How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? The way I do it is to block out 4 hours in the afternoon in

How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? The way I do it is to block out 4 hours in the afternoon in my calendar as "Focus Time" that people aren't allowed to touch, and let people schedule me into meetings any time other than that. If all the devs on a team do it then the meetings they're required in just naturally gravitate to being shorter ones in the morning with fewer gaps. I'm quite fortunate in the sense that the company I work in operates as a 'sociocracy' (https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/) so teams do actually get to define that this sort of thing is acceptable. In other companies it might be a harder sell, but most managers I've worked with do understand that there's other work to do besides meetings so they're usually open to talking about how to do better as a team. Especially if their bonus is related to performance. Even if they're not open to talking about it, you can always raise it in every single retro for months until someone starts getting annoyed enough to fix it.