Stop Optimizing for Availability. Start Optimizing for Output.

I need your help thinking through something that's been bothering me.

We collectively built a work culture that's killing the creative work we all say we value. Meeting-heavy schedules. Calendar Tetris. Deep work squeezed into 30-minute gaps between status updates.

At Forge, we're not immune to this. We have meetings. Sometimes too many. But we've made some progress in protecting flow state work, even if it's not perfect.

We've started preserving full afternoons or complete days for deep work. We constantly question whether meetings are actually necessary before scheduling them. And we're restructuring how our teams operate so they don't have to funnel through a typical org chart. Multiple projects can enter at different points and run in parallel, which reduces the coordination overhead that kills flow.

It's obviously easier to control our own internal schedules. Working with different client schedules adds complexity. But even with those constraints, the work we produce when we have real making time is so much better than the work we squeeze out between meetings. The difference is obvious. The team feels it. I feel it. Our clients feel it.

So I'm writing this less as someone who's solved the problem and more as someone who's seeing progress and wants to figure out the rest. Because I think we all got to this place together, and we're going to have to collaborate our way out of it.

Why This Actually Matters

Before we dig into the problem, let's talk about why solving it matters beyond just productivity metrics.

Joy in the process makes good work excellent.

We are here to make things. To solve problems. To craft solutions that move people and change businesses. To experience that deep satisfaction that comes from spending uninterrupted hours shaping something from rough concept to refined execution.

When you protect the space for that kind of work, the quality goes up. But more importantly, the experience of making the work improves. And that fulfillment, that sense of doing the work you were meant to do, that shows up in everything you create.

What Flow Actually Requires

Flow state is what happens when you give your brain the space and time it needs to go deep on a problem.

Research shows it takes about 23 minutes to fully engage with complex creative work. Your brain needs time to load all the relevant context, push aside distractions, and get into the zone where real problem-solving happens.

But here's the trap most of us are in: we don't have 23 uninterrupted minutes in our entire day. We've got 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there, all sandwiched between meetings, check-ins, and "quick syncs."

You can't design a compelling brand identity in the 37 minutes between your standup and your client call. You can't write breakthrough strategy in the gaps between status updates. You can't solve complex creative problems when your brain never gets past the loading screen.

Flow requires depth. Depth requires time. Time requires saying no to some of the meeting culture we've all normalized.

The Cost Nobody Talks About

Every time you switch contexts, there's a cost. Not just the time spent in the meeting itself, but the ramp-up time to get back into what you were working on.

You're deep in designing a campaign. You get pulled into a 30-minute meeting. The meeting itself wasn't terrible. Actually needed to happen. But now you need 20 minutes to remember where you were, what you were solving for, and why you made the decisions you made before the interruption.

That's not a 30-minute meeting. That's a 50-minute interruption. Do that four times a day and you've lost more than three hours just to context switching. Not to actual work. Not to meetings. Just to the cognitive cost of jumping between different types of thinking.

And here's what I'm wrestling with: most of those meetings actually matter. Client check-ins. Creative reviews. Strategic alignment. They're not all waste. But the cumulative effect on deep work is killing us.

The Staccato Problem

Some days I look at our team's calendars and see what looks like protected focus time. But when you zoom in, it's staccato: 30 minutes of work, quick meeting, another 45 minutes of work, status update, 20 minutes before the next check-in.

But creative work isn't staccato. It's sustained. The best insights come in hour three of deep focus, not minute 15. The breakthrough happens when your brain has been circling a problem long enough to see it from angles you couldn't access in short bursts.

Think about any craft. You don't forge metal in quick bursts between other tasks. You heat it, work it, shape it, and stay with it until it's right. Interrupt the process and you have to start over. Let it cool and it becomes harder to shape.

Creative work is the same. Interrupt the flow and you're not just losing time. You're losing momentum, context, and the deep thinking that makes work go from good to excellent.

Meeting Fatigue Is Real

Here's what I see in our team and hear from creative leaders everywhere: most of us are exhausted. Not from the work itself, but from the performance of appearing productive.

Eight hours of video calls. Then guilt about not getting "real work" done. Then staying late to actually make things. Then feeling burned out because you're working more hours but producing less work you're proud of.

We normalized a meeting culture that treats everyone's calendar like public property. That assumes synchronous communication is always better than asynchronous. That values face time over actual output.

And honestly? I don't think any of us meant for it to get here. We're all just responding to the same pressures. Client expectations. Team coordination. The desire to be collaborative and transparent.

But the result is killing the work we all care about making.

What We're Trying

At Forge, we haven't cracked this. But here's what we're experimenting with:

Protecting making time, not just focus time: We're trying to block full mornings or afternoons for deep work, not just 30-minute gaps. Some weeks we nail it. Some weeks we don't.

Questioning meeting defaults: Before scheduling, we're asking if this actually needs to be synchronous or if it could be a doc, recorded video, or async conversation. We still default to meetings more than I'd like.

No meeting zones: We're testing no meetings before 10am or after 3pm when possible. It's hard. Client schedules don't always cooperate. But when we protect it, the output difference is obvious.

Defaulting to async: We're trying to build systems where people can respond between focus sessions instead of during them. This one's culture change, which means it's slow going.

Integration as meeting reduction: When strategy, creative, and production work together from the start with significant overlap, we need fewer handoff meetings. This actually works. Questions get answered in real-time without scheduling. But it requires keeping teams small and coordination tight.

Some of this is working. Some of it falls apart when we get busy. We're figuring it out as we go.

The Questions I'm Sitting With

Here's where I'd love your thinking:

How do you protect deep work time while still being responsive to clients who expect availability?

What meetings actually need to happen synchronously versus what we just assume needs a meeting?

How do you measure the cost of interruption when the impact shows up in work quality, not just time spent?

How do you build a culture that values output over activity when so much of business culture still equates meetings with importance?

What systems have worked for your team to reduce meeting fatigue while maintaining the collaboration that actually matters?

Building Toward Something Better

I don't have all the answers here. But I know this: the best work happens when creative teams have the time and space to do what they do best. Not in 30-minute bursts. Not between status updates. But in sustained, focused sessions where real problem-solving can happen.

You can't rush great creative work any more than you can rush forging metal. Both require heat, time, and sustained attention to get right.

Creative should solve, not just impress. But solving requires thinking. And thinking requires flow. And flow requires protecting our teams from the meeting culture we've all collectively built.

Results with heart, crafted in flow. That's what great creative work looks like.

We got to where we are now by collectively normalizing certain ways of working. I think we can collaboratively figure out how to get to where we actually want to be.

What's working for you? What are you trying? What's still broken?

Let's figure this out together.

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How does your team handle the tension between collaboration and flow? What experiments have you tried? What's worked and what hasn't? I'm genuinely curious about what other creative leaders are learning as they navigate this.