Why I stopped taking meetings

The default calendar is a trap. Most meetings are a tax on the people who actually make things.

Here is the counterintuitive part: the busier the calendar, the less gets built. A day sliced into thirty-minute blocks has no room left for the one thing that mattered.

I ran the experiment on myself. For a month I declined every meeting that did not have a written agenda and a decision to make. Ninety percent of them simply never rebooked. The work they were supposedly about got done anyway — in writing, asynchronously, better.

The lesson was not "meetings are bad." It was that the meeting is a default, and defaults are where good judgment goes to hide. Question the default and you get your week back.

So I keep two hours, twice a week, and nothing else. If it cannot survive that constraint, it was never as urgent as it felt.