I recently noticed how my calendar is very similar to a magnetic hard drive.
Back when magnetic hard drives were more commonplace, a drive head read sectors of a magnetic disc as it spun. Sequential reads were performant whereas non-sequential reads were very expensive because it would require the disk to spin around again before the head could to read that sector to retrieve the block. When a file was written to disk, the disk controller would try its best to find a continuous block where it could fit the entire file, if it couldn’t it would need to split the file into multiple sub-blocks, ideally, it would still be in sequence as the disc turns. This type of write strategy leads to file fragmentation over time if contiguous blocks can’t be found to write the files.
Calendars are somewhat like this, but has some characteristics of a ticker tape (things that happen in the past are less important that upcoming events or those in the immediate future).
In order to do effective work, people need contiguous blocks of time. Two hours is generally a lot of time to work on a task and get it to a state of some semblance of coherence that can be shared with others for feedback. If you break two-hours into eight 15-minute blocks chances are the output will be scattered, a lot less voluminous and of low quality.
Sometimes people like breaks in their calendar because they find back-to-back meetings for hours on end to be exhausting. So they leave holes in their calendars. I generally avoid this. I found that if I’m going to do 1:1s, I’d rather be in the 1:1 flow and just do a whole string of them back-to-back. Over the years, my stamina for paying attention has improved and I don’t find it exhausting at all.
To enable sequential reads, I often book off time for concentrated work. Thoughtful work takes focused-time, multi-tasking is an illusion, the cost of context switching is an expensive tax. With computers, we can compute the cost of their context switches, but humans poor machines at quantifying it.
One strategy I often employ at the beginning of the day is the calendar defrag. I look through my calendar, inevitably there’s some random 1:1s or meetings that are smack in the middle of an otherwise potential 2-hr block of free time, in those cases I’ll request to move the event and reserve the 2-hr block for focused work.
Give it a try, I’m sure you’ll find you’ll become less randomized, more focused and produce high-quality work.