The school concert was at 3 pm on a Tuesday. Here is the calendar block I now use, and why I stopped apologising for it

My daughter is seven. Last month her school had its annual day concert at 3 pm on a Tuesday, which, if you are a working parent in India, you will recognise as a time chosen by someone who has never had a 3 pm sprint review.

For years, my move in this situation was to sneak out. Leave my status green, keep Slack open on my phone in the auditorium, answer one message during the song my daughter had practised for three weeks, and feel terrible about all of it. This time I did something different, and it went better than I expected, so I am writing it down.

What I did

I put it in my calendar, visible to the whole org, with the actual reason:

Daughter's school concert. Offline 2.30 to 5.30 pm. Arun is covering escalations, call him first. Back online after 5.30 for anything that cannot wait till tomorrow.

That is it. Three things: the real reason, the exact window, and who to go to instead. I have since used the same format for a dentist, for my mother's hospital follow-ups and for a parent-teacher meeting, and I encourage my team to do the same.

Why the real reason matters

"Personal" or "busy" blocks get negotiated. People see "busy" and think "probably movable". People see "daughter's school concert" and nobody, not once, has asked me to move it. There is a small risk that someone judges you for having a life. In my experience it is much smaller than the risk of everyone silently assuming you do not have one.

It also does something for the team. When the engineering manager puts her kid's concert in the calendar, the junior engineer who needs to take his father to a hospital appointment stops writing "personal work" and feeling guilty about it. I know this because one of them told me.

Why the cover matters more

The block is only half of it. The other half is that someone is actually covering, that they have been told beforehand, and that they have the authority to make decisions while I am gone. If I disappear and nobody can approve a hotfix, that is not a boundary, that is an outage with my name on it.

Arun covers for me. I cover for him on Thursdays when he coaches his son's cricket team. Neither of us keeps a scorecard.

What it is not

This is not a "parents deserve special treatment" post. The same rules work for anyone: the person caring for a parent, the person training for a marathon, the person who has therapy on Wednesday evenings. Real reason (as much as you are comfortable sharing), exact window, named cover. The structure is the point, not the reason.

My daughter sang the second verse slightly off-key and waved at me in the middle of it, which I am told is not allowed. I did not look at my phone once.

There is a Tamil saying, "Thottil pazhakkam sudukaadu mattum": the habits of the cradle last until the cremation ground. I would like her to grow up with a different habit than I had.