Open your calendar for next week and look at what is actually in there. ⛩️
Now count how many of those things you put in yourself, for your own work, that nobody else was invited to.
For most women the answer is zero. Every block belongs to somebody who asked.
An empty calendar does not read as free. It reads as available, and available is a word other people get to define.
What a calendar is actually for 🗓️
It is not a record of what you have agreed to. It is a fence around what you are protecting.
Nobody treats it that way, because it was handed to us as a scheduling tool by workplaces that only cared about the shared parts. So the only things that go in are the things involving other people, and your own work becomes the stuff you do in the gaps between.
Which means your real work — the thing you are actually paid to be excellent at — is permanently the lowest-priority item on the page. It is the only thing with nobody defending it.
Why the gaps do not survive
Because an open slot is an invitation and everybody can see it. Somebody needs half an hour, they look, the space is white, and now it is theirs — and they were not being rude. You left the gate open and they walked through the gate.
Then Friday arrives and the thing you meant to do all week has not moved, and you decide the problem was your focus. It was not your focus. You were the only person at that company who did not have a meeting defending their work. 💅🏾
You were the only person there whose actual work had nobody defending it, and then you blamed your focus.
What it looks like when the fence is up
Deeply unglamorous, as usual. It looks like two blocks a week with a boring name — not deep work, not focus time, something specific like Thursday invoicing or Q3 draft. Specific survives. Vague gets moved.
It looks like those blocks being as hard to take as any other meeting, which mostly means you decline into them the same way you would decline out of a clash. You do not need to explain. Nobody explains a meeting.
And the softest part, honestly: it looks like Sunday evening not being an anxious inventory of everything the week ate.
The takeaway
Put one block in for next week. One. Name it after the actual task, not the state of mind.
Then the real test — when somebody asks for that exact slot, say I have got something then, how about Thursday. Not a lie. There is something there. You put it there. 🤍
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