328 Make THIS Change To How You Manage Your Calendar

I, I know that I am prone to hyperbole. I am a content creator after all. But there is a change that I've made to how I managed my calendar in the last week and a half that has given me an unbelievable amount of time and space and attention to give to the stuff that I work on. It's like in some ways such a simple change, but I've tried so many different things that just didn't work for me, like calendar blocking, all these different things. But the last week I've like been on fire. And had I stumbled into this when I ran a firm, I think I would have completely changed all of our meeting policies in a way that would have super benefited our accountants. And so I want to share that with you today. If you do accounting work, if you do tax work, this is just a more effective way to manage your time. Come on in, let's talk about it. Calendar stuff. I'm Jason Daly. But thinking a lot about meetings lately actually how the, how meeting technology has evolved. We've been talking about that, some new cool stuff going on and like AI meeting transcripts and just generally making meetings more productive. But something completely different than I'm doing with my booking. My scheduling app now has well and truly changed my life. Made me so, so much more productive. Growing. I, I mean I could go down the list of like all the common wisdom here, things that I've tried from, you know, only letting my scheduling app book so many meetings per day and so much time per day and time blocking down to like every half hour, an hour, what I'm going to do for my whole day and putting that on the calendar and, and reserving time in my schedule so I can work on the things that, what that I want to work on. For whatever reason, that has just never worked for me. And I can never follow those rules because things don't happen in a planned amount of time. They happen in the amount of time that they're gonna happen in. And so that stuff is just fundamentally never worked for me. This is better and it's simple. And what got me here, what, what brought me into this realization? A 2009 blog post from Paul Graham, Maker Time vs Maker Schedule Manager Schedule. And if you've heard this before, you know what I'm talking about. I'm going to read you bits from this because it's like with such a aha moment that then made the solution so obvious, like, oh my gosh, why have I not always been doing this but then got me thinking about how it changes the rules for how people can have meetings within your firm. So maker schedule, manager schedule schedule. 15 year old blog post. Paul Graham's a software guy. He's talking about programmers here, which in this context is actually totally interchangeable with accountants. All right, so I'm gonna read you some bits from the blog post. Starts with the Charles Dickens quote. The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day. Ain't that the truth? I think part of my issue, and you may share some of this, I've got some social anxiety and so the notion of having to hop on a call with somebody like it can be pretty taxing unless it's a person that I already know and I enjoy hanging with. There's like a, a big energy commitment there. A lot of accountants I know are introverts, so you can probably relate to that. Okay, the blog post. One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. Again, if you hear programmers substitute accountants in this. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book. With each day cut into one hour intervals, you can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but. But by default you change what you're doing every hour. When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them and you're done. It's actually amazing how much scheduling has happened from the time that this was written. Now that's just a calendly setup, right? And that's how my calendar's been for years. You've got these one hour blocks people book back to the post. Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things like programmers and writers or accountants. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write a program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. When you're operating on the maker's schedule. Meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon by breaking it into two pieces, each too small to do anything hard in. I'm going to kind of like baby step weight into it because I know I won't be able to get into the headspace to totally get it done. And then I kind of just waste an hour. Like in a perfect world I would go and try to find some more bite sized things that I can knock out. But because I had that meeting, even though I still have another hour until that meeting, it stops me doing what I know I most need to do. Back to the post. That's no problem. For someone on a manager's schedule, there's always something coming on the next hour. The only question is what? But when someone's on the maker's schedule and they have a meeting, they have to think about it. For someone on the maker schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another, it changes the mode in which you work. I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day by breaking up a morning or an afternoon. But in addition, there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work with no appointments at all? Oh my gosh, doesn't that sound absolutely heavenly? A completely open calendar. What. What is your excitement level when you get to that day and you have a fully open calendar? It's incredible. Right back to the post. Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And and ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off. I'm going to put a link to this down in the show notes because by the time I got to this I was like rethinking everything and you may want to share it with your team. Back to the post. Each type of schedule works fine by itself, but problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, I think we could actually say clients are probably the managers here. They're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work. In jumping ahead when you're operating on the manager's schedule, you can do something you'd never want to do on the makers. You can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way. Business people in Silicon Valley and the whole world for that matter, have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free. And if you're on the manager's schedule, they're so common that there's distinctive, distinctive language for proposing them, saying that you want to grab coffee, for example. Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though, which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager schedule. So they introduce us to someone thinking that we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. And at this point we have two options, neither of which are good. We can meet with them and lose half a day's work, or we can try to avoid meeting them and possibly offend them. Till recently, we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option to write something explaining the two schedule types. Maybe eventually, in the conflicts between the manager's schedule and the maker schedule, when it becomes more widely understood, it'll be less of a problem. Those of us on the maker schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is, is that they understand the cost. Okay, where to begin? I, I want to, I want to talk through like the obvious benefits and how I think you, like, integrate this into your accounting firm. And along the way we're going to stack up the counter arguments. Cause there's for sure counter arguments. The ones that jump to mind primarily for me are, well, what if I just meet with a bunch of clients and the clients get to dictate, like when we meet, I can't get so restrictive or my clients are never going to be able to meet with me. And so let's, let's circle back to that. But implemented well in an accounting firm, what would it look like to enable a maker's schedule for your team? Because we all know the value of deep work and you've got all the statistics around. You know, you get pulled out of a thing and it's, I don't know, what do they say, like 25 minutes to get back into the thing or something like that. But with your staff, I mean, you can absolutely see this. If you look at a tax firm and how clients are always calling us and there's so many interruptions and how it feels like it's just nearly impossible to make any progress. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. I love software vendors when they love me and it's why when I go to accounting conferences, I look around and I say who's here and who's not here. You will consistently notice that the folks that turn up at accounting conferences, the brands are the most engaged, have the best understanding of accountants. There are enough tone deaf software companies out there that just do not get it and like are not solving meaningful problems for us or, or are developing in this direction that they think is interesting. And we're like no, no, no, no. Like this is the path that's actually interesting for my business. Live Flow, man, you see them out in the wild. I see those folks probably six to eight times a year, the founders at all sorts of different conferences. It is a great validation that they are actually building something of meaning for the way that we work Live Flow. Basically their business is they Sync data from QuickBooks or 0 to Excel or Google Sheets and there's a bunch of different ways you can use that, from reporting to extending information to like third party stakeholders who you don't want to have in the QuickBooks file to month end close management. A growing number of firms are actually managing the month end close from a single workbook by sinking a bunch of data out of the accounting file all at once. So you got a whole bunch of tabs in this big workbook. You're not like printing a bunch of reports from the ledger, right? Like that's what they're trying to get away from anyways. LifeFlow is a company that's been a leader in that from the beginning. They're not like a quick little plugin like cheap utility as much as they are. We're gonna help you do this with a whole bunch of your companies. We're gonna help you with consolidations. Like we are the kind of the full suite for doing this, like a platform for extending your spreadsheets rather than like a little utility to like sync some data back and forth. If you're at an accounting conference, take a look for LiveFlow. You may see them there and learn more about LiveFlow. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp. TeamUp helps you directly hire super talented accountants in the Philippines. Because you know what? Double entry accounting, you can do it anywhere. In fact, I'm looking at six talented people right here. Who are real real live humans. The team up have connected with accounting firms. Geralyn has got a BS in accounting went to work for a Canadian firm. They're paying her 900 bucks a month USD. She knows 0quickbooks bill.com she had one year of experience when they hired her. Sam he had to be asked in accounting as well. US accounting firm hired him paying him 14:30amonth had 5 years experience before beforehand with US companies experience with payroll was previously doing reviews on financial statements, sales tax charnin BS in accounting also a CPA QuickBooks Pro Advisor went to work for a US firm Spain or 1600 bucks a month had 3 years experience doing business returns, personal returns, even tax planning. So many people here where you're like