Rule 15 of 33 · Chapter III — Meetings We Actually Keep
Protect the maker's calendar
Why this rule exists
There are two kinds of schedules on this team: the manager's day, cut naturally into slots where a meeting costs one slot, and the maker's day, which needs half-day runways to build anything real and where a single meeting can flatten the whole stretch. We take this difference seriously because most of our value comes from making, and a calendar optimized for managers' convenience quietly destroys makers' productivity while looking perfectly reasonable on the surface. Fragmenting someone's day with well-meaning check-ins is one of the easiest ways to make a strong engineer ineffective without anyone noticing what went wrong. Guarding large contiguous blocks isn't laziness or antisocial behavior; it's the precondition for the deep work the business runs on. When we protect the maker's calendar, people can actually finish things, and finished things are what we're here for.
In practice
When scheduling with someone in a making role, reach for the edges of their day, or existing meeting clusters, rather than punching a hole in the middle of their morning. Batch your asks so you interrupt once, not five times. Respect blocked focus time on people's calendars as if it were an external meeting, because to them it is. If you're a maker, actually block your focus time and defend it, because an empty calendar reads as available. Prefer async for anything that doesn't truly need to be live, especially when it would cost someone their deep-work window. And notice when you're scheduling for your own convenience at the expense of someone else's ability to concentrate.
When it doesn't apply
Incidents and genuinely time-critical issues trump focus time, no question. And makers have a duty to be reachable and responsive at the seams of their focus blocks, because protecting deep work is not a license to go dark for two days.