14 ms·

Stop Swiss Cheesing your calendar

224 points by maddynator 6y ago

benjiweber 6y ago
I think if we changed the way we talk about meetings, schedules, work etc we could improve a lot of things. https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-change-our-language/ https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-c...
- etripe 6y ago
  I'd say it's more about how we feel about them. A lot of it is in the standard modus operandi for extraverts and introverts. For extraverts, meetings feel productive, because they get their energy from social stimulation. They also like brainstorms and similar initiatives, despite research saying they decrease productivity and innovation. Most "people person" and "idea guy" functions tend to be extraverts, so they drive the narrative. For introverts, discussing ideas provides energy. Meetings discussing feelings, inter-departemental drama, brainstorming, etc feel like the waste of time they are. A lot of meetings are poor replacements for thinking ahead or actual planning.
phnofive 6y ago
As always, “Stop doing $negativebehavior” is less useful than the actual advice: Schedule multiple blocks of time per week of sufficient length to allow for meaningful, independent work, rather than try fruitlessly to fit this work in around countless interruptions of, on average, less importance.
- somedude895 6y ago
  This year I've begun to put down all my todos in my calendar as blockers. It has reduced the time I spend in meetings drastically.
  - alexdig 6y ago
    Have you experienced any backlash for doing so?
    - somedude895 6y ago
      Not at all. If there's a need for an actual important and urgent meeting people usually tell me my calendar's really full and if I can move something out of the way, which I then usually do. But nobody has questioned the method itself... yet.
  - RhysU 6y ago
    This is nice in that as more work arises more back pressure appears on one's calendar.
  - cathyreisenwitz 6y ago
    Classic time blocking! I really thought OP was going to be about that. https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-time-blocking https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-time-blocking
- ec109685 6y ago
  I actually think stop Swiss cheesing is a pretty succinct way of what you are saying in your second paragraph.
  - sschueller 6y ago
    Odd that the phrase "Swiss cheesing" is used. As it implies all Swiss cheeses have holes yet only a few do. Especially odd that in the United States "Swiss Cheese" refers to one specific cheese which is the Emmentaler [1] when there are so many different kinds of cheese in Switzerland. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmental_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmental_cheese
    - WoodenChair 6y ago
      > Especially odd that in the United States "Swiss Cheese" refers to one specific cheese which is the Emmentaler [1] when there are so many different kinds of cheese in Switzerland. I don’t think it’s anymore odd than “French Fries” or “Greek Yogurt”. People like simple connections. Somebody long ago (perhaps unintentionally) did some good branding.
      - HenryBemis 6y ago
        > “Greek Yogurt” I have eaten yogurt all over the world. The "Greek" yogurt (or in some countries they call it "Greek Type" - to avoid 'lying' about the country of production/origin) is thicker/less of a liquid. It must be in the process. Most yogurts (plain, not sugary with fruites and other stuff) I've had are semi-liquid. The only 'good' yogurt I truly enjoy is the original Greek by "FAGE" called "Total" (not affiliated). I assume that similar yogurt-making process must be a regional thing (Greece, Balkans), and perhaps Greece had the industries/factories to support exports on great volumes that helped them conquer/define this type of yogurt in the 80's, 90's and establish that name.
        masklinn 6y ago
        > Most yogurts (plain, not sugary with fruites and other stuff) I've had are semi-liquid. Semi liquid sounds excessive for actual yogurt, but what you may be looking for specifically is strained yogurts, which have a lower amount of whey (liquids) and are thus drier and thicker. Greek yogurt is indeed a common type of strained yogurt.
KETpXDDzR 6y ago
IMO there should be a cost for inviting ppl to meetings. Eg, the department should pay the attendees salaries.
- somedude895 6y ago
  There should be some kind of tool that tracks how much of people's time each department uses, simple (attendees from other departments) * (hours), and then each quarter the departments have to justify their use of resources and the goal should be to reduce that number. Wonder what effect that would have on company culture.
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    That could quite easily backfire, with different departments forming silos as they avoid inviting members of other departments to meetings.
  - Skunkleton 6y ago