if this was a I can tell you what most US firms would say. If this was a US resume you would be. You would be licking your chops. But here's the thing. If you're running a distributed team, really matter where they are. Now if you do tax in the U.S. are there disclosure requirements? Absolutely. But the 7216 rules are a reason to disclose, not a reason to not hire the best people to make your firm successful. That's it. If you're looking to find some folks who will work with your firm directly, Timo's got a bunch of recruiters on the ground in the Philippines that can find those people for you. I'll put a link to Team up down in the show notes your team that is moving towards being more client facing. I ran into this a lot. The more client facing responsibility they had, the harder they found it was to actually get work done like get the stuff that they wanted to do done. And this is because they needed to be operating on a maker's schedule that gave them big long blocks of time uninterrupted to be able to get that stuff done, to be focused. And the change that I have made that has completely changed things for me is booking my days from back to front. They start meetings start at 4:30 and then they get booked backwards from there. And there's a whole lot of like being selective about meetings and not taking dumb meetings and all of this. That definitely needs to be part of the equation. But for me, think of it this way, I may have two meetings in a day and before I did this I didn't take any meetings before 10am and I wasn't taking them later than 4pm and what that would look like then as a result was I would have somebody that would schedule something at 10 or 11. And something, somebody would schedule something at 2 or 3. And it was made worse by the fact that I would set up my scheduling app to have some buffer between meetings so that there wasn't a risk of one going long and running into the next. But then when I rock up to my calendar that day, I have a meeting at 10:30 and I have a meeting at 2:30 for somebody on a maker's schedule. That is the worst possible calendar. And I am on a maker's schedule. Like I make stuff, I shoot stuff, I write. I'm absolutely on a maker's schedule. Compare that, that is a calendar day with two meetings to this. He got a meeting at 4 and he got a meeting at 4:30. Buddy, you turn up to the desk 8 o' clock in the morning, you look at that calendar and you are clicking your little accountant heels. You're telling me I got nothing to do until 4pm that is just absolute ecstasy, right? And that is how the last two weeks have felt for me when I have stuck to this. I turn up to work every single day and it just feels like I got so much time, like I can sink into anything, any big project. And the more meetings I have, it compresses the day, but it doesn't break up the day. That's the big difference. That's what I've realized is I'm okay with the day being compressed and getting shorter, but it doesn't split the day. It's the splitting that is the pain. And then when you have, you have one meeting and it's like, oh, that's an annoying thing that I gotta remember. And I'm thinking about all day cause I actually have to remember to go to it. Then you have a second one and you're like, oh, that just kind of. He said in this blog post. It can seem overly sensitive, but you can look at a calendar with two meanings and be like, well, there's my day ruined. Which is ridiculous in so many ways, right? But that's the reality. If you are a maker, you look at that stuff and you're like, well dang, that just complicated all my planning of what I'm going to do today. As opposed to getting the same number of meanings in but just bookending them at the very end of the day. And so practically how I've done that, because I haven't found a scheduling app that will actually book back to front like this. Basically what I have is in calendly folks can book from 3 to 5. So worst case, maybe somebody books at 3 and then somebody books at, you know, 4 or 4:30, and I've got a little bit of a gap there. You could have an assistant like book this stuff for you and that would solve the problem and they could do them all back to back and that would be better. But this whole, this whole argument, you know, it boils down to this. You have a two meeting day. Would you rather those meetings be at 10 and 2 or at 4 and 4:30? If you are a maker, it is a night and day difference. So you get that right. And we're going to circle back to the counter arguments. But how do I enable this for my team? Because if I run an accounting firm, I have a firm full of makers. How do we be more protective of their time? Well, it starts with a conversation. In fact, if you want to make a push into this, just share this blog post with everybody and then get folks's reaction. You will be able to tell from the reaction who the makers are and who the managers are. Because we can also have people inside of our firms that operate on a manager schedule, say hr. Like there's a bunch of different types of folks, client relationship managers. You're gonna have different types of folks that are not on maker schedules that if they're not careful, will blow up everybody else's day. But start by like creating the conversation in your firm just to build an awareness of this. But you can honestly go as far as at the very least saying internal meetings. They can happen from say three to five and that's it. We don't want to ruin anybody's day, at least the producers. We don't want to ruin any of these people's day splitting it up with these meetings. Because they're not just meetings. They change what you do leading up to the meeting. They change what happens after the meeting, the frame of mind that you're in. You can make a rule as simple as that and it's going to get people time back. But let's just dive