“Giraffe ears” mean hearing the need behind the words, instead of reacting to the complaint on the surface.
— Not the Epilogue, 32. Giraffe Ears
Someone tells you they’re drowning in meetings, and your first instinct is to fix the calendar. Fewer meetings, shorter meetings, no-meeting Wednesdays. But the calendar was never the actual problem. The complaint about meetings is almost always a complaint about something else — a gap between the work a person imagined doing and the work they’re actually doing, day after day. If you only treat the surface complaint, you’ll fix the schedule and lose the person anyway.
Translate the complaint before you solve it
Most complaints at this stage of a career or a life are coded. “No time” often means the reason this matters has gone missing. “Nobody listens anymore” often means not being sure what there would be to say if they did. “Too many meetings” is rarely about the meetings. It’s about the quiet math a person does at the end of a long day, adding up hours spent and coming up short on anything they’d call meaningful.
This matters because the fix for a scheduling problem is different from the fix for a meaning problem. You can block off Friday afternoons and still feel empty if nothing fills that space but errands and email. The complaint is data, but it’s data about an inner condition, not just an outer one.
Try this: the next time you hear yourself or someone else say “no time for the work that matters,” ask a follow-up question before offering a solution. What work? Matters to whom? When did you last spend an hour on it? The answers usually surface faster than expected, and they rarely have anything to do with the calendar.
Name the work before you defend the time
People protect what they can name. If someone asks “what matters to you right now” and the honest answer is vague — “making a difference,” “using the experience,” “not wasting this decade” — that vagueness is the real obstacle, not the meetings. Vague goals lose every scheduling fight, because nothing concrete is standing on the other side of the ledger. A meeting is specific. It has a time, a place, people expecting you. Vague ambition can’t compete with that on its own terms.
So the work is to make the meaningful thing as concrete as the meeting that’s crowding it out. Not “spend more time mentoring” but “have coffee with one younger colleague every other Thursday to talk through their next step.” Not “write more” but “spend ninety minutes on the manuscript before checking email.” Specificity is what lets a person defend their time, because now there’s something with a name and a shape to defend.
Try this: take whatever “work that matters” means to you right now and write it as a single sentence with a verb, a frequency, and a length of time. Not a mission statement — a placeholder you could put in a calendar. If you can’t do that yet, that’s useful information too. It tells you the work isn’t ready to compete for your hours because you haven’t decided what it actually is.
Ask what the meetings are protecting you from
Here’s the harder truth, and it’s worth sitting with. Sometimes the meetings aren’t really the enemy of the meaningful work — they’re a shelter from it. Meaningful work, especially the kind that shows up later in a career or a life, tends to be more exposed. It has your name on it in a way that attending someone else’s meeting does not. If the mentoring goes badly, that’s on you. If the book doesn’t sell, that’s on you. A full calendar can be a quiet, respectable way of postponing that exposure indefinitely, and it comes with the added comfort of looking busy while you do it.
This isn’t a criticism, just an observation worth being honest about. Before rearranging anyone’s schedule, it helps to ask, gently, what would happen if the time opened up. Would the meaningful work actually get done, or would something else rush in to fill the space instead? The answer tells you whether you’re dealing with a scheduling problem or an avoidance problem, and those two problems need very different conversations.
Listen closely to people describing their days, and the words almost never mean only what they say. A packed calendar is often a person’s way of describing a hunger they haven’t named yet. Learning to hear that hunger, in yourself or in someone you’re talking with, is a skill, and like most skills it gets easier with practice and a little structure. Not the Epilogue goes into this territory at more length — not as a fix, but as a way of listening more carefully to what you or someone else is actually asking for.
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