Moving on, we have a question from Noah. Noah is asking about time blocking. He says, "How do you time block plan within a company culture that's apt to throw a meeting on your calendar if it's marked as free?" Well, honestly, Noah, what you really need to do here is take all your colleagues in this company, lock them in a room like in the first Saw movie, but instead of them having to cut the leg off of someone else to get out of that room, they have to read A World Without E-mail before you'll give them any water.

And I think then you'll solve your problem because I hate these type of cultures. It's a huge issue and I feel your pain. Let's just start there. So long term, that's going to be your solution is, of course, you want to change this culture. This is an ad hoc, on-demand, haphazard approach to work.

It's the hyperactive, hive mind personified. It's an approach to work where you just rock and roll. Oh, I want to do this. Let's get a meeting on the books. Let's shoot an email to this person. Let's grab this person by Slack. What about that? I don't know. Let's just jump on and have a meeting.

Let's do a call. Let's circle around on this. Let's circle back. Let's jump on. Whatever the different terminology is, right? Just grabbing time and attention on-demand, haphazardly as needed to advance whatever it is that you're working on or interested in with the minimal amount of overhead for you. We know that this does not scale when you apply this approach to a whole organization.

What you get out of it is a fraction of the potential output. It is the knowledge work equivalent of running a car factory where you say, look, guys, I don't want to tell you how to do your job. So everyone just rock and roll. Let's try to get some cars built.

You know, if you need someone to help you with whatever you're working on, just grab them. You know, yeah, you would produce some cars, but Henry Ford is going to outproduce you a thousand times. All right. So that's long-term solution. Short-term, there are some hacks we can call them that help you get a little bit more breathing room in this culture while you're still waiting for the culture itself to change.

Both of the hacks I'm going to suggest for you revolve around protecting time on your shared calendar so that it can't be grabbed for meetings. And there is a proactive and reactive way to doing this because you can't just block off all your free time. So the proactive approach is block off some time to protect yourself.

You can't block off all your free time. If you block off all your free time, there's no time left for any meetings in a work culture like you work in, people aren't going to tolerate that. So I don't want to give you this false hope of like, just take all your time and block it off so people can't bother you with meetings.

So block off some. Okay, I know I have this hour and these two hours. I know what I'm doing in those two hours and it's protected. So at least my biggest deep work priorities get progressed made up. But you also have to leave a lot of time free for the meetings that still have to happen.

Now, here's where things get tricky. You can't simply say, this is the ideal amount of time I want to spend on meetings each week and then leave exactly that much time free because you have to give flexibility to your colleagues. They need to have options because their schedule is different than yours.

And you have to find times that works for everyone. So yes, you can proactively block off some blocks. This is busy time, you focus on deep work in that time. At the very least, you know, that time will be spent with deep work. But you probably have to leave a substantial amount of your time free.

Not that you want to fill all that time with meetings, but you need to give enough options that you can actually find meeting times that work with other people. Again, if you have one hour free each day, people aren't going to tolerate this because that is effectively no time for each day because it's not going to align with two or three people's other schedule.

This then puts us into a tragedy of the common situation, though, where you're now leaving, let's say half your day free so that there's flexibility for scheduling the meetings that have to happen. But when everyone sees half your day is free, now everyone's going to come and try to grab as much of that time as possible and you have too many meetings on the books.

So that second hack I'm going to give here is reactive time protection. The way I work with reactive time protection is in response to every meeting that gets scheduled on a day, immediately go and block off and protect an equal duration meeting for just your own time. So if someone comes in on Tuesday, let's say you have you've proactively protected about half your day on Tuesdays, half your day free.

And someone comes in like, okay, we need to use some terrible phrase like we need to circle back on a call that we jump on to go over the Q4 deck on our quarterly objectives, right? Or whatever the terrible thing is. All right. You have the whole afternoon free so that there's flexibility here and pretty easily the people involved in this meeting find a time.

They find like three o'clock free. And so you're not the jerk that has no time free. Great. So now you have an hour, 3 to 4 p.m. for that meeting. Immediately block off another hour that afternoon just for you. So maybe four to five. All right, now let's say someone else comes along and, you know, whatever they need to work on their, their, whatever it is, we need to slack on the client Q4 agenda.

When are you free on Tuesday, they look at the available time and they block from 12 to one to do that call. And again, you have some good flexibility here. That's fine. You say, great, I'm going to now take another hour, maybe two to three. Boom. And that's for me, I'm going to make that protected time.

Now, if someone else wants to meet on Tuesday, there is a little bit of time free, but it might not work. And they're going to have to move that meeting to another day. What you have effectively done here is implemented a dynamic system that said, I'm willing to have a couple hours of meetings in this afternoon.

And I want to have flexibility of when those can fall so that people won't think I'm a jerk. I don't want to be the roadblock to figuring out times that work, but I only want two hours of meetings. This reactive scheduling hack basically implemented that system. Two meetings fit.

You were very flexible about where they went, but the rest of the time ended up protected. And so I think this is a way that you can deal with shared work cultures without the unsustainable approach of let me block most of my time off in advance. And so you can give that a try.

But again, your ultimate solution is going to be locking your colleagues in a room, chain them to the wall. They have to answer a 10 question detailed quiz correctly about a world without email before you're going to turn on the light and let them out.