I Stopped Taking Meetings on Mondays

Six months ago I blocked every Monday on my calendar. No calls, no investor meetings, no catch-ups. Just me, my laptop, and whatever problem I'd been avoiding.

It felt indulgent at first. Running Paking Duck means there's always someone who needs something — a client with an urgent packaging order, a portfolio company founder asking for intros, my team with questions. Mondays used to be the day I tried to "catch up" on everything from the weekend, which meant I spent the entire day reactive.

Now Mondays are the only day I do real thinking. Not responding-to-Slack thinking. Not reading-a-report thinking. Actual deep work on the hard questions. Where should Paking Duck be in two years? Which market segment are we under-serving? What would I build if I started over today?

Most of the good strategic decisions I've made this year came from Monday mornings. The realization that we needed to invest more in our design services offering. The decision to restructure how we handle custom orders under 1,000 units. A new packaging format I'd been ignoring because I was too busy with day-to-day ops to research it properly.

I think founders — especially founder-operators who are still in the weeds on execution — underestimate how much their company suffers when they never have time to think. You end up making all your strategic decisions in the cracks between tactical work, which means you're always choosing the obvious path instead of the right one.

The pushback I get: "I can't afford to lose a day." My answer: you can't afford to spend five days a week on autopilot. The company you're building in two years depends on the thinking you're doing today, not the emails you're answering.

If you're a founder and you feel like you're always running but never getting anywhere strategically, try blocking one day. You don't need to make it Monday. Just pick a day and protect it like your company depends on it. Because it does.