meetings on meetings
when your calendar is 70% back-to-back, you learn something about what people actually need.
February 11th was nine back-to-back meetings.
Not an anomaly. Not a "bad day." Just reality when you're in the zone of a thesis.
In between, I noticed something: the people who got the most value weren't the ones with the longest time slots. They were the ones who had a specific question.
"I'm stuck on unit economics, can you look at this?" Twenty minutes, we solved it.
"Can you introduce me to X?" Sixty seconds, boom, done.
But: "I want to pick your brain about the space." That's the one that always becomes an hour and generates nothing.
This is the insight that changed how I structure time: most people don't need an hour with you. They need a specific answer. And most of the time, they can ask it in fifteen minutes if they're forced to.
The meetings that felt productive weren't the deep dives. They were the clarifications. The quick intro. The "you were right, here's why" moment.
I started saying: "What's the one thing you came to figure out?" and stopping the clock when we got there.
Turned out people liked that better than rambling.
What would change if your next ten meetings had a hard stop at 30 minutes and a forced question: "What's the one thing"?