by Serguey Shinder
There was a recurring meeting on my calendar that I dreaded every week. It had been created for a good reason once, months earlier, to coordinate something that genuinely needed coordinating. But that something had long since resolved, and the meeting had outlived its purpose and simply kept happening, half of us not sure why we were there and none of us willing to be the one to say so.
I kept it, week after week, for a reason I am not proud of. Cancelling it felt like a statement, and I was afraid of the statement. Afraid that ending it would look like I did not value the people in it, or that I would miss the one week it turned out to matter, or that removing something I had created would be an admission it should not have existed as long as it had. So the cowardice compounded, thirty minutes at a time, across everyone’s week.
What finally moved me was doing the arithmetic. Six people, half an hour, every week, for the better part of a year. I added it up once and the number was genuinely startling, a small mountain of collective attention spent maintaining something nobody wanted, purely because ending it required a moment of social courage none of us could summon. The meeting was cheap each week and ruinous in aggregate.
So I cancelled it, with a short and slightly nervous message, and braced for the disappointment I had imagined. What came back instead was relief. Several people admitted they had been wanting the same thing for months and had assumed everyone else found it valuable. We had all been sitting in a room we each privately wished we could leave, each held there by the belief that the others wanted to stay.
That taught me something about focus that no productivity method ever had. The things that erode my attention are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the quiet standing commitments that made sense once and now persist through sheer inertia and the small social cost of ending them. Nobody defends them. Nobody wants them. They simply continue because stopping requires someone to act, and acting feels like a bigger deal than enduring.
Now I audit my recurring commitments the way I would audit spending, on the assumption that anything not actively earning its place is quietly costing me. The default is not to continue. The default is to justify continuing, and the burden of proof sits with the thing on the calendar, not with the courage it takes to remove it.
The most protective thing I have done for my own focus was not adding a system. It was becoming willing to end things, out loud, before they were dramatically bad. Most attention is not stolen. It is surrendered, half an hour at a time, to things we are simply too polite to cancel.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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