Meeting Seven of Nine

It's 4:55 on a Thursday. Half a turkey sandwich sits next to your keyboard, right where you left it at noon. You're in meeting number seven of nine with your camera on, nodding.

Your calendar looks like a game of Tetris that's going badly. There are blue blocks, green blocks, and a red one labeled "quick sync" that has never once been quick.

Then someone on the call says, "Let's step back and look at the big picture."

You freeze. When did you last look at the big picture? Not this month. Maybe not this year.

You tell yourself it's just a busy season and you'll have time to think about it next quarter.

You told yourself that last quarter too.

Now Your Calendar Has a Robot

It's about to get faster. On October 8, Google introduced its Gemini agent for work. You can ask it to set up a meeting with "the usual team" without typing a single name, and it checks everyone's calendars and starts the email thread for you. That's genuinely useful. It also means the blocks can now drop faster than any human could stack them.

Game Over, One Block at a Time

Here's what a packed calendar really costs. You stop leading and start reacting. Decisions get made in the four minutes between calls, usually mid-chew. Your team learns that the only way to reach you is to book a meeting, so they book more meetings. Your best ideas don't disappear. They just never get a turn.

Anyone who's played Tetris knows a full screen isn't winning. It's game over.

Confession time: I once color-coded my calendar so beautifully it looked like a bag of Skittles. I was proud of it. Then I noticed I hadn't had an original thought in three weeks. It turns out "busy" and "productive" aren't the same thing. They're barely acquaintances. ‘B-U-S-Y’ is actually one of my most-hated, four-letter words.

The Coach's Take: Good Ideas Need a Crock-Pot

In Kickass Husband I wrote, "We live in a Crock-pot world, but we all want microwave results." Your best thinking works the same way. It needs slow heat and a little patience. Back-to-back meetings keep you in catabolic energy, where you're reactive, rushed and always putting out fires. White space moves you into anabolic energy, where curiosity and creativity live.

Writer Anne Lamott said it best in her 2017 TED talk: "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."

Blocking out time to think isn't lazy. It's a commitment to the part of your job nobody else can do.

Your Playbook for This Week

1. Cap your calendar at 80%. In a 40-hour week, that's 32 hours booked and eight hours left open. Once you hit the cap, the next request goes to next week.

2. Book white space like it's your biggest client. Put one unstructured block on your calendar every week and give it a real name. It has no agenda and no deliverables. It's time to think, dream, search and experiment.

3. Take a 30-minute thinking walk. Keep the phone in your pocket and turn over three questions: Where am I? Where do I want to be? What might get me there? Stanford researchers found that people's creative output went up by an average of 60% while they were walking.

4. Tell your team the truth about it. Don't hide the block behind a vague "busy." Tell your team it's thinking time and that you trust them to handle things for an hour. Being honest about it also gives them permission to protect their own white space.Its like locking the bedroom door if you have kids. Claim the time you need and don’t apologize or make excuses for it.

The Gap at 2 p.m.

Now picture next Thursday. It's the same Tetris board, but there's a gap at 2 p.m. labeled "Walk." About two blocks into your neighborhood, the big picture shows up on its own. You even eat the turkey sandwich while it's fresh. Small victories.

So what idea has been waiting for a gap in your calendar?

If you're ready to reclaim your focus and get your creativity back, head over and grab your complimentary
Core Energy Session. I'd love to talk with you.

And remember,
When focus, purpose, and action align, success follows.