Office Hours: Batching as a Defense

Y Combinator's solution is office hours: chunks of time, deliberately placed at the end of the day, when meetings are allowed to happen. Founders sign up, meetings cluster there, and the rest of the day stays whole.

This is the general trick: you can simulate the manager's schedule inside the maker's schedule by batching. All interruptions get herded into one pen instead of roaming free across your calendar.

The placement matters as much as the batching. Meetings at the edge of the day never split a work block in two. A meeting at 4pm costs you 4pm. A meeting at 1pm costs you the afternoon.