Check out this blog post by author Neal Stephenson on why he’s a bad email correspondent, by design. I feel similarly about meetings - they generally interrupt my flow and fragment my day. I already have attention issues, so avoiding all but the most important meetings enables me to stay focussed.

Stephenson’s philosophy resonates with me - it embodies the importance of saying No. You need to guard your productivity, even when (especially when) it conflicts with cultural expectations.


If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.