Mediations #17: Improving My Schedule as a Manager
How I balance meetings, solo work, and reflection time. While meetings dominate, uninterrupted time for planning and spontaneous chats is crucial for managers.
One of my previous managers told me, “The manager’s work happens in meetings,” while I was complaining about the lack of uninterrupted time. Now, I can say that my manager was only half right. Considering one-on-ones, alignment, check-in, decision-making and many other meetings, it’s true that most of the work happens during meetings. However, a significant chunk of work—arguably the most crucial—is outside scheduled meetings: spontaneous chats, reflection time and solo work. Without them, no manager can succeed.
When I look at my calendar, 60-70% of my time, on average, is occupied by meetings. Regular and one-off meetings take most of my time. Realizing that I don’t have the luxury of having a half day without interruption and working with, as Paul Graham put, maker’s time after becoming a manager was an eye-opener. It’s also what my manager was pointing to.
Manager’s vs. Maker’s Time
Managers work with time slots like thirty minutes to an hour. Most slots are occupied with meetings. Meeting-free days are rare. I know there are organizations with meeting-free days, but I observe that it requires immense discipline from everyone. Most organizations default back to having fewer meetings on a meeting-free day.
Meetings are an unavoidable part of the work, a big part. It is where the manager gathers context, exchanges ideas, listens to others and ensures people are aligned and progress toward a shared goal. It is the work of the manager, which is different from the makers’ work.
Makers work with big-time chunks, like spending half a day finishing a piece of work. Any meeting—regardless of the length—disrupts this flow, and the quality of the output gets lower. Hence, they try to avoid meetings at all costs. The focus needed to complete the creative work overrules the importance of any work that’s done in collaboration. Most of the complaints of makers come from managers not being mindful of the maker’s time structure.
Although I avoid interrupting anyone’s flow (if they have headphones on or have a focus time blocker on their calendar or status on team chat), I also had a LOT of spontaneous chat makers initiated either via sending me a message (“Do you have a few minutes?”), reaching out to me on my desk or catching me while getting a coffee in the office.
Spontaneous Chats
Random chats bring so much value for both sides that I began having slack time in case any of these pop up. Moreover, having this slack time gave me an opportunity to have spontaneous chats with others outside of my team. Even though we don’t directly work together, knowing people in the organization proved to bring a lot of value later on.
As knowledge is power in our age, knowing who to reach out to to gather context for a project or connecting people who need each other is one of the superpowers of any manager. Spontaneous chats are the place to build that information map, so I know who to go to when documentation is not up-to-date (when is it ever up-to-date?). While these chats are random, my strategy is definitely not. I intentionally create slack time to have these chats. That requires setting uninterrupted solo work and reflection time on my calendar.
Solo Work
Solo work is what my manager failed to warn me to be mindful of (he actually told me, but way too late). It’s that work when you ask a manager about how their week was, and you hear them saying, “I finally got some work done.”
It’s hard to set time aside to write that document, plan an upcoming meeting to maximize the outcome or share well-written updates with stakeholders. I need at least a few hours a week to work alone to jot down my thinking, build arguments, and think about how I will approach problems that involve people and technical systems. I think hard about how I will set the environment for others to solve the problem. As this work is not visible on the calendar, many managers put an extra hour or two in a week to “get some work done.”
When I try to put this work on my calendar, I often get other meetings scheduled over them. Just because it’s solo work, people’s argument is, “It’s easier to move it compared to a meeting with ten participants.” I’m not going to dive into how to say no to that meeting, but solo work is one of the fundamental parts of the job. It should find its place on the calendar every week.
There is one more time category managers have, which often causes overtime work.
Reflection & Planning Time
I fall into a trap a lot. My mind wonders when I cook, walk my dog, run, or exercise, and I reflect on my work. I know I’m not alone.
Management is a lot about reflecting on yesterday and planning today and the future. It’s not only about meetings, writing a document, or sending a message in a team chat. It’s thinking about all of these before doing it, learning from past interactions, and reflecting on the last spontaneous chat or recent outcomes to prepare for the difficult feedback conversation in the next one-one-one.
This reflection time is the most neglected one, but in my experience, the most crucial one. When I neglect, I catch myself doing it outside of my working hours while walking my dog. It happens whether I like or want it or not. So, it’s better to make it intentionally part of the working hours. Work should stay at work anyway.
Whether solo work, reflection time or meetings, I also learned that a manager’s calendar is very dynamic compared to a maker’s calendar. When I look at my last 8-10 weeks on my calendar, none of the two are the same. Hence, it’s difficult to say these hours are for this work and those for that. Some weeks, meetings occupy the most time, and other weeks, there is solo work. When any category dominates my two weeks back to back, I know I’m not getting my work done and I need to change something.
How do you spend your time at work? What do you do to improve your schedule?