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The Art of Politely Declining a Calendar Invite

By In Technology

The Bare Minimum for Professional Etiquette

Picture this: you’ve just hustled to get your five-year-old to school, stressing him and yourself out, because you had someone ask for an early morning meeting as a favor. You finally pull into the office parking lot thinking you’ve just made it, only to receive a notification two minutes before the meeting starts that it’s been declined. No explanation, no courtesy text, just a simple “decline.” Frustration now leads to expletives and the visualization exercise of physically harming a person. THEY WERE THE PERSON WHO ASKED FOR THIS F&*!ING MEETING.

So, breathe Greg. Channel the anger into something productive. I know… a blog. Let’s talk about how to avoid being that person and how to politely decline a calendar invite, especially if you’re the one who F&*!ING initiated it.

0. Respect People’s Time and Humanity

Before ANYTHING. Before I even write “Number 1”, the you have to realize that there are other human beings in the world other than yourself. They have things to do, people to meet, and places to be. When you do something that affects another human being, you need to think about that, and acknowledge that.

1. Acknowledge the Invite Promptly

Ok, now the actual first rule of declining a meeting is to do it as soon as you realize you can’t make it. Don’t leave the inviter hanging, hoping you might attend. This allows the other party to adjust their schedule accordingly and respects their time.

2. Provide a Reason

You don’t need to divulge your entire life story, but offering a brief, genuine reason goes a long way. A simple “I have a conflicting appointment” or “I need to handle an urgent matter” shows that you respect the other person’s time and that your reason for declining is legitimate.

3. Apologize for the Inconvenience

Acknowledge the trouble your cancellation might cause. A polite apology can soften the blow of the declined invite. Phrases like “I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause” or “I apologize for the last-minute notice” are courteous ways to show empathy.

4. Suggest an Alternative

If possible, propose an alternative time for the meeting. This shows that you’re still interested in meeting and that you value the other person’s time. For example, “I’m unable to make the 9 AM slot. Could we reschedule for later in the day or perhaps tomorrow morning?”

5. Use the Right Medium

If the meeting is informal or within a small team, a quick email or a message on your company’s communication platform might suffice. For more formal or high-stakes meetings, a phone call or a detailed email is more appropriate. It demonstrates that you take the meeting seriously.

6. Follow Up

If you’re the one who called the meeting, follow up after the decline. This is crucial. A simple message acknowledging the inconvenience and reaffirming the importance of the meeting can keep the professional relationship intact. “I understand the reschedule may have been inconvenient, and I appreciate your flexibility. Looking forward to our meeting tomorrow.”

Example Templates

Here are some templates that I should not have to write, because they should be obvious:

Template 1: The Quick Decline

Subject: Meeting Reschedule Request

Hi [Name],

I’m afraid I have to cancel our 9 AM meeting due to an urgent matter that has come up. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Could we reschedule for tomorrow at the same time?

Thank you for your understanding.

Best,
[Your Name]

Template 2: The Detailed Decline

Subject: Request to Reschedule Meeting

Dear [Name],

I hope this message finds you well. Unfortunately, I need to cancel our meeting scheduled for tomorrow at 9 AM. An unexpected issue has arisen that requires my immediate attention.

I sincerely apologize for the short notice and any inconvenience this may cause. I value our meeting, and your time, and would like to propose rescheduling it to [Alternative Date and Time] if that works for you.

Please let me know your availability, and I’ll do my best to accommodate.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,
[Your Name]

Template 3: The Phone Call Script

“Hi [Name], this is [Your Name]. I wanted to call and apologize for needing to cancel our meeting scheduled for tomorrow at 9 AM. Something urgent has come up. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. Could we look at rescheduling for later in the week? I appreciate your understanding.”

Conclusion

Cancelling a meeting, especially one you’ve requested, is never ideal. However, handling it with grace, promptness, and politeness can maintain and even strengthen professional relationships. It also shows that you are a human, who actually cares about other humans. Remember, EVERYONE’s time is valuable, and acknowledging that through your actions speaks volumes about your professionalism. So, next time you find yourself in a bind, decline with dignity and respect – if you don’t you’re going to end up .

And maybe, just maybe, save a fellow parent from a stressful morning rush.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The Million-Line MVP

In Technology

A founder told me last week that his chatbot understands him better than most people he works with, and he wasn’t joking.

He had been alone in his house for the better part of a year building an app on one of the popular AI coding platforms, and he wanted me to take a look. Almost a million lines of code, one developer (him), no engineering co-founder, no senior reviewer, no nobody. The app had an ERP module, a CRM module, a custom AI agent with a name and a voice, built in mini-games (yes, really), dozens of character personas, a few landing pages, and a small army of social media accounts in multiple languages. He had not yet had a paying user, or even a free one.

He was, by the way, very excited.

(I’ve changed some details, since the pattern is what I want to talk about and not the founder. I see something close to this on roughly one out of every three sales calls now.)

What used to slow you down was the point

Building software used to be annoying for mostly good reasons. You had to hire developers, or learn to code yourself, or convince a co-founder to come along for the ride. Then, you would grind out every line, which would come at a cost (time, money, conversations, arguments, etc.)… basically friction. And that friction was not a bug, but it was like this ting that you are forced you to deal with, before adding any feature, whether the feature actually needed to exist.

