I started my day with a small work thing. It’s Monday.
And on Mondays, I open my calendar.
What meetings do I have this week? What meetings do I have today? How much time do I actually have to design, to code, to think? How much time in between?
My calendar probably looks like most — a scatterplot of meetings and commitments sprinkled across the week. But there’s one small difference in mine: none of my meetings are accepted... yet.
That’s by design.
It’s not a productivity hack. It’s a check-in with reality. Because too often, our calendars become artifacts of old decisions — a museum of “yeses” we forgot to reconsider.
And suddenly, the week is driving us.
Design
By not automatically RSVPing “yes” to everything, I force myself — every Monday — to look, to think, and most importantly, to choose.
To understand what each meeting is. To decide if it deserves my time.
I’ve learned the hard way that it’s too easy to stumble into a meeting you forgot existed — camera on, context off — and realize you don’t even know why you’re there. It’s not that I can’t handle surprises. It’s that I’d rather to be at least somewhat prepared. Because when I understand what a meeting’s for, I can show up sharper. I can give it the attention it claims to deserve. And I can give time back when the meeting has quietly outlived its meaning.
It’s not that I don’t know how to auto-RSVP in Google Calendar. I do. It’s that I choose not to.
In fact, it takes more work to do it my way. I have to manually change my status to “Maybe” for every recurring event. I have to sit down each Monday morning and deliberately decide: where will my time go this week?
All of this is work. And all of it is worth it.
Decide
This small ritual forces me to articulate — to myself — what’s actually important.
It gives me a moment to zoom out, to look at my overworld, and plan how to move through the week ahead.
It’s a reminder that I get to choose.
Automation is amazing. It removes friction, amplifies output, multiplies what’s possible. But there’s a shadow side too: if you automate everything, you also automate awareness. You lose the part where you notice, reflect, and decide.
Autonomy, quietly surrendered to autopilot.
Every time you touch a process manually, you feel its rough edges. You notice the awkward parts that automation hides. That’s how good systems evolve: through the human impulse to reach in, feel what’s wrong, and refine it.
In this process, lives a paradox: The more manual a process, the more it teaches you about automation. Because only by doing the work do you learn what’s actually worth automating.
Drive
And that’s why I take notes the way I do. That’s why my calendar works the way it does.
That beat before you drag an email to a folder instead of letting a Gmail filter do it. That moment when you type something by hand instead of letting autocomplete guess for you.
Every one of those pauses is a checkpoint for consciousness.
It’s you saying, “I’m still here.”
The tiny rituals. The manualness of everyday things. The slowdowns, the crossroads — the friction that reminds you you’re still part of it all.
Because the week isn’t just happening to me. It’s happening with me. And my hands are still on the wheel.
Happy Monday, everyone.