My calendar was killing my focus, so I started treating it like a system to be debugged.

Hey there,

I been a dev for over a decade and realized the biggest bottleneck to my output wasn't my coding ability; it was my damn Google Calendar. It was completely fragmented. A 45-minute meeting here, a 30-minute block for a ticket there. My entire day was one long series of context switches.

I realized I was trying to do high-demand cognitive work on a completely broken OS. You wouldn't run a database on a fragmented disk, so why was I running my brain on a fragmented schedule?

So I built a little script for myself to fix it.

It's pretty simple logic. First, it identifies the immovable blocks the team standups, the 1-on-1s you can't move. Then it takes all my flexible tasks and deep work blocks (sand and gravel) and rearranges them based on a few rules I set.

Rule 1: My mornings from 9 to 12 are sacred. All deep work blocks get consolidated there. Period.
Rule 2: No back-to-back meetings. The script automatically injects a 15-minute "buffer" event after any meeting longer than an hour.
Rule 3: De-prioritize focus work late in the day. It shoves all my lighter stuff like PR reviews or admin tasks into the late afternoon.

The result is a defragmented calendar. I now have these huge, 2-3 hour protected blocks of pure coding time. The difference in my ability to actually solve hard problems has been night and day. It’s not about working more; it’s about creating the right conditions for the work to happen.

Curious if any other senior folks have gone down this path of aggressively defending your focus time at the calendar level. Seems like the only sane way to survive the constant meeting creep.

Love to hear more. Thank you :)