In order for you to move on your goals, it’s imperative that you control your calendar. Otherwise you are in reactive mode, and your priorities are being managed by other people. Some suggestions:

Start with an audit.

Start by looking back at the last month. How does your time currently flow? How much time do you spend on the things that matter to you? There’s a good chance very little time is spent on your most important stuff. (For example, early stage founders often say recruiting is one of their top priorities. But when you look at their calendar they are rarely meeting with talent.)

Don’t just accept meetings.

When someone tries to schedule a meeting, ask yourself whether it can be accomplished in other ways:

• Does it really need my input specifically? If not, reply that the rest of the invitees should be able to handle it and you trust their judgment. (Obviously easier to do if you’re a manager).
• If it does need your input, ask if they can list out the questions in advance and you can try to answer them asynchronously over Slack, a Google doc, email, etc.
• If the meeting is truly necessary, make sure there’s clarity at the outset on what the decision is that needs to be made. Ask for the relevant pre-reading material so you can focus on the issue at hand and not spend the bulk of the time watching someone read off a slide deck.

Design your calendar around your goals

Many people find value in time blocking - looking at their weeks and making conscious decisions about what you’ll do when. If this serves you by all means do it.

A caveat though - if you slot everything into your calendar and don’t honor it, you begin to lose trust in your calendar. David Allen advocates reserving your calendar for the “hard landscape” of your life - only slotting in things you have to do that day.

I do a bit of a hybrid approach. In addition to appointments and time specific things I must do, I do add my morning and evening routines to my calendar. And I broadly break my day into two halves. My morning is for my MVT, when my energy and willpower are their highest. My afternoons I leave relatively open - allowing people to schedule meetings if necessary (leveraging the above filters as much as possible), and otherwise working through my next actions list.