How my 'creator' schedule helps me say NO to meetings that don't align with my goals

and avoid anxiety with constantly missing out on possible opportunities

As a creator, I want to do many things: build communities, make money, create products.

But most of all I want to have enough quiet time during the day to create my content instead of jumping on calls, answering emails and checking messengers.

That’s why I’ve adopted a “creator” schedule, which means that:

• I have 2-3 major tasks per day (for example, these could consist of a video, a Substack email, a class for my course)

• I prefer using half-day units instead of hours: first part of the day is for day-to day tasks: emails, texts, planning content; second part of the day is for filming, podcasts

• I try to only have calls two days a week. It is crazy how one day you wake up full of energy to create, and then a couple of calls just take your inspiration away from you. A single call breaks up the afternoon into two pieces that are too small to actually have time to focus on creating content.

The best thing about being on a ‘creator’ schedule is that it doesn’t prompt you to have speculative meetings. Paul Graham explains this in his post about maker’s vs manager’s schedule.

“When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. … They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.”

“Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. … . At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.”

Limiting days when I can have ‘speculative’ meetings to two per week made me a lot more picky about who I am meeting, so partially solves the problem.