A handful of people have emailed or variously asked if I could chat, and in the interest of trying to be available beyond the insulated network of “people I either already know or who have a mutual friend to introduce us”, I wanted to try opening up chunks of my schedule to what I’ll call “coffee talk”. You can sign up here (but you might want to read on to understand where I’m coming from so your expectations are measured).

The way it works is pretty simple: I’ve blocked off chunks of time throughout the week that you can book if you want to chat about something. It doesn’t have to be about work stuff - if you want to think of it like running into someone in the break room and shooting the breeze, that’s fine with me.

(I’ll reevaluate that if it gets weird. Please don’t make it weird.)

I tried to stagger the availability windows so that some days would work well for people in PST or nearby timezones, some days would work for people in EST and maybe GMT timezones. I’m hoping these staggered options work for people in more timezones than that, but if someone wants to chat and all of the options land in like… the middle of the night for you, reach out and I’ll be happy to move stuff around to make things work.

I also tried - for almost literally no reason at all - some of the blocks being 30-minute windows and some of them being 45-minute windows. I might change that too. Honestly I’m just trying different things. If we find out that calls get awkward at 39 minutes, then I’ll shorten all of the blocks to half-hour windows; if we find out that we don’t really get into a groove until 26 minutes into the call, then I’ll give the blocks more time so we’re not racing to wrap up.

This is all a big experiment in opening up my calendar (and I guess in some virtual sense my home) to whoever wants to chat. I don’t really expect anyone to be interested in booking a block, but “cold calling” people was always super awkward and uncomfortable for me, so if I can break the ice to facilitate that first interaction, then I want to try and do that. If nobody reaches out, then it didn’t cost me anything to try; and if someone does reach out, then that’s kinda cool.

I think I mixed a few metaphors there, so I’ll wrap up. If you’re interested, click on the link above or here or somewhere. This experiment will run through June, but if there’s interest I’ll keep it going (with whatever tweaks to experiment here and there). Okay, see you then (or whenever lol).