I've gone back and forth on the topic, between protecting my calendar, which seem to do little good because people don't care, and deciding I would just say "no" if I don't want to go, which doesn't seem to fly well in my organization's mentality.<p>Overall I think whether blacklist or whitelist, these are just mechanisms to help reduce a systemic problem. Whitelisting works ok if your problem is scattered work time (hell to the craze for 45m meetings that leave you with 15m of useless time in between). Blacklist works as a defense mechanism when your calendar gets abused. But overall it would be better that the systemic problem gets fixed in the first place. So overall these address mostly the planning part of meetings, not the other part of the iceberg which is the usefulness altogether.<p>However, on that topic, on a conceptual level, I really like approaches of companies like basecamp or what's described in emergency remote[1]: replace meeting with tools. But I don't believe it's always the efficient way to get to decisions, when you need a meeting, planning can be collaborative (eg [2] scheduler which just iteratively asks people for their preference until finding a slot that works) rather than dictated by the organizers.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote" rel="nofollow">https://www.emergencyremote.com/emergencyremote</a>
[2]