Time is constant. What we do with it is not.
That’s not deep. But it took me twenty years of meetings to actually believe it.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about senior engineering work: the work itself isn’t what’s expensive. The expensive part is getting back to the work after you stop.
For deep work — writing a design doc, debugging a tricky issue, building a prototype — it takes about fifteen minutes to form the context. Where’s the file? What was I doing? What did I just realize before the interruption? Fifteen minutes of warm-up before useful code or prose starts coming out.
A meeting in the middle of an otherwise-clear afternoon doesn’t cost you thirty minutes. It costs you sixty. The meeting itself, plus the fifteen minutes you didn’t get back at the start of the block before it, plus the fifteen minutes you have to re-spend at the start of the block after it.
This is why a calendar with three meetings spread evenly across the day is worse than a calendar with three meetings stacked back-to-back. Same total meeting time. Wildly different output.
Most leaders don’t budget for the fifteen-minute tax because it’s invisible on the calendar. The calendar shows the meeting block. It doesn’t show the dead air on either side of it. So they keep accepting meetings, keep wondering why they didn’t ship anything that week, keep blaming “not enough hours in the day.”
The hours are there. The context-setup time is what’s missing.
The simplest move: batch your meetings. The second move: protect at least one stretch of ninety unbroken minutes per day. The third move: stop telling yourself the meetings are the problem. The interruptions are.
The mechanics of how I actually do this: Design your schedule.