You can teach others how to respect your time

👋 Somehow, we’re (almost) halfway through January
Issue #246: making a mobile game, empathy v. accountability, and a procrastination tip

A few of my coworkers do this chaotic thing at the beginning of the year: They delete every recurring meeting and repopulate their calendars gradually, only reinstating what they actually need.

Investor Hunter Walk tried an extreme version of this in 2020 — he razed every single thing on his calendar, went full scorched-earth with his obligations, and asked himself: What do I really care about? It was his way to reassess his time, sure, but also an attempt to save money. A few years ago, Shopify created a “meeting cost calculator” that adds every attendee’s hourly compensation and multiplies it by a meeting’s length. This is very handwavey, but according to this calculator, the average 30-minute meeting between three people costs between $700 and $1,600 (if there’s an exec in the meeting, its cost balloons to at least $2K).

That investment can be worth it, of course! But as product leader Julia Harrison writes, a meeting is most useful if it has a goal — and if everyone in the meeting is necessary to reach that goal. You know the meeting’s over not when the clock tells you so, but when you’ve reached it.

Your goal doesn’t need to be a doc or a Gantt chart, either. It can just be a feeling. Former Microsoft VP Steven Sinofsky, who led the Windows and Office teams in the ’90s and aughts, writes: “The best meetings I remember are the ones where our team got a little closer and more connected and I remember that ‘feeling’ more than I remember the specifics of what we talked about.”

Either way, if you’re not essential to whatever a meeting is trying to accomplish, you can… not go! (It’s so hard for me to say no to things, but I’m really trying to do this more in 2025.) “Guard your calendar like it’s your wallet,” writes executive recruiter Brian Fink. The uncomfortable truth, he explains, is that people will treat you the way you treat yourself — and they’ll only value your time as much (or as little) as you value it.

— Harris Sockel

We’re also reading…

• Software engineer Anastasia Laczko spent two years building a new match-three mobile game that lets you create delicious animated sandwiches. She learned (a) you must ruthlessly cut scope wherever possible (her original idea was a multiplayer game, but that proved way too ambitious), and (b) there’s nothing as satisfying as seeing your friends and family fall in love with whatever you’ve created (her mom adores the game!).
• Technical team lead Victoria Corindi: “Empathy without accountability is enabling. Accountability without empathy is cruelty. The real challenge is finding the balance between the two.”
• In the 1940s, a married team of psychologists found that, regardless of their race, children between ages 3 and 7 felt more positively about white dolls than dolls of color (i.e. they were more likely to label white dolls “nice” or “beautiful”). Reflecting on that study and her own experience growing up without seeing herself in most of the dolls around her, writer Osi I. gifts every child in her daughter’s class a Black doll, writing: “the gift was simply a very small gesture of exposure that… may subtly heighten their consciousness, increase their understanding of and connection to others and help them celebrate the ways in which we are all beautifully human.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

If you’re procrastinating, it’s probably because you don’t want to lose something in exchange for moving forward. (Bruno Guardia)

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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