Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

10. Bulldoze Your Calendar If you can’t block your calendar, there’s another way to clear time for your Highlight: Bulldoze it. Imagine a tiny bulldozer driving through your calendar, pushing events around. The bulldozer might compress one meeting by fifteen minutes and another by thirty. It might shove your one-on-one from the morning to the afternoon or push your lunch back by half an hour so you can get a full two hours of Highlight time. The bulldozer could even stack all your meetings on one or two days of the week, freeing up the other days for solo work. Bulldozing is admittedly easier if you’re the boss than it is if you’re the intern,5 but you might have more control over your calendar than you think. There’s no harm in telling people something important came up and asking if they can meet a little earlier or later or for a quick chat instead of for an hour. In fact, when meetings are shortened or disappear from the calendar, people are usually thrilled.