I was on a panel recently – well, we ran it like a meeting, which was fun – about remote meetings and making them suck less. It was fun and I got some nice ideas from my fellow panelists! Watch it here.
Tag: meetings
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Structure, Meetings and Other People
Credit: PIxabay / geralt When I started on this self-employed adventure, I had no structure. This was the first adjustment. I allowed myself to be distracted by potential projects, pitching things, doing unpaid work in the hope that it would pay off (it didn’t). Over time I created habits for myself, drew boundaries, evolved to this 5 days on / 1 day off which I have found works really well for me.
But projects started to come in, and my work started to change. I’ve had periods that were very busy with client work and heavily scheduled (e.g. at the start of May I was doing so many technical interviews). This past week I had:
- 1 technical phone screen
- 2 calls about a panel I’m moderating (+1 no show that I had to reschedule).
- 1 meeting about project A
- 3 daily standups about project D, plus two in-depth planning meetings and another people management meeting.
- 2 hours in-person work with admin (she finished the rest at home).
- Real-time work and back and forth with UX designer about the UI refresh.
The other thing that has changed is: I have more deadlines in my life. Right now there’s a list of things that I need to finish before I leave on Thursday that makes me want to panic. Instead I spent the last hour working (inefficiently) on something that has a deadline of the following Tuesday. I’m not sure if I’ve been engaging in structured procrastination, indulging my need to feel in control of something (anything!), or just having a normal approach to a Sunday morning.
There’s good things about this, not least of which: feeling overbooked means that I don’t chase work anymore. (I hated this, and also spent too long on back and forth that would go nowhere.)
I also feel more effective, but this isn’t the same as being more effective. I can point to a list of things that I did last week, but I see value in execution not in ideas (or meetings!). So I look at the list and see “oh that was a busy week I got stuff done” and then rationally think “did I really?” – how much of that will matter a week from now, a month from now, a year from now?
Maybe none of it.
Some Observations
Having say, 40-60% of my time structured has in fact meant that 100% of my time needs to be structured (and resulted in me needing to devote some time to getting organised). My day for my own projects has to be planned better and ruthlessly protected, because otherwise nothing happens. Similarly my day off comes with a list of goals because having more constraints around my time means that running the odd errand needs to be planned and can’t just be taken care of when I’m feeling like a break anyway.
I mainly feel the loss of large blocks of time. Tracking small things that can be taken care of in small gaps helps but isn’t a panacea because most small things in practise fall into categories of unimportant things that shouldn’t be done at all and things taking <5 minutes that should be done when you think of them.
It’s possible to carve out time for things that I want a day for. I’ve found it close to impossible to carve out time for things that I want more than a day for.
I am so focused on checking things of The List that I don’t make time for those things that are unknown.
Planning has become more natural to me. I have an all day flight next Friday and I already assembled a list of what I need to be able to work offline during it.
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Time Blocking
The thing about knowing more about what you’re doing, is that more people want to talk to you about it, and you have less and less time to actually… do it.
And so people block their calendars with “Do not Schedule” and “Make Time!” and presumably try to be diligent about actually enforcing this. But it’s hard. And when my schedule gets crazy and I contemplate doing this, the thing I come back to is – I want the make time to be the default, that other things eat in to. I want the assumption to be that all my “open” time is make time, and when I have time here or there I work on that not on… email.
(I still hate email)
I had a very engineer meeting recently. The guy didn’t block off my calendar, and didn’t book a meeting room, but sent a note saying “I can’t change this event so we’ll just do this”. I’d rushed from thing to thing most of the day, so nearly forgot, and was a couple of minutes late. But it was refreshing, and reminded me I used to be like that. Where a meeting was really just a chat with another engineer, and there was no need to schedule it because my calendar was open enough to remember it, and who needs a meeting room anyway? We’ll find somewhere to get together. Whatevs.
For a year now I’ve been refusing meetings which could be done over lunch (e.g with people wanting to pick my brain on diversity stuff although moving made it easy to cut back on that kind of stuff), but it’s not the solution to my current problem. I absolutely refuse to put “make time” on my calendar. I refuse to get to the point that it’s not the default – all time is make time, unless something specifies otherwise.
But what about going the other way? Blocking off time to handle non-making, whether it’s meetings, or writing design docs, or planning.
I’ve been working on that instead, and it’s sometimes challenging – there can be non-technical emergencies that pull me back. But I’ve found it’s a helpful way to stop the constant pull of “oh I’ll just do X and my head will be clear to code”. I can proxy it by writing it down, and saying, “I’m dealing with this on Tuesday when I’ve blocked out time for a bunch of such tasks”. Working across timezones actually helps, so meetings get blocked into overlapping work time.
The downside, is I’m back to needing a todo list – which I’d pretty much eliminated previously (notes in bug trackers and CLs sufficed).
Anyway, so far my semi-promising strategy for keeping on top of non-technical things, whilst retaining make time as the default. How do you balance?
