Calendar day consumed by preparing for, attending, and recovering from one meeting

That 11 a.m. stand-up is basically a stop-the-world GC - four hours to pause all threads, one hour to talk about pausing them, four hours to warm the caches back up

The real distributed systems challenge isn't achieving consensus across nodes - it's achieving consensus on whether this meeting could have been an async Slack thread while maintaining exactly-once delivery of actual decisions

This calendar perfectly captures the hidden O(n²) complexity of meetings: where n is the meeting duration, but the actual cost is n + 4n + 4n. Senior engineers know that 'just a quick sync' has the same computational overhead as a full context switch - you're not just losing the hour in the meeting, you're losing the entire mental stack trace you'd built up that morning, plus the time to rebuild it afterward. It's the engineering equivalent of a cache miss that triggers a full system reboot

That one-hour ‘quick sync’ triggers a four-hour warmup and a four-hour stop-the-world GC - textbook manager-schedule DoS on throughput

Meetings: O(n²) context preload where n=attendees, with recovery phase amortizing the action item bloat nobody commits to

Our calendar implements two‑phase commit: 4h of prepare(), 1h commit, and an afternoon of rollback/GC - strong consistency, near‑zero throughput