We squander our time with a death of a thousand cuts. So another tweet I had was you should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

People who know me know that I'm famous for simultaneously doing two things. One is having a very clean calendar.

I have almost no meetings on it and there are people that I meet with when they see my calendar. They almost weep.

Well at the same time I am busy all the time. I'm always doing something and it's usually quote-unquote work related.

But it is whatever the highest impact thing is that needs to be done at that time and that I'm most interested and inspired about.

But the only way to do that is to constantly ruthlessly decline meetings.

People want to do coffee and build relationships and that's fine early in your career when you're still exploring.

But later in your career when exploiting and there are more things coming at you than you have time for,

you have to ruthlessly cut meetings out of your life.

If someone wants to do a meeting, see if you can do it with a phone call instead.

If they want to do a phone call, see if they can do it with an email instead.

If they want to do it with an email, see if they can do it with a text message instead.

If they're text messaging, you should probably be ignoring most text messages unless they're true emergencies.

So one has to be utterly ruthless about dodging meetings.

When you do do meetings, do walking meetings, do standing meetings, keep them short, keep them actionable, keep them small.

Any meeting with eight people in a certain or a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting.

You're literally just dying one hour at a time.

Doing coffee reminds me of an old quote I think from Steve Jobs when they asked him,

Hey, why does an apple come to conventions or why don't you come to my convention and his response was,

Well, then because we wouldn't be here working.

Yeah, I used to have a tough time turning people down for meetings,

but now I just tell them outright.

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