I picked up the habit of doing this manually a couple years ago, when my meeting load mushroomed following a reorg.<p>I also started getting assertive about declining meetings if I thought they were asking for too much time. Too many folks were in the habit of reflexively blocking out a full hour for a decision that could be made in 15 minutes plus a briefing email that everyone could be expected to read ahead of time. I was surprised to find that that one didn't really burn any social capital. Far from being offended, many of my colleagues thought it was a good idea and started following suit.
A technique I learned years ago once Outlook starting broadcasting availability is the notion of "defensive scheduling". Basically schedule work time the same as you treat any other meeting. If a meeting request comes in and it conflicts with your previously scheduled work time? Decline.<p>I've used it pretty successfully, but it requires a little bit of discipline to make sure you have scheduled yourself out a few weeks in advance and that you don't start accepting meetings during that time.<p>(note: some people will figure out what you're doing when you have 6 hour blocks of time every Thursday. Schedule lots of smaller 30minute and 1hour meetings and people trying to invade your calendar won't know the difference)
I do this all the time manually, but it's not hard or time-consuming. Why would I want this service trying to do it? It takes me maybe 5 minutes to block out the portions of my week that I don't want people to schedule over.<p>(Of course, they still schedule over it. But they also schedule over real meetings, so I don't think there's some magical way to name a meeting that makes it seem important enough that the meeting locusts won't try and eat more hours than you have in a day.)
I have a recurring "Developer meeting", with some of the other devs every day at 12-1 because I was so tired of having the management types, having filled the rest of their calendars with useless meetings, deciding to schedule me for useless meetings that prevented me from getting lunch (as in, Monday, Tuesday is wide open, then Tuesday morning, bam, meeting invites from 10:30 until 2:30, no breaks).<p>That, and responding to every meeting with "tentative", so that I'm free to re-evaluate the meeting's priority against real work up until the last possible second, has allowed me to keep my sanity in a culture of time wasting.
I do this and also take advantage of the chance to take a conference room for an hour or two, vs. open plan desk with my back to a room full of people.<p>I get probably 5x more done per minute in the conference room.
Bwahaha cynical me really likes that.<p>It's sad that adding a calendar item of "Working - do not disturb" is not considered an option but cramming bullshit into your calendar is.
This is one of those things I just assumed everybody did. I've been doing it for years, and can't imagine keeping my sanity if I didn't.
I used to block off every 9AM-10AM, 4PM-5PM and 1PM-2PM slot as busy slots. If someone really needed to have a meeting at one of those times they could ask me. Because often, those were the only slots the 10 people in the meeting all had open in the immediate future so people would then schedule meetings at those times. I grew tired of 4PM-5PM meetings which extended to 5:30PM, 6PM etc.
I'm fortunate in that I work from home a couple days a week regularly. Generally, people will wait until I'm in the office to schedule meetings, giving me those full glorious days to get things done.
I loathe meetings and do my best to avoid attending them unless there is a specific technical issue being discussed that falls within my wheelhouse. I especially dislike meetings with non-technical people present. To have to stop the meeting constantly to explain things is annoying, so I ask to be excused unless my area of expertise is involved. A later walk-to-the-local-cafe-for-espresso with my supervisor gives me anything I need to know without the lame questions and hand-holding.<p>There is a reason I ask to be in the server room with the lights out...
Just tried it - unfortunately it doesn't disable the meeting notifications so once you fill up your calendar with decoy meetings you get alerted all day :(