Agents Run on Maker Time Too
An agentic workflow is not instantaneous. It requires setup, evaluation, iteration, and the human oversight that catches drift before it compounds. That work demands the same unbroken attention Graham describes for programmers and writers. If you are context-switching through meetings while an agent pipeline runs in production, you are not supervising — you are reacting. Reliable agentic work depends on feedback loops you can actually close, and closing them requires focused time you have to schedule deliberately.
The Meeting Is a Judgment Interrupt
Human judgment is the scarce, non-delegable resource in an autonomous company. Goals, tradeoffs, trust boundaries, accountability — none of that can be handed to an agent. But judgment degrades under fragmentation. Graham's insight is that the cost of an interruption is not the meeting itself; it is the destroyed block around it. If your eval reviews, escalation decisions, and trust calibration happen in the margins of a manager's schedule, you are running judgment on depleted hardware.
Design the Schedule Before the Workflow
The canon on agents says to build the eval before you build the agent. The same discipline applies to time: design the protected blocks before you fill the calendar. Decide which hours are for building workflows, running evals, and reviewing agent output — then defend them the way you defend a schema. A founder who treats schedule design as an afterthought is making the same mistake as one who deploys an agent without a harness.
