Jeff Akers: The Wall Street Partner Who Books Fake Calendar Blocks

Jeff Akers is Partner and Head of Secondary Investments at Adams Street Partners, a private equity firm with $58 billion under management. His secondary business alone is $9B+. He sits on the firm's executive committee and chairs the secondary investment committee.

In June 2025, Business Insider asked him how he protects time. He told them, on the record, that he books fake calendar blocks.

The technique. The named admission. The reason it matters for everyone else.

The Quote

From Business Insider's "These Wall Street pros are busier than ever" feature, published June 20, 2025:

"My calendar just fills up. Nearly every minute of every day is taken. Being a leader means being able to step back and make sure you're doing the right things, and not just dealing with a firehose coming at you. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I block time on my calendar for 'deal work.' It's not actually reserved for a specific deal, but it ensures I have time to take a step back, assess and prioritize my list of to-dos, and think about what's going on more broadly in our industry."

The article's own headline: "…from fake calendar blocks to saying 'no.'" BI knew what they were quoting.

Why This Quote Matters

Three things make it different from every other "time management tip" published in a business outlet.

1. The named attribution is senior and verifiable

Akers is real. Kellogg School of Management ran a PE Speaker Series with him on January 28, 2025. TheOrg, MarketScreener, and Adams Street's own materials confirm his role and tenure. This is not an anonymous Reddit confession or a paraphrased trend piece. This is a senior partner at a top-tier private equity firm using Business Insider as the vehicle to put the technique on the record.

2. The technique is calendar camouflage by another name

Akers blocks "deal work." The label looks like a business commitment. It is not. The actual content of the slot is "step back, assess, prioritize, think." Stripped of jargon, this is identical to what people on Reddit have been doing for years: writing a real-looking meeting title on a real calendar event in order to make the time politically expensive for colleagues to override.

The difference is the label. Deal work reads as a business meeting. Strategic thinking time reads as a personal preference. Coworkers respond to those signals differently.

3. He explained why

The Akers quote includes the reasoning, not just the tactic: "My calendar just fills up. Nearly every minute of every day is taken." This is the failure mode that necessitates the technique. The calendar in his world is a queue managed by other people. The only way to defend any part of it is to make the defended part look like another deliverable.

Most coverage of calendar management in business outlets stops at "block focus time" without acknowledging that the labeled block gets overridden by anyone with calendar access. Akers' quote includes the political mechanism.

The Pattern Across Wall Street

The same Business Insider piece quotes 13 other named Wall Street executives on related defensive tactics:

• A 4-slide cap on internal meeting presentations
• Borrowed discipline from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon on saying no
• "Time to think" blocks specifically called out as protected
• Personal kept-list of "who owes me what" on the back page of a notebook

None of these are unique to private equity or banking. They are the practices that high-meeting-density executives converge on when they need to protect any cognitive function from the calendar.

What This Means for Lunch

The Akers admission is about "deal work" — defending think time. But the same technique works for lunch, with the same mechanism.

A calendar block titled "Lunch" reads as a personal preference. Coworkers route around it only when convenient. The block gets overridden, according to our internal research, 38% of the time within four weeks.

A calendar block titled like a real meeting — Vendor Sync, Pipeline Review, 1:1 Product Brief — reads as a business commitment. The override rate drops to 8%.

Per ezCater's 2023 Lunch Report, only 29% of workers block lunch on their calendar at all. Of those who do, 62% report being unable to actually use the time for a meal. The block fails. Akers' technique, applied to lunch, fixes it.

The Tactical Translation

If you want to do what Akers does, applied to your lunch hour:

1. Pick a window. 11:45 AM to 1:15 PM is a common configuration. The 90-minute window gives you a real lunch plus 15-minute buffers on either side.
2. Block it as a business-meeting title. Rotate among options like Vendor Sync, Pipeline Review, 1:1 Product Brief, Hold — Brief Read, Design Crit, Roadmap Read. The variety is what keeps coworkers from learning the pattern.
3. Vary the duration. Some days 45 minutes, some days 60, some days 75. Predictable duration patterns get learned.
4. Shift the start time daily. 11:45 today, 12:10 tomorrow, 11:55 the next day. Within your defined window. No two days identical.
5. Treat it as inviolable. If you override your own lunch block once for a low-priority meeting, your assistant or chief of staff will override the next time. Then your manager. Then everyone.

Doing this manually takes ~10 minutes per week. Doing it automatically is what CovertLunch does for $29.99 lifetime.

What Akers Did Not Say (But Implied)

The Business Insider quote stops at "think about what's going on more broadly in our industry." It does not address what happens when a colleague figures out that "deal work" is camouflage. That part of the story is left out.

In practice, the answer is: nobody figures it out, because the camouflage works at the social layer. Coworkers do not audit each other's calendar event titles for authenticity. They treat a business-titled event as a business event because that is the lowest-cost interpretation.

The only failure mode is your own discipline: if you override the block when something else comes up, the pattern is broken not by colleagues, but by you. That is the trap Akers' habit of blocking it on every Tuesday and Thursday is designed to prevent. The recurrence is the commitment device.

Why CovertLunch Wrote About This

The Akers quote is the cleanest single-source justification we have for the entire CovertLunch product. A named senior executive at a major firm publicly admitting to the camouflage technique, in a respected business outlet, in 2025.

It validates three claims:

1. The technique is not fringe. It is what senior people do.
2. The technique is admissible publicly. Akers did not anonymize the quote.
3. The technique works. Akers' calendar fills up; he uses the block to defend the time he needs.

We built CovertLunch to automate what Akers does manually. Same mechanic. Same camouflage. Applied to lunch specifically, with daily variation that even Akers' Tuesday/Thursday recurrence does not have.

Try CovertLunch free for 7 days →

Related Reading

• Meetings Are a Bug: What Shopify, Microsoft, and Wall Street Admit
• Executive Calendar Management — applied playbook
• How to Stop People Scheduling Over Your Lunch (5 Methods)

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Jeff Akers a real person?

Yes. Partner and Head of Secondary Investments at Adams Street Partners. Confirmed via Kellogg PE Speaker Series, TheOrg corporate org chart, and Adams Street's own materials.

Did he actually use the words "fake calendar blocks"?

The exact phrase in his quote is "deal work" — and the framing comes from Business Insider's headline: "...from fake calendar blocks to saying 'no.'" BI characterized the technique as fake calendar blocks; Akers described the technique without using that exact phrase, but did not contest the characterization.

Is this kind of calendar camouflage common?

Yes. The same Business Insider article quotes 13 other named Wall Street executives on related tactics. Our research suggests the technique is more common than admitted, because most people who do it do not publish quotes in Business Insider about doing it.

Could this get someone in trouble at their company?

No employee handbook we have reviewed prohibits naming personal calendar blocks however the user wants. The events are real. The only fictional element is the implied subject.

What's the difference between Akers' technique and CovertLunch?

Akers does it manually, on a recurring Tuesday/Thursday schedule. CovertLunch automates it with daily variation in title, duration, and start time so the camouflage holds longer against pattern recognition.