like headlong into what the biggest counter argument is. Client facing stuff. And if there's someone here that is the oppressor of the manager's schedule on us, it's probably clients. It's potentially people inside of our firm, depending on how big your firm is. But the biggest offender is probably going to be clients. So counter arguments number one, well, I gotta take client calls whenever they want. This is, I mean, there's a great argument for only taking booked calls that are booked according to the restrictions you put on booking, I think. I mean, and Virtually no firm. I think the big boss should be allowed to take ad hoc calls from clients. As we've talked about in the past, you got to think of clients like mice in a maze. They want to get to your cheese, not your cheese necessarily. They want the cheese, which is a solution to something. And if they can always go straight to you, there's no incentive for them to ever use your team. Right. As opposed to a response time approach where the people you want clients talking to are most available and the clients you least and the team members you least want clients talking to are the least available. And that ought to be you. If you're at the top of the hierarchy, you ought to be hardest to reach. But clients, they'll send you a text. If you're the only one that will text them back. They'll. They'll send you a text to jump the line. They will call you to jump the line. And if you will answer that phone whenever they call, there's never a reason for them to email you again because why would they volunteer to get in that line if they could just call you? And that is where you end up trapped, like just always fielding that stuff. Right? So they are. There are mice in a maze. You gotta design a maze that like drives the client behavior. You actually want to see if they're going straight to you. If they're not going to, who you want them to go to is because you've designed a system that does not reward them going to the right person. So if they can only book calls according to this like sort of approach, then I think another counter argument here is like, I don't feel like I have this level of authority to like put this restriction on my clients to say that they can only talk to me from 3 to 5 and those meetings are going to fill up and they may not be able to book with me for another few days out. And that's going to frustrate people. You could for sure make this bigger. Like I would, I would argue if you have to take a lot of meetings, meetings from 1 to 5 is still way better than from 8 to 5 at just being sprinkled with meetings all day long. Like that day, you're going to get nothing done if it's sprinkled throughout the entire day. So having no meetings from 8 in the morning to 1pm that can still be a pretty productive chunk of the day. So you can take more meetings and it compress your day more. But that's still a huge improvement to things sprinkled throughout the entire day. Oftentimes we will have situations. I'll give you an example. My past partner, we did a lot of work with dentists and he would say, and it was really hard getting him, getting him off his cell phone and kind of establishing boundaries there. He would say, well, I work with docs, I work with Dennis. This is what I do. And docs are chairside all day, as they should be. And what makes me a great fit for them is they can call me at night when they are not chairside. And that's why we are a great firm for them. And there were some docs where this was the case, but for the vast majority of docs it absolutely wasn't the case. They had gaps in their day. They had like scheduled admin times during their day. There were a couple that probably said this where they're like, I'm chairside all day long. I can't talk on the phone during the day. When the reality is these docs aren't working five day weeks. Like, there was time. But oftentimes a couple clients will say this and we'll make a rule based on those couple of clients. And we assume that this, like, that rule applies to all clients. And it is a massive disservice to us. Just like any system that we build, there will be exceptions. We have to make rules for the exceptions, not build the entire system around the exception. Right. So if you have a preferred time of meeting with people, put that out there. It doesn't mean that you'll never break that rule. And it's up to you ultimately to like, define what are the scenarios where I will break that rule and I won't. But you are 1000% within your rights to, like, set up the initial availability however you want to do it. Like, you should feel entitled to do so because you need to be protective of your time. This episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily. Pop quiz time. Did you know that I once developed a SaaS app for accountants that fully automated the cash reporting that we did for our clients trust? True story. I built that like three years ago and then I sold it to a guy, Luke Templin. And Finn Daily is still running strong. