There is one thing in your calendar today.
Half an hour, at eleven.
You will lose the morning to it,
and when somebody asks
you will say you had almost no meetings,
because on paper you did not.
Here is where it goes.
You sit down before nine
with two clear hours in front of you.
You do not open the difficult thing,
because opening the difficult thing
and then stopping
is worse than not opening it,
and some part of you knows
the morning has a wall in it.
So you do small work instead.
Tickets, replies, a rename,
the reasonable looking things
that fit in a gap.
From about half past ten
you are not really working.
You are waiting with a browser open,
checking the link,
performing the last ten minutes
of a task you already put down.
The half hour happens.
Afterwards you need
twenty minutes to become useful again,
and by the time you have them
it is lunch.
Three hours for a thirty minute call,
and none of the loss
appears anywhere
that anybody counts.
The thing to understand
is that a block of time
is not worth its length.
It is worth its length
minus whatever it takes
to stop being available,
and an interruption you are expecting
cancels the whole block,
not the part it occupies.
Two hours with a wall at the end
is not two hours.
It is a waiting room.
So stop treating a calendar
as a list of events
and start treating it
as a description of your day's shape.
Push things to the edges.
First thing, or after lunch,
or against another meeting,
and refuse, gently and often,
to be the person
who puts one in the middle
of somebody else's morning.
Ask for a move.
It works far more often than people try it,
and nobody has ever been offended
by half past nine instead of eleven.
And when it cannot move,
stop pretending.
Call the morning shallow,
spend it on the work that suits it,
and put the difficult thing
somewhere it can actually run.
A day with one meeting in the wrong place
is a day with no deep work in it.
Move the meeting,
or move the work.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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