The ideal breakfast window for a PM at most global companies is 6:45 AM to 7:15 AM. Before APAC wakes up. Before Europe goes to lunch. Before the American meeting industrial complex spins up. This isn't a time management problem. It's an organizational design failure.
The Underlying Dysfunction
You're eating breakfast in the dark because your company substitutes synchronous communication for decision-making authority. Leadership won't decide who actually needs to attend which meetings, so everyone attends everything. The calendar fills. The work shifts to nights and weekends. The meetings themselves become the work.
The pattern is specific: recurring meetings proliferate because they're easier to schedule than decisions are to delegate. A 30-minute "sync" exists because nobody was authorized to make the call async. A cross-timezone standup exists because the org chart doesn't clearly define who owns what.
The Constraint Test
No meetings before 10 AM. No meetings after 4 PM. No meetings over 30 minutes without a written agenda and a specific decision to be made.
If your organization can't function under these constraints, the problem isn't the constraints. It's that you've built a company where presence is the proxy for productivity, and the calendar is the system of record for who matters.
The Real Cost
Every PM eating breakfast during a standup is a symptom. Every "quick sync" that could have been a Slack message is a withdrawal from the focused time your product team needs to do the actual work -- the thinking, the analysis, the design decisions that require uninterrupted blocks.
The cost isn't abstract. It shows up in product quality. Teams that spend their mornings in status meetings and their afternoons in planning sessions have no time left for the work those meetings are supposedly about. The output degrades. The response is more meetings to address the degraded output.
Stop treating meeting load as an inevitability. Start treating it as a design choice with measurable consequences.