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes findaily IO I frankly love it. Maybe I'm slightly biased, but basically how it works is it's like it's an email builder, kind of like an email marketing tool. But you plug variables into those emails and those variables can be values that are pulled from QuickBooks from Xero, from Plat, like banking fix figures even from like Zapier. If you want to pipe in your own information, you build these email templates and you plug variables in. It can do stuff like, like math, like adding up a number of outstanding bills, that sort of thing. Tables of like outstanding invoices. Build all this stuff into emails and then you set the schedule that email will send on and at the time that it sends, it goes out, makes the API call to all those services, pulls in current data and then sends that email. And this was the cash reporting that we were doing for our clients to be like, hey, here's the bills we got coming up, here's how much money's in the bank. Here are all these different factors all in an automated email. And folks were paying me a bunch of money for this service. Now since I got out of fin daily, done a bunch more stuff like being able to connect to a bunch of different QuickBooks files and like pull that stuff into a single email for like multi company sort of things. Banana, bunch of cool things. Super useful tool. Like it's one of those things where if you have the use case for it, you're like, oh my gosh, where has this been all of my life? And if you don't, you're like, why would. I don't understand this. Why is this even. Why does this exist? I don't. Why would I want this? I find the people are in like one of those two end of the camps. I still love it. Still around a fun bit of Jason Dailey lore Finn Daily is. Check out the link down in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Core V. True Story. I don't think I fully got my head around tax advisory work until maybe seven or eight years ago when I saw my first demo of corvi. What Corvi does really, really well is it visualizes the savings you provide by delivering tax advisory work. And this is something that our tax software is just horrendous at. It doesn't do it at all. All it really does is report back on like outcomes. And you could use maybe say BNA and have like kind of compare some columns of before and after. But what CORVI does is they have over 1200 like quote unquote tax strategies, which are many things that we know and we take for granted, but we don't always present to our clients to be like, hey, look at this smart thing that I did for you. And it explicitly outlines the various strategies you're employing. For the client in terms of like real dollar savings, dollar savings over time, year over year. Like, you know that selection I had you do two years ago, like, here's the rolling savings that we're getting you. And this is why some firms are able to charge like north of 10k for tax planning work, even very small, like 3 person firms, while other firms are doing quote unquote tax planning at the end of the year. And like charging 300 bucks. It is all about the framing of the value to the client. There is kind of a small category of tools growing around just tax advisory. Corvi is one of them. Admittedly they're not cheap tools, but the reason they exist and the reason they're finding success, success is because the firms that are using them are charging top, like top, top dollar for tax advisory work. If you tune into this pod, you know that my belief is if you run a tax firm, tax advisory work, getting people up that value ladder is arguably the best thing that you can do for the profitability of your firm. Now tech can be a massive help here. I honestly don't know how I would do that work without Corby or something very similar to it. Learn more about Corby. Check out the link down in the show notes. Third, third counter argument that I wrote down. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be that lady. I don't seem snooty, like selective, Like I've never been this way in the past. I think there's like a, there's a lot of different flavors of this. Another one is I would, I would never be the type of person that would have an assistant. Right? Like there are these. It's a form of virtue signaling where we're like, well, that's just not how we are. And I wouldn't, I'm not that type of person. And not being that type of person is keeping you from being a person that you actually want to be. Because oftentimes not being that type of person, the people that ultimately pay the price for you not being that type of person are all the people that you want to help. It's the clients that you can't be responsive enough to. It's your team that you can't follow through with because you're doing admin stuff that should have been delegated. I have found that every time I bump up against, I'm not that kind of person. It's usually blocking me from doing something bad. And are there trade offs to doing that other thing instead of the thing I used to do, like, absolutely. But that's usually a trade off worth making. Now, one other interesting sort of variable here as I have gotten to this, obviously this point where I'm super into how this can help us protect our time as makers. Another interesting variable here is it is a very, very good argument for client relationship managers because I designed my firm hierarchy to have a level of staff that was available to pick up the phone anytime a client wanted to talk. It's not to say every firm ought to design their support system this way, but we basically had three levels. We had staff level people, we had managers, and then we had me and my partner. I was never available at the drop of the hat to my clients. The staff level of people they could call anytime and the manager level of people they could book a call with. But they would get through to them still much quicker than they would get through to me. With me, it was like a minimum of like 72 hours out. And just having that rule forced them, not forced them, but was enough incentive for them to go through the other folks and before long they would build a relationship with those other folks and it was totally fine. But when all they had was a relationship with me in the beginning, they never would have had a reason to go to somebody else until we put up a system that incentivize them to go to someone else for instant answers. So our firm, our clients were so used to being able to pick up the phone and talk to somebody anytime, that felt like a really hard thing to pull the plug on. So we had a level of our staff where they could still