I Don't Do Early Meetings
The speaker explains their strategy for protecting deep work time by refusing early morning meetings. When meetings are unavoidable, they schedule them at the end of the day, working backwards from a set end time to preserve uninterrupted morning and afternoon hours.
Summary
The speaker outlines a strong personal policy against morning meetings, arguing that even a single meeting scheduled at 10:00 a.m. effectively destroys the entire morning by breaking focus and preventing deep work. They note that the fragmented time remaining before and after such a meeting is largely unusable for meaningful, concentrated work.
When a meeting is deemed truly urgent and the other party makes a compelling case, the speaker has a structured fallback strategy: scheduling meetings at the very end of the workday and booking additional meetings backward from that point. For example, if the desired end-of-day is 5:00 p.m., the first meeting would be placed at 4:00 p.m., and any second meeting would occupy the 3:00–4:00 p.m. slot. This approach ensures that everything before 3:00 p.m. remains completely uninterrupted, allowing the speaker to focus on their highest-priority work during their most productive hours.
Key Insights
- The speaker argues that a single 10:00 a.m. meeting doesn't just cost one hour — it effectively destroys the entire morning by preventing any meaningful deep work from starting.
- The speaker claims that even the time after an early meeting is largely wasted, referencing the fragmented two-hour gap before lunch and other afternoon obligations as unusable.
- The speaker only agrees to meetings when two conditions are met: the meeting is framed as 'very urgent' and the other party presents a strong argument for why it must happen.
- The speaker uses an end-of-day anchoring method — deciding when they want to stop working first, then scheduling meetings backward from that fixed endpoint.
- By stacking meetings consecutively at the tail end of the day (e.g., 3:00–4:00 and 4:00–5:00), the speaker preserves the entire block before 3:00 p.m. as uninterrupted, high-priority work time.
Topics
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