple SMEs are needed) there shouldn’t be more than one team member in a meeting. Even our weekly team meetings aren’t mandatory unless you are on the agenda explicitly if you can attend you should but if you have more important things to do then no one would mind if you don’t.

Re: Your calendar should be a whitelist, not a blacklist

#10
> We should be able to say say “I’m free for meetings from 2-5pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if you want to talk to me then that’s when you can.”

It's a nice idea, but the moment you have more than a very small handful of people who need to meet this becomes untenable and obnoxious.

"Sorry, Mike says he'll only meet between 2 and 4 on Wednesdays, so I guess we'll have this meeting in 17 years when that works for everyone else. Or maybe Mike is just fired now? Either way, I suppose."

> In most companies, doing that would make you an annoyance. Those companies don’t respect Deep Work.

The other perspective, of course, is that you don't respect collaboration.

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