Calendar Reviews

Product leaders report the same symptoms everywhere: calendar is almost 100% booked, little time to do the actual work that comes out of meetings, complaints from people who can't get on your calendar, spending nights and weekends catching up, mentally exhausted. You're sneaking out of Zoom sessions camera-off for body breaks. This is similar to the core product prioritization problem—an infinite set of demands, but the scarce resource is time rather than development capacity. You'll never get to the end of the backlog, and you'll never accept all incoming invitations.

Do a quick 10-minute inventory. Color-code your calendar into buckets: executive meetings, time with your PM team, recruiting, project status, solo thinking time. Make a pie chart. There's no magic mix, but roughly a third for exec team and cross-functional peers, a third for the product management team, and a few protected hours for uninterrupted thinking is about right. Now here's what you block out first: recruiting time (being a player/coach part-time CPO and part-time PM is a dark pattern), and three-plus hours per week of focus time where you invite yourself and nobody else. Just 30-40 minutes of uninterrupted work at the start of the day—before opening email—refreshes your sense of purpose.

Then take an incremental approach. Reclaim one meeting this week to cancel, shorten, delegate, or liven up. One next week. Small gains compound. Ask yourself: could this have been an email? Is this agenda-less and poorly organized? Can I delegate instantly by inviting the PM who'll own this to the kickoff? Skip a recurring meeting once—invent an emergency—and see if anyone notices. Budget no more than 10 hours per week for projects and status meetings. Everything else is below the line.

The off-hours problem: lots of late-night work lets you confuse time spent with value. In a good week you can do 20 or 30 hours of really useful thinking and strategizing. After that you're mostly going through the motions, sending knee-jerk emails you'll regret.