Paul Graham, who co-founded the startup programme Y Combinator, wrote this in a 2009 essay about two ways of running a day. It reads like a grumble about meetings. It is arithmetic about pieces.

Graham split the working world in two. A manager's day is cut into hours, and one more meeting fills one more slot. A maker's day, the day of anyone who writes, codes or designs, runs in half-days, because hard work needs a long run-up before it moves.

The meeting itself is not the cost.

Put a 30-minute call at 3pm and the afternoon from 1pm to 6pm does not lose half an hour. It becomes two stubs: two hours before, where you watch the clock, and two hours after, where you reload everything the call knocked out of your head. Neither stub is long enough to start the thing that matters, so both go to email.

That is how a week with six meetings produces nothing. You look at the calendar and see white space. The white space is chopped into pieces too short to use.

The fix is fewer cuts, not fewer meetings.

Stack the calls back to back at one end of the day, and the other end stays whole. Same number of meetings, same people, one long stretch where the hard thing can finally start.

So today: open the calendar, find the one meeting sitting in the middle of an afternoon, and ask to move it to 9am or 5pm. One moved meeting buys back an afternoon.