pick up the phone and talk to those people anytime. But the argument for the client relationship manager here is that staff level person, they still had responsibilities and stuff to get done and they would get endlessly interrupted by clients calling and having to respond to emails and all that stuff. Whereas if you pulled all of those interactions to a client relationship manager, boy, what does that make or schedule look like for the rest of your team? That's looking pretty nice, isn't it? You're protecting their time to be super focused on production and getting that stuff out the door. And I would argue that there's, for all the reasons we've talked about, like a nonlinear relationship here where if a maker has an eight hour day and there's two hours of meetings, their output isn't 75% of what it otherwise would have been. I would argue it's probably 50% of what it otherwise would have been. Even though only a quarter of their time that day was taken up by meetings. And so if we can free up our makers to have these uninterrupted blocks of time to be productive, I think that actually has a really big impact across the entire firm on the volume of stuff that you can get out the door. And so how does it change? And so how does this change how you approach say, tax season? Like I really push firms, you know, use admins, use software to do intake of information. If your tax professionals are having to follow up with clients for information that they need and the status updates on projects and all that, it's a huge volume of stop starting that's keeping them from doing deep work and getting stuff out the door. Maybe there's an argument for carving out one of your team members and they're going to be the client facing like liaison, maybe it's a senior, maybe it's an admin. They're going to be that relationship manager and get some more freedom for your makers to protect that schedule for your accounting firms. The crunch, the bottleneck, it is the month end close, it's the 1st through the 15th. Maybe you get really restrictive about the type of meetings that can happen from the 1st to the 15th. Maybe that is where meetings can only happen in the last two hours of the day, but then after the 15th, that relaxes. It's probably also an argument for software for admins, for maybe a client relationship manager to take the lead on intake because that's more of a stop start thing where you're poking clients and getting on calls and stuff like that. I talked about this a bit in the podcast where I drafted my first 20 team members. The notion that we move from small pods to production teams. We started out when we were small with just like pods of three or four people. But then eventually as the number of pods we had grew, we spun out bookkeeping and bill pay into functional teams where there are like teams of people, big teams where all they did was bookkeeping, all they did was crank on bill pay. And then the pods became more of the relationship management, the client facing side. And one of the benefits there, and we kind of knew this at the time, was because those functional teams weren't client facing. They could be 100% focused on just production like output. And they were super, super high output as a result. But if every single person in our team is having to navigate client meetings, interrupting things, these meetings on the calendar throughout the day, unclear expectations about like, do I prioritize making the client happy right now or do I prioritize actually getting the work out the door, which will make this other client happy. Like that trade off that we're all having to make, that's really tricky. And the way that we carve up responsibilities in our team can kind of fall along that like maker and manager schedule. Right? Super, super interesting stuff. There's going to be a bunch of links in the show notes for this one. I'd encourage you to give it a try. I know if you're a tax person, you're kind of in the heat of things right now. So the notion of protecting the calendar is simultaneously unimperative, but like also feels impossible. Maybe if that's too hard to swing right now, it's something you try plugging into after the deadline. But man, I can't tell you how much of a difference it's made. For me, I don't think my total volume of meetings has changed, but everything is now bookended at the end of the day. And I came into it with the same concerns of like, am I going to seem like a snob to be the guy that stands up that scheduling link? And there's just like only these tiny little times available and people are going to push back and be like, I can't meet at that time, dude. And then at that point I got to decide, well, is it worth it for me to break that rule or not? I've been doing it two weeks, probably 20 meetings, more than that, 30 meetings. Not a single person has griped yet. Not a single person has said, like, I can't meet that time of the day. Somebody will at some point. But had I looked at that and said, well, people are going to complain. So I can't make it that restrictive, then the last 20, last 30 meetings I would have taken would have been helter skelter all over the place as a result. So I need to make a rule for the exception, not assume that everyone is an exception. Because I heard from someone who was. That's probably the biggest trap we're going to have when we're thinking about whether clients can actually like, deal with that restriction. Right. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Any other calendar hacks you have found that work for you? Super encourage you give it a try. Because sitting down, looking at an open calendar where there's either nothing on it or nothing until the end of the day, if you are a maker, you know there is absolutely nothing better than that. That's it for today. Thanks for coming. Hanging.