Journal · Second Curve · 2026-07-23
Hear the need behind the words. "Too many meetings" often means "I can't find time to do work that matters."
Hear the need behind the words. “Too many meetings” often means “I can’t find time to do work that matters.”
The complaint arrives dressed as a scheduling problem. Someone tells you there are too many meetings, and if you take that literally, you’ll respond with literal fixes: shorter agendas, fewer invitees, a stricter cadence. Sometimes that helps. More often it doesn’t, because the actual problem was never on the calendar. It was underneath it, in the gap between the work someone believed they were hired to do and the work they’ve been doing instead.
I’ve sat across from enough people in transition to know that this gap widens quietly. You don’t wake up one day and decide to abandon meaningful work for administrative noise. It happens meeting by meeting, each one reasonable on its own, until the sum of them has quietly replaced the thing you actually came here to build.
Translate the complaint before you try to solve it
When someone says “too many meetings,” they are handing you a symptom and hoping you’ll diagnose the disease. The words are a proxy. Underneath them is usually something closer to: I had a plan for what mattered this year, and I can’t find the hours to touch it. That’s a different problem entirely, and it needs a different response than trimming an hour off Tuesday’s calendar.
The habit worth building is pausing before you fix. When you hear a complaint about time, ask what the person imagines they’d be doing with it instead. Not hypothetically — specifically. “If this afternoon opened up, what would you actually work on?” The answer tells you whether you’re dealing with a logistics problem or a meaning problem. Most of the time, in my experience, it’s the latter wearing the former’s clothes.
Try this: The next time you or a colleague voices a familiar complaint about busyness, write down the literal words, then write a second line underneath: “What this might actually mean is…” Don’t overthink it. Let yourself guess. You’ll often surprise yourself with how quickly the real issue surfaces once you stop treating the words as the whole message.
Protect the work, not just the hours
Once you’ve found the real need, the fix usually isn’t “clear more time.” It’s “make it structurally harder to lose the time you already have.” These are different projects. Anyone can find an open hour. Keeping that hour from being colonized by the next urgent, reasonable request is the actual discipline.
This is where a second curve — a stretch of life or career where you’re deliberately building something new — either survives or doesn’t. The old rhythms of busyness don’t disappear just because you’ve decided this next chapter matters more. They compete for the same hours, and they compete well, because they come with immediate deadlines and social pressure, while the work that matters to you long-term usually just sits there, patient and quiet, easy to postpone.
Try this: Pick one block of time this week — ninety minutes is enough — and name it before anyone else can. Not “focus time” in the vague sense, but the actual task: “draft the outline,” “make the call I’ve been avoiding,” “read the material I need before I can move forward.” Put it on the calendar with that specific name. A block called “focus time” gets negotiated away. A block called “finish chapter two” is harder to argue with, even by yourself.
Ask what the complaint is protecting you from
Sometimes the deeper truth is less comfortable. Occasionally “too many meetings” isn’t blocking the important work — it’s providing cover from it. Meaningful work carries risk. It can fail publicly. It asks something of you that a status update never will. A full calendar, paradoxically, can be a form of shelter, a way to stay visibly busy while avoiding the more exposed, more uncertain work that actually matters to you.
I don’t say this to make anyone feel caught. I say it because naming this possibility, gently and without judgment, is often the difference between someone rearranging their schedule for the third time and someone finally admitting what they’ve been circling.
Try this: Ask yourself honestly — if every meeting vanished tomorrow, would you actually start the important thing, or would you find a different way to stay busy? Sit with the answer before you defend it.
I’ve spent a good part of this book working through what it takes to hear these translations clearly, in yourself and in the people you work alongside, and to build the kind of structures that hold up once the initial resolve fades. This short piece can only point in that direction. The fuller version walks through it with more patience than a page like this allows.
Go deeper. The full method is in Craft Your Second Curve. New here? Start with the free companion pack, or explore the series.