[tyre]

When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time.

All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”.

We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.

[hoherd]

I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

[tyre]

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

[magneticnorth]

YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".

And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's what's going on if they added me without asking.

If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see my time block and ask me.

[rukuu001]

Google Cal will auto-decline meetings that occur during ‘out of office’ events.

I have several of these ‘out of office’ events recurring in my calendar that I use for concentrated work

[minkzilla]

To make them stick you have to decline meetings scheduled during that time

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

Fuck Off We're Working Working Group