Every work meeting since the first startup pitch in June 2011, and every training hour, flight and family block next to it — quarter by quarter, side by side. Both halves pulled from one data lake I own.
Grid format inspired by cv.nickspitzer.com
Each cell is one quarter, shaded by that row's own scale — concurrent events count once (priority to the realest thing in the slot), and sport/personal blockers are stripped from the work half. Read it like tree rings: fundraising lights up in 2014, 2016 and 2019 — the rounds. Big rooms grow as the company does. Deep-work blocks explode after 2020 (calendar defense, learned the hard way). Below the line: the 2020 bike spike, the 2025 run pivot, family since 2021 — and 2026, where the top half goes quiet and the bottom half doesn't.
ETH lab, 2011: 3.4 h/week in meetings. Peak Beekeeper, 2019: 28.8. First year after the exit: 6.0 — and the difference is what built everything on this site.
Real meeting time, cleaned: overlapping events merged so a double-booked hour counts once, and 6,155 sport/personal blockers that lived in the work calendar are excluded. 2019 remains the heaviest year on record.
Join cleaned meeting load against 110 months of overnight resting HR: r = +0.44, and the staircase is perfectly monotonic. A maxed-out calendar costs four beats per minute, every night.
Units are per MONTH: 120–150 meeting-hours a month ≈ 28–35 h a week — there were 18 such months, all deep in scale-up years. Quiet months (0–30 h) average 46.1 bpm; the 120–150 h months average 50.4. Part of it is mediated — heavy meeting months crowd out training — but that's exactly the point: the calendar is upstream of the body. Google Calendar has one half, Garmin has the other. Only the lake has both.
Extracted from calendar entries — Tripit imports (2011), hand-written "Flug nach Barcelona" (the startup years), Gmail auto-events (2018+). Honest caveat: it's a floor, not a ceiling — 2012 and 2016–17 flights mostly lived in email, not the calendar. Peak on record: 2024, fifty-nine legs.