Why a 2 pm Meeting Ruins Your Whole Day
Rian Doris: Calendar Threat to Flow
2 min read · 13.7.2025
“Why does even a single meeting on your calendar make it feel near impossible to do deeply focused work?
“You sit down to work—ready to go deep, finally make real progress—and then you glance at your calendar.
“There’s a call in seventy minutes.
“Suddenly, your brain pulls back. You feel it. That quiet hesitation. That subtle resistance. Like some part of you has already decided it’s not worth starting anything big.
“You’re not lazy. You’re not procrastinating. Your brain is doing a quiet calculation in the background.
It's not just you. This happens to almost everyone, and it's not simply about the time lost.
“I discovered this when I built my first real team.
“Instead of gaining time for focused work, I found myself constantly held hostage by what was coming next on my calendar. My brain was quietly calculating whether the effort to focus would be worth it, given the looming interruption.
“I wasn't procrastinating. I wasn't distracted. I was rationing effort before I even began.
“These scheduled events throughout your day can turn your calendar into Swiss cheese.
“They’re called calendar chokepoints.
“Calendar chokepoints are seemingly minor obligations—meetings or appointments—that fragment your day and leave you with insufficient time to get into flow.
“Here's what's really happening in your brain when you have a calendar chokepoint:
“Flow state happens when all of your attention is fully locked into the present. But a calendar chokepoint creates a neurological tug-of-war between now and next.
“Your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is responsible for prospective time monitoring—tracking future obligations. The moment a meeting appears on your calendar, your dlPFC locks onto it, keeping a mental timestamp that subtly anchors your attention to the upcoming event.
“This creates sustained activation in the dlPFC.
“And that's the problem.
“Because flow requires the opposite.
“Flow happens when the dlPFC downregulates—a state called transient hypofrontality. This is what allows deep immersion and effortless execution.
“Your dlPFC can't power down while it's counting down.
“Flow doesn't just need time—it needs trust that time won't run out.
“This is why even one short meeting—even just a 30-minute check-in—can derail your entire day. It keeps your brain from fully entering the struggle phase—the first and most effortful part of the Flow Cycle.
“That phase is uncomfortable. It burns energy. It takes real effort to push through.
“And if your brain doesn’t believe the effort will pay off—if it knows you'll be interrupted—it resists even starting.
“So you drift. You open Slack. You answer low-impact emails. You nibble around the edges of your real work. Because there’s no struggle payoff—there isn’t enough flow state on the other side of the struggle to make the effort worth it.” [...]
“When you eliminate calendar chokepoints, your days feel expansive.
“You stop tracking, planning, and anticipating interruptions. You lose self-consciousness about time.
“The real power comes with consecutive open days. One day gives you freedom. A streak of three, four, or five days unlocks profound immersion.
You can follow your focus wherever it leads.
“This uninterrupted state produces a distinct quality of insight and creativity. You access what Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, called "Mind at Large" – the source of ideas and inspiration.
“Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term "flow," wrote in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, ‘The best moments in our lives occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.’ “
Reference:
Rian Doris. Why a 2 pm Meeting Ruins Your Whole Day. Newsletter 8.6.2025.
