| Paul Graham wrote an article about the difference between a Maker’s schedule vs a Manager’s schedule. [1] Powerful people are on a manager’s schedule. Meetings are a unit of work for a manager, and they freely schedule meetings because there’s very little cost to them. The advantage of this schedule is you can have speculative meetings that potentially open up new opportunities. This is very costly on a Maker’s schedule. PG suggests partitioning the day to AM being maker’s schedule and PM being manager’s schedule. (A form of office hours). This works if you have power and can swing this. But I’d be curious to hear what ICs do. I personally just block off my calendar and decline meetings (with reasons given, always politely). I also entertain speculative meetings — I never want to shut myself off to new ideas. Most of my career has been built on serendipitous meetings by people who want to share a crazy idea. [1] https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html |