WORK • Meetings
We had a 9a video call with a potential vendor yesterday morning to kick off the week at FOUND. I selected the time after the Calendly link the vendor sent on Friday showed no availability for weeks, and he offered to make time outside his standard 10a-5p booking schedule.
It was a good meeting. But the scheduling was a funny dance for a minute — sort of like a day-of 7p reservation magically opening up at a hot restaurant — and reminded me of days in more meeting-heavy corporate cultures when we could never “Find a time” in Google Calendar for that 10-person check-in. There was so much politics and preening, manufactured busyness, and big-timing built into the process.
The changing nature of work schedules and remote work seems to be doing away with some of that. With more employees working asynchronously, firms have had to get creative about how they interact, trading check-ins for shared workspaces and new forms of documentation.
One upshot of meeting-lite work culture is that it’s harder to show off how absolutely packed your calendar is. For those purposes, however, there’s still the pre-dawn email, reportedly making a comeback.
It’s unlikely yesterday’s scheduling dance was about calendar gamesmanship, but if it was? Well played. We just might get a Calendly ourselves and block it through July. –Josh Albertson