Journal · Second Curve · 2026-08-28
You don't have to be everywhere. Stepping back from a meeting can be the most focused thing you do all week.
You don’t have to be everywhere. Stepping back from a meeting can be the most focused thing you do all week.
Here is the tension nobody names out loud: stepping back looks like disappearing. In a culture that measures worth by responsiveness, absence reads as absence of ambition. You worry that if you’re not in the room, you’ll be forgotten, or worse, replaced by someone hungrier. So you show up to everything, half-present, and call it commitment. The real question isn’t whether you can attend the meeting. It’s whether attending is the most useful thing you could do with that hour of your life.
The Math of Attention Nobody Teaches You
Most of us were trained to think of our calendar as a container to fill, not a resource to allocate. Early in a career, this makes sense. You don’t yet know which meetings matter, so you go to all of them and learn by sitting through the boring ones. But by the second half of a working life, you’ve already learned. You know which conversations move things forward and which ones exist because canceling them feels ruder than wasting an hour.
The problem is that the habit of attending outlives its usefulness. You keep showing up out of loyalty to an old version of your job, or out of a quiet fear that your value is measured by your visibility. It rarely is. Your value, at this stage, is usually measured by the quality of the few things you actually finish.
Try this: for one week, before accepting any meeting, write down one sentence answering “what decision or output requires me specifically to be there?” If you can’t answer it, decline or send a written note instead. You’ll be surprised how often the honest answer is “none.”
Absence as a Signal, Not a Gap
There’s a fear that stepping back signals disengagement to the people around you. In practice, the opposite is often true. When you’re selective about your presence, the times you do show up carry more weight. People notice when someone who isn’t in every meeting chooses to be in this one. It tells them something matters enough to earn your attention, which is a scarcer resource than your calendar slot.
This isn’t about playing hard to get. It’s about being honest with yourself about where your judgment actually adds something, versus where you’re there out of habit or obligation. A second curve, the kind of stretch this stage of life invites, requires protected hours. Not leftover hours. Not the ones squeezed between calls. Protected ones, defended the way you’d defend a doctor’s appointment or a flight you can’t miss.
Try this: pick one recurring meeting you’ve attended out of habit for at least six months. Skip it once, on purpose, and ask a colleague to send you notes afterward. Notice what you actually missed. Often it’s less than your anxiety predicted.
What You’re Making Room For
Stepping back isn’t a virtue on its own. It matters because of what it makes possible. The freed hour has to go somewhere, or the whole exercise is just avoidance dressed up as wisdom. Maybe it goes toward the early, unglamorous stage of a new skill, the kind of work that looks like nothing is happening because nothing visible is happening yet. Maybe it goes toward a piece of writing, a conversation you’ve been putting off, or simply thinking without a screen in front of you, which is rarer than it should be.
The people who navigate this stage well tend to treat their attention like a limited fund they’re investing, not an infinite well they’re drawing from. They ask what compounds. A meeting rarely compounds. A well-used hour of deep, undistracted work on something that matters to your next chapter almost always does.
Try this: block the freed hour on your calendar under a specific name, not “focus time” but the actual project, so it’s harder to let it slide back into open space that gets colonized by the next request.
I’ve spent a fair amount of the book working through why this feels harder than it should, and what tends to get in the way once you actually try it. The short version is that stepping back is a skill, not a personality trait, and it gets easier with practice and a little structure. If any of this resonated, the fuller argument is there when you want it. For now, the smaller move is enough: pick one meeting this week, and don’t go.
Go deeper. The full method is in Craft Your Second Curve. New here? Start with the free companion pack, or explore the series.