Take Control of your Calendar
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. This week is a long weekend in the US. It's President's Day.
I hope you had time to recover from last week and spend time with yourself.
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Have you ever had days or weeks where you feel you could have done better on your tasks? Or things that are priorities for you or your team?
I tend to feel that way when the amount of meetings is large, and I "run out of time" in my day.
Meetings are work
As a staff engineer, you tend to be more aligned with management tasks than individual contributor (IC) tasks without all the direct reports. That depends on the organization. Your mileage may vary.
In my case, meetings are part of my role and work week.
Maker vs Manager
I've written about Maker vs Manager calendars. These two calendars are opposite. Manager time requires quick context switching, while Maker requires long hours to focus and dive deeply into a topic.
I tend to split my day at some arbitrary hour to take control of my calendar from that aspect. If that's impossible, I dedicate a week to maker vs manager time.
At this point, sometimes, I can't get out of meetings for a whole week.
Scaling yourself
When I can get out of a meeting, it is due to several reasons. I have someone who can step up for me and take my place at a meeting. Or I've created documentation that teams can leverage for their purposes.
Having someone that can take your place at a meeting helps both of you.
When I encounter a new topic, I see if it's within my priorities. Otherwise, I find if someone has an interest in learning the topic. If I find a person, I coach them to take my place at the meeting by attending, asking them for meeting notes or pairing with them in solutions.
Writing documents is another excellent way to scale yourself.
I write documentation on projects, goals, available options, or risks. That helps avoid meetings in some cases. Other times, you need to brainstorm with the team and write a solution design. This lowers the number of meetings; we could asynchronously communicate via the comment section.
If your company doesn't have a strong reading culture, writing documents might not help you get out of this.
Ruthlessly prioritize
People recommend using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize their tasks—but that matrix breaks after a certain level. Even after you delegate or delete tasks, the amount of tasks to do or schedule is large.
I liked the framework proposed by Shreyas Doshi, the "LNO Framework", which talks about task categories in terms of "Leverage," "Neutral," and "Overhead."
When you have neutral or overhead tasks you can't avoid, you must either do a good enough or an OK job. As to invest the least possible amount of time on them. This allows the leverage tasks to have more time in our week.
Remember these categories as you start taking control of your calendar and planning your days!
Talk about trade-offs
Another thing I do is have slots in my calendar for specific purposes. "Write design document for Project X," "Review solution design from Person A," "Code Reviews." Allocating these time slots allows me to block the calendar, and if a meeting conflict comes through, I can think of the trade-offs of one priority over the other.
If you've categorized your calendar slots, you can tell your manager that you're being pulled into meetings or people are asking you to work on things that don't provide any leverage.
I like doing this every month or weekly if the amount is too large to manage correctly.
Failing is OK
Nobody is perfect, and it is perfectly fine if you can't manage all the fires or urgent meetings for one week. Another time, you may cancel all possible meetings in search of a fantastic solution to a long-standing problem.
As long as we're openly communicating these with our manager, either those one-time occurrences or your calendar is "uncontrollable," they need to be aware to help you out.
Conclusion
Planning your days and weeks is necessary for our work. Otherwise, we might be working on other people's priorities and tasks, not our own.
I shared some techniques from the LNO framework, such as allocating slots in my calendar and openly communicating with management.
I hope they help you out!
Your turn!
How do you prioritize your work? Or if you've never had to think about that? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Blogging is not dead is a sentiment I agree with. It takes more time to find blogs, but I still see people participating in this way.
- I keep chipping away at this video Architecture for Flow - Wardley Mapping, DDD, and Team Topologies - Susanne Kaiser - DDD Europe 2022. I try to take notes as I go through it. Maybe I'll share after I wrap up.
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