Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Nice piece by Paul Graham:  Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

The following paragraph really speaks to where I'm at right now:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

It's good to know that I'm not alone. Misery loves company.

Meetings are productivity vampires.

I have so much work still to do on my latest training video and I can't get any traction because of all the damn meetings on my Outlook calendar.  More than 40% of this week will be spent on the phone, in work-related meetings.  Just knowing that I don't have a consistent block of uninterrupted time to record and edit video is enough to kill almost all motivation and progress.  It looks like it'll be evenings and weekends again to get this months video out somewhere close to the deadline.

Well, gotta go. I need to prep for the next three hours of back-to-back meetings.

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