The same meetings can leave you three deep work blocks or none, depending only on where they sit in the day. See your own calendar both ways.
Take an eight-hour day with four 30-minute meetings. Spread evenly, they leave five gaps of under an hour — room for zero 90-minute focus blocks. Put the same four meetings back to back at one end of the day, and there is room for three.
Same day, same meetings, same total hours. The only difference is fragmentation, and fragmentation is what kills deep work.
Longest gap: 56 min
Longest gap: 350 min
8-hour day, 30-minute meetings, a 10-minute buffer around each.
| Meetings | Spread out | Clustered |
|---|---|---|
| 1 × 30 min | 4 | 4 |
| 2 × 30 min | 3 | 4 |
| 3 × 30 min | 0 | 4 |
| 4 × 30 min | 0 | 3 |
| 6 × 30 min | 0 | 3 |
Some work runs on an hourly schedule: meetings, calls, quick decisions. Other work — writing, building, designing — needs long unbroken stretches, and a single meeting in the middle of the afternoon does not cost an hour, it costs the afternoon. Paul Graham called these the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule.
The trouble is that most calendars are designed by managers and lived in by makers. A free hour between two meetings looks available, but nobody starts hard work they know they must abandon in 45 minutes.
A meeting costs more than its length. There are the minutes before it, when starting anything real is pointless, and the minutes after, when your head is still in the conversation. The calculator charges a buffer on both sides of each spread-out meeting — and only once for a cluster.
Cluster meetings into one part of the day, or a few days of the week, and protect the rest. Offer meeting slots only in the afternoon. Turn status meetings into written updates. And put your own focus blocks in the calendar first, before anyone else can claim the space.
Mostly through fragmentation. Beyond their own length, meetings split the day into gaps too short for demanding work and add transition time before and after. Clustering them recovers much of that lost focus time.
A way of working in long, uninterrupted blocks of at least half a day, suited to creative and technical work. Paul Graham contrasted it with the manager's schedule of hourly slots.
If you need deep work time, yes. Grouping meetings at the start or end of the day — or on fixed days — leaves the rest of your time in blocks long enough to actually use.