he only takes meetings two mornings a week

wednesday morning i had a debrief with a guest on his second appearance. he'd just come back from three weeks in vietnam.

his main company has about four hundred people. most of them are in vietnam, some in thailand, africa and the us. a nine person marketing team with inbound fully automated. a sales team of fifteen to twenty.

and he isn't involved in new customer acquisition at all.

then he told me how he runs his week.

i squeeze all meetings into tuesday and wednesday mornings. they're the only 2 days that i take meetings. and the rest of the time is my content creation time, my thinking time.

two mornings.

i looked down at my own week while he said it. back to back. five to ten live streams a day. a paper notepad beside the keyboard because there's no gap long enough to open a doc. by sunday night the coming week is usually full.

so who's right?

the easy post would tell you he is. protect your deep work, batch your meetings, say no more. you've read that post a hundred times.

i don't think it's that simple. i think we're both right, for the job we're each doing this year.

his company has a machine under it. four hundred people, automated inbound, a sales team that runs without him. his job now is to think. to see where the company should go next, and to make content that sets the tone. meetings get in the way of that job. so he fenced them into two mornings.

he told me he's trying to work less so he can think more. that's not laziness. that's what the job asks of him at that size.

my job right now is different. i'm building relationships at a pace that compounds. every conversation is a seed. i'm in the stage where volume is the strategy, where the next investor or partner or client comes from the twentieth conversation this week, not the third.

the mistake isn't having a full calendar or an empty one. the mistake is having a calendar you didn't choose.

most founders i talk to never chose theirs. it chose them. someone asked for thirty minutes, they said yes, and three years later their week is a pile of yeses to other people's priorities.

so here's the question i'd ask yourself. what's the job you're doing this year? not the title. the job.

if the job is to find the next hundred relationships, a packed calendar might be exactly right. pack it with the right people and filter hard at the door.

i'll admit the packed version has a cost. there are days the notepad is the only place a thought gets to live before the next call starts. i don't love that. but i chose it, for now, because it fits the job.

if the job is to think, to set direction, to write, to see further than your team can... then your calendar should look more like his. two mornings, and the rest protected like it's the most valuable thing you own. because it is.

and the jobs change. the calendar that fits this year might be wrong next year.

one more thing he said stuck with me. he likes doing a podcast because it's fun, not work. he has a full studio in the vietnam office and recorded six episodes on his last trip.

that's a ceo who protects his thinking time and still makes room for conversations. he just made the conversations the kind he wants to have.

if you want to fill your calendar with conversations you'd choose on purpose, that's what the spotlight is about, and it's free.

so open next week's calendar... did you choose it, or did it choose you?