When I was a young and carefree individual contributor, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I thought having a calendar with appointments and events on it was a strange concept that probably made more sense for travelling salesmen, doctors, presidents, and other people pleasing professionals who needed to remember when they were meeting a client or someone.
My work day was simple and relaxed. Ok, maybe not simple and relaxed: after all, I was writing code without AI or even proper IDEs, and mostly something called Usenet to ask around for help with coding issues (back in my days, we had no Stack Overflow). But, my calendar was essentially two identical blocks for “Coding”, separated by a “Lunch break” slot. That’s it.
Then, with time, something changed. Actually, lots changed. And now I get the young and carefree individual contributors going “wow, I looked at your calendar! How do you do it?!”, while having two blocks and a lunch break themselves.
It’s the circle of life.
Here’s how I actually structure my week now. It’s not a “system” or a “protocol”. It’s more like a set of habits I’ve developed after years of getting it wrong.
If you’re transitioning from carefree young professional to “holy shit, my day’s a mess! How did that happen?”, this post is for you.
Start with what can’t move
Before anything else, you have hard constraints. Flights, talks or trainings I have to give, meetings I can’t skip and where rescheduling is hard or impossible. The rules here are like laws of physics: you can’t negotiate a new flight time or board meeting.
Everything else gets placed around these. If you try to schedule “deep work” or “thinking time” before locking in the immovable stuff, you’re just writing fiction.
Protect your brain modes
The immense Paul Graham wrote almost 20 years ago about maker’s schedule and manager’s schedule. The essential learning for our purposes is: your brain doesn’t context-switch for free.
However, my job is essentially now a daisy chain of meetings and emergencies, sprinkled with business trips where all planning goes out the window.
I love it, but it makes it really hard to find the time to actually do shit.
The way I mitigate this problem is, I block a daily 90 minutes “focus time” slot for deep work. That’s when I write documents, review documents, build solutions, write code, do email, and so on.
Ideally, that’s in the morning, just after standup. In practice it can move around and sometimes just disappear, but I try to keep it there as much as I can.
Leave shock absorbers
In the Theory of Constraints, there’s a rule: leaving some buffer, some unused capacity between stages, actually increases average productivity.
Having some empty slots in your calendar has the same effect.
I try to never schedule two high-stakes meetings back-to-back. If a complicated discussion runs late (spoilers: it will), I need somewhere for that time to bleed into without causing a chain reaction. So I sandwich a low-stakes internal sync between two critical meetings, or even better, I just leave some empty space. If the first meeting runs over, I eat into the internal block. The crisis is absorbed. Nobody notices.
Think of it like crumple zones in a car. You want certain parts to deform on impact so the important bits stay intact.
The colour thing
For years, I looked in awe at calendars that looked like a Mondrian. I never quite understood what all that was for, but they looked amazing.
Then I found out that most people colour-code by topic. Management is blue, a certain project is green, whatever.
I don’t understand why I should care: when a fire breaks out on Tuesday at 2 PM, I don’t care if a meeting is “Engineering” or “HR”. I care about one thing: can I move this without consequences?
So I started to colour-code roughly by friction: how painful would it be to reschedule, and why. Remembering that the human brain can work with only up to seven things (plus or minus two), I limit my colours to seven (plus two).
Here’s my code (sorted by how hard it is to move that slot if I need to)
- Black: Technical. These are unmovable things that make the structure of the day. Flights, commute time or transfer between offices, and so on. They just are.
- Red: Critical. Things I must attend. Either meetings that I really care about and that can’t be moved (say, a board meeting, or a critical customer call), or things that have a lot of people expecting me to show up (e.g. trainings I’m giving).
- Yellow: External. Things involving people from outside the company. Interviews are yellow, so are calls with, say, auditors, or consultants.
- Blue: One-on-one. Meetings with only one other person. Obviously, if I don’t show up or am late, that’s a problem: they can’t really start the meeting unless I’m there.
- Orange: General. Just any other meeting. If I’m meeting people and it’s not one of the other types, it gets orange.
- Green: Deep Work. This is the colour of my “Deep Work Focus Time” daily slots. But also, say I need to write performance reviews, or sit and work on a complicated document, and I block some time for it: that will get green.
- Purple: Passive. This is not quite a meeting: it’s an event where I can passively listen and not really contribute. Presentations, all-hands, team lunches, that kind of stuff.
There are two other colours I use, that I consider separate from the ones I use to stay organized: lilac is for personal stuff that is not work related, and the default light blue for “uncategorized”.
That’s it. Seven (plus two) colours. That tells me instantly how messy my day will be.
Two rituals that make it work
A system you don’t maintain is just decoration, so how do I do it?
Friday afternoon: the sweep. Ok, it’s actually between Friday afternoon and Monday lunch time, but you get the gist. I look at the week ahead. I check all the uncategorized meetings and events and I categorise them. I decline what I can, I move stuff around to avoid conflicts, and then try to re-fit in my focus time blocks.
Every morning: the 60-second triage. I do this while I wait for my son to brush his teeth and wear his shoes. I scan the day, get a reminder of what needs to happen and how compressed the day will be. That’s it.
The actual point
None of this is about being perfectly organised. My weeks still go sideways. Incidents still happen at bad times. Things still take longer than expected. I still get double-booked and need to make hard decisions about where I’m more useful.
But the difference is that a scheduling conflict used to feel like a personal failure, like I’d screwed up somehow. Now it’s just Tetris. I know what matters, I know what can move, and I know what I can quietly drop without too much hassle.
Your calendar isn’t a to-do list. It’s a constraint-management tool. Build it like one, and when the chaos hits (it always does), you’ll still be able to breathe.