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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time.

All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”.

We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.

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I do this, except without the foolery. I schedule recurring blocks on my calendar like "Focus time" and "Personal time" so people know that scheduling meetings with me during those blocks may not result in my attendance.

I tried generic ones but they were schedule over :(

YMMV whether this will fly in your company culture, but I titled mine "Focus time, please ask before scheduling".

And when people inevitably didn't ask, I'd just decline unless I especially wanted to attend. I find myself getting invited to meetings sometimes just because the organizer wants to be inclusive and make sure everyone is looped in who might want to be, and I figure that's what's going on if they added me without asking.

If it's really important for me to be there, they'll see my time block and ask me.

Google Cal will auto-decline meetings that occur during ‘out of office’ events.

I have several of these ‘out of office’ events recurring in my calendar that I use for concentrated work

To make them stick you have to decline meetings scheduled during that time

Fuck Off We're Working Working Group

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