It arrives in your inbox at 8:47 am, attached to a calendar invite for a meeting that begins at 9. This indicates a poor meeting agenda.

Nobody writes think pieces about operators. There are no TED Talks titled "How I Quietly Fixed Every Process In The Company While The Founder Was On A Podcast." There are no bestselling books dedicated to the person who shows up at 7 am, maps the workflow that had been silently breaking for six months, fixes it before lunch, and then attends three meetings where other people take credit for the improved metrics. Operators are the most underrated professionals in business, an

Your brain is not a machine. It does not run at a constant speed from 9 am to 5 pm; in infact, till 9 pm for founders and operators. It does not maintain the same quality of thought across an eight-hour workday. It does not have an off switch that you flip when a meeting invite arrives.

Your calendar has no say about what happens inside a meeting. It does not know if a decision meeting produced a decision or a follow-up meeting. It does not know if the eight people who attended were the right people, or just people who accepted an invite because declining felt rude. It does not know whether the discussion required everyone in the room or just three people, with the rest present out of courtesy. All the calendar knows is that a slot existed and someone filled

The calendar does not ask whether a meeting should exist. It only asks when, and because nobody built a system to answer the first question, the second question gets answered 12 times a day, 5 days a week, until everyone is booked, busy, and still somehow behind the production schedule.