Your calendar should be an allowlist, not a blocklist

I&#x27;m not necessarily against the idea, but I suspect that it would exacerbate existing issues with team members in different time zones. For example, I work on the US east coast and everyone else in my team is on the west coast - a difference of three hours. My coworkers <i>already</i> tend to be unreachable or uncommunicative in their mornings. If they were to follow the advice in this article, they would almost certainly formalize that by limiting their &quot;allow&quot; time to their afternoon. Since I already end my own &quot;allow&quot; time at dinner, that only leaves about two hours a day when the two overlap. Even if they didn&#x27;t consistently fill those two hours with meetings among themselves within their own time zone, that wouldn&#x27;t be enough. It&#x27;s why I have a 6:30pm meeting this evening, which is <i>super</i> unwelcome but it&#x27;s what I have to do. At least it&#x27;s not on a Friday this time. This situation would be even worse with a five- or eight-hour time difference.<p>I don&#x27;t think this system can work if everyone can just arbitrarily choose which hours to leave open, on a team distributed across time zones. There would have to be some kind of rules to ensure sufficient overlap. That means some people might not get the absolutely perfect schedule they wanted, but too bad. Be adults. Better for everyone to make <i>some</i> accommodation than to force everyone in the minority time zone to work majority-time-zone hours - which is basically what I see happening to everyone in my situation. We don&#x27;t need to make that worse.

&gt; The solution should be office hours. You should be able to say say “I’m free for meetings from 2-5pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if you want to talk to me then that’s when you can.” In most companies, doing that would make you an annoyance. Those companies don’t respect Deep Work.<p>No, the main reason would be that it becomes impossible to schedule meetings when everyone only has that few arbitrarily selected office hours.<p>It <i>might</i> work when everyone in the team agrees to the same office hours, but even then, how do you schedule meetings to align between teams with different office hours?

&gt; Does your company have a culture of letting everyone see each other’s calendars? Do people often schedule meetings whenever there are openings, without asking?<p>&gt; If so, your calendar is a blocklist.<p>Sure, but what is this “schedule meetings, without asking”? Sending out meeting <i>requests</i> is asking. Having open calendars gives people a better first-glance idea of times that are likely to be acceptable and times that aren&#x27;t.

I agree with the premise, but it depends on your workplace. I struggle with colleagues who don&#x27;t even both checking if the spot is available.

Naive question, coming from an academic.<p>How common is the phenomenon that the blog is posting about? Where everyone in a company can unilaterally block off a meeting with anyone else?<p>I&#x27;m astonished that anyone would put up with this. Maybe I should count myself lucky.

Tools like Calendly do a reasonably good job of making an allowlist out of your calendar. Put them in your email sig and generally teach people to use it.

But what of the middle managers who depend on filling their calendars back to back with meetings so they can pretend their job isn’t meaningless.

Submitted here yesterday, but it was removed very quickly, presumably because it originally said &quot;blacklist&quot; and &quot;whitelist&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24043175" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24043175</a><p>EDIT: Looks like this post is marked as [flagged] now.

What&#x27;s an allowlist?

Why did they change the whitelist blacklist thing. Isn&#x27;t that a bit silly to be pedantic about?