Startup advice has been more or less the same for twenty years, maybe more:

  • Build something small
  • Show it to real people
  • Find out what they actually want
  • Don’t build a million things at once.

The Lean Startup came out in 2011 and we have all been quoting it at each other ever since (poorly, mostly).

This is what we talk about when we discuss “startup discipline”. It’s really not very complicated, but it can be really hard. It used to be hard because building was hard, and now it’s hard for a completely different reason.

How does one person build almost a million lines of code in a few months?

The honest answer is they don’t, the AI does, and the AI has no opinion on whether any of the code should exist.

This is the part I want to sit with for a minute, because I think it’s the heart of the problem. Imagine you’re building a startup that lets local news anchors rent out their unused toupees by the hour (try not to overthink this). You sit down with one of the AI coding tools and you say “build me a marketplace where toupees can be listed by the hour,” and the AI builds it. Then you say “actually, add a loyalty rewards program,” and the AI builds that too. Then you say “and also, add a Pokemon-style mini-game where users battle each other’s toupees,” and the AI starts coding.

It doesn’t pause or ask why, and it doesn’t say “dude, I love your enthusiasm but I am genuinely worried we are losing the plot here,” it just builds the toupee-battle-feature.

This removes the single most useful thing about a good engineering team, which is that engineers PUSH BACK. A senior developer, or a seasoned product manger, asked to add a toupee-battle mini-game to a B2B rental marketplace would slowly take off their glasses, set them on the desk, and ask one of those long quiet questions that means “we are not doing this.” The AI this is a sycophantic drone that has the eagerness of an underfed puppy to please you, and it has no glasses to take off. It also has unlimited keystrokes and believes that every single idea you’ve ever come up with is absolutely genius. At least it tells me that everything I’ve ever written or thought about is pretty clever.

A few months ago I ran into the perfect name for this, which is Slurm Coding. I used to call it AI crack coding, because the dopamine loop is very real, and I have really needed another hit of that good AI crack just one more time before I went to bed on more than one occasion. But Slurm is both more insidious in its combination of addictiveness and corporate outreach.

The MVP don’t change

Here’s what hasn’t moved in twenty years of startup thinking:

  1. Build the smallest thing that solves one specific problem for one specific person.
  2. Show it to that person (a real person, probably not your spouse, definitely not your mom, and DEFINITELY not my mom, and 100% not your chatbot).
  3. Find out what they actually do with it (which is probably not what you thought).
  4. Kill features, pivot, or double down based on what you learned.
  5. Repeat.

What’s new is that step one is basically free, and while not perfect, free is very alluring. You can build the smallest thing in an afternoon, or the largest thing if there’s no one around to tell you not to. Steps two through five still require getting out of your house, talking to humans, accepting that most of your assumptions are wrong, and throwing real work away. None of that is faster than it was in 2005, none of it is fun, and none of it scratches the “I NEED MORE SLURM” build-a-thing itch the way an AI tool does.

So a certain kind of founder just skips it, staying in the build phase indefinitely, because the build phase now feels like winning at a casino while getting unlimited free martinis. The feature ship (how to get them onto a server is someone else’s problem) the codebase grows, the agent agrees with everything. Meanwhile the only thing that actually matters, which is whether anyone wants this, goes unanswered.

It’s the founder version of Wilson the volleyball. In your unwashed isolation, you’ve made a friend, you’ve named the friend, and the friend agrees with everything you say. The problem is that the friend is also the boat, the island, and the ocean, and you haven’t actually left the house yet.

To be fair, I am not above this myself, by the way. I have, in my time, built things that nobody asked for and gotten weirdly emotional about them, but the difference is that mine were three hundred lines of code over a weekend, not almost a million lines of code over the better part of a year, which is sort of the whole point. No one asked for my William S. Burroughs poetry writing twitter bot, but I loved it anyway.

Codebases don’t love you back

Code you wrote yourself CAN hard to let go of, and code you wrote with an AI, when you are not a trad-coder, seems to be way harder. Experienced engineers seem to be more than happy to throw away AI code or rebuild it in a heartbeat. But I can see how even if you didn’t actually write the lines, but the shape of the thing is yours (you named the characters, you picked the voice, you spent months in a chair with this thing as your only collaborator), and you have feelings about it.

But one day, if you’re lucky, and it does have SOME product market fit, a real engineering team is going to need to look at your masterpiece. And they are not going to share those feelings. They’re going to tell you, as gently as they can manage, that most of it has to go. Not because they’re mean (they might actually be mean), but because almost a million lines of AI-generated code, written by one person, in one tool, with no architectural review, is never maintainable, almost guaranteed to not be secure, and almost never going to scale past the “prototype” it currently is.

So what should you actually do?

I mean, I already told you… Build the smallest thing you can, then show it to ten strangers and actually listen to them. Throw away half of what you built and build a slightly different smallest thing, and repeat until one of those things is real. Keep your runway reserved for the moment you realize you were WAY off about something important, because, like, you will be, and that moment is what your runway is for.

Use AI tools, because they are legit amazing. But treat them like a coffee machine (fast, useful, no opinions of their own), not like a co-founder or worse, a slot machine. Co-founders are supposed to tell you no, slot machines whisper “just one more hit baby!”