Does your calendar reflect your goals?

February 13, 2026

Hi Everyone,

Open your calendar for the next two weeks.

If it's already full and the meetings are mostly about "keeping things moving", you're probably not running a high-leverage week.

A calendar without rules optimizes for availability, not outcomes. It fills with other people's priorities.

You stay busy, but decisions slow down. Projects wait for your input. Small issues escalate because nobody knows when they'll get your attention.

The fix is a small set of enforceable rules about what gets protected, what gets batched, and what gets rejected.

Ultimately, your calendar must reflect your most important goals, not just other people's demands on your time.

The rules behind a high-leverage week

Rule 1: Find the leverage

Answer the following question, "If every area of my business maintained its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?"

Perhaps it's your sales and marketing systems.

Perhaps it's making some tough calls with your team and ensuring you have the best people in the most important seats.

Or maybe it's consciously noting, and then eliminating, all the low-leverage work somebody else should be doing - or that nobody should be doing at all!

If you don't actively find your highest leverage work, one thing is for certain - it's not going to come looking for you.

Rule 2: Separate manager time from maker time

Divide your days into blocks meant for meetings versus blocks meant for deep work.

Mornings tend to work well for strategic work (reviewing proposals, writing, thinking through problems, or more simply working on whatever you identified in the previous rule), with afternoons for 1:1s and team discussions.

Some teams go further with policies like no-meeting Wednesdays. The exact schedule matters less than making it predictable. When your team knows Tuesday afternoons are for decisions and Thursday mornings are off-limits, they plan around it.

Rule 3: Set gates for what earns a meeting

If there's no decision to make and no real-time input needed, it's probably not worth a meeting.

Status updates, routine check-ins, and purely informational items can move async into project dashboards, written updates, or short video messages.

Require that meeting invites come with an agenda and a stated outcome. If someone can't articulate what decision needs to be made, push it back. This forces clarity and quietly kills a lot of low-value meetings before they happen.

Rule 4: Batch recurring meetings into blocks

Instead of scattering 1:1s and check-ins throughout the week, cluster them.

Hold all your 1:1s back-to-back on Tuesday afternoon. Stack operational reviews on Monday. Keep Wednesday clear.

This frees up entire half-days for focus and creates a rhythm your team gets used to. Research suggests it takes roughly 10 minutes to regain focus after switching tasks. If you have six scattered meetings in a day, you're losing an hour just for context-switching.

Bonus: "Decision-Driven Office Hours"

When Carilu Dietrich was CMO at Atlassian, her calendar filled up with ad hoc requests, and her managers filtered too much information before it reached her. She established a weekly 90-minute office hours slot where anyone in her org could bring time-sensitive decisions or get feedback on work in progress. She saw work before it went off-track and gave context directly, without scheduling a dozen separate meetings.

Office hours preserve responsiveness – nobody waits more than a few days for an answer, while protecting everything else from constant interruption.

Would your team sign up?

Try this today

Look at your calendar for the next week and answer these 5 questions honestly:

Do you have at least one 90-minute focus block each day to work whatever emerged from the question in rule #1 - your highest leverage priority? If not, add those blocks now. Nobody will do this for you.
Are more than half your working hours filled with meetings? If yes, that's too many. Cancel or delegate the lowest-value ones.
Does every meeting have a clear decision or outcome attached? If you see vague titles like "sync" or "check-in" with no agenda, convert them to async or cancel.
Do you have a predictable time for your team to reach you with non-urgent questions? If not, you're inviting constant interruption.
Did you decline anything this week that violated your rules? If the answer is no, your rules aren't real yet.

One thing to try today is to pick one standing meeting that feels low-value. Cancel it and send a note:

"Let's try a written update this week instead. I'll read and respond by the end of the day. If something urgent comes up, we'll handle it in Slack."

See what happens. If it works, roll the same change out to another meeting next week.

Go deeper

👉 Paul Graham: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

👉 Atlassian: How we started a No Meeting Day at Loom (Case study)

👉 Farnam Street: Bezos's one-way/two-way door framework

Coming up on Monday

We're starting the week with the 80/20 of customer churn and a simple way to find your top reasons.

Have a good weekend!

P.S. How many hours of meetings do you have this week? Hit reply with the number – we're curious what "normal" looks like for you.