    This is what it is like to work in defense. Having charge numbers for projects does not reduce meetings.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  How about the cost being that the organizer needs to do more planning; have them fill in a standard form, clearly illustrating the purpose of the meeting, an agenda, and a timeline. And someone actually leading the meeting. I think a big issue is that meetings are too informal and on a whim. If they cannot produce that, they cannot plan a meeting. Of course, before that they need to ascertain whether it could just be an email or a quick question to someone.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  “I’m continuously amazed by how many people have to ask permission to buy a $50 book, yet are empowered to call a meeting that costs tens of thousands of dollars.” — @QuinnyPig
Yan-solucracy 6y ago
On a side note : there are no holes in swiss cheese :-) , the cheese with holes in it is french and called Emmental.
killingtime74 6y ago
My manager started using this Saas with us to automate this https://www.getclockwise.com/ https://www.getclockwise.com/
- bjterry 6y ago
  I use Clockwise for managing my calendar. It's quite convenient if you are a manager because it can handle all your flexible meetings (aka 1:1s) even without everyone on board at your company using it. Definitely recommend it.
- npunt 6y ago
  Clockwise is excellent and pretty much purpose-built for this problem.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  What does it cost? I see “get started for free,” but that doesn’t tell me how they make money.
- SpikeMeister 6y ago
  +1 for Clockwise, it does a great job of automating this. It easily doubled my team's work time ("focus time" in Clockwise). It also has useful preferences like "prefer morning/afternoon", "no meeting days", which it takes into account when scheduling. I can't say enough good things about it. It's free at first but I would pay almost any money to keep it, the value of the extra time it gives you is enormous.
- xutopia 6y ago
  I loved Clockwise but unfortunately not allowed to use it at my workplace anymore. If you can use it do so! It is the best personal assistant I had in ages!
Swizec 6y ago
My favorite story on the topic — https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-story-of-priorities-and-a-jar.pdf https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-st... The following story is one that’s been circulating for awhile. I believe it holds a very important message regarding appropriately setting priorities in our lives. A professor of philosophy stood before his class with some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks about two inches in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was full. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly and watched as the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The professor then asked the students again if the jar was full. They chuckled and agreed that it was indeed full this time. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. The sand filled the remaining open areas of the jar. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this jar signifies your life. The rocks are the truly important things, such as family, health and relationships. If all else was lost and only the rocks remained, your life would still be meaningful. The pebbles are the other things that matter in your life, such as work or school. The sand signifies the remaining “small stuff” and material possessions. If you put sand into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks or the pebbles. The same can be applied to your lives. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are truly important. Pay attention to the things in life that are critical to your happiness and well-being. Take time to get medical check- ups, play with your children, go for a run, write your grandmother a letter. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, or fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first – things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just pebbles and sand. —— An often seen addition: A student then walks up to the jar and pours in a beer. It flows into the little gaps between the sand and the pebbles and the rocks. There’s always time for a beer with friends.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  Yes, I paused reading your note, to read the PDF, and I came back to add the coffee/beer comment, but it was already there! Yes.. even if your time is all blocked up, you can always have time/space for a coffee with a loved one!
twblalock 6y ago
Learn to deal with interruptions. It's not reasonable to expect 4+ hours of uninterrupted time per day. We aren't monks copying sacred texts. Being productive despite interruptions is a job skill. It can be achieved. It's a more realistic path to success than blocking off 4+ hours per day, because most people are in a position where they need to attend the meetings they are told to attend.
- sedgjh23 6y ago
  context switching is the mind killer
  - twblalock 6y ago
    > context switching is the mind killer Only if you let it be. Minimize the context. It turns out that good programming practices work well for this: break things down and encapsulate them. You haven't done that if you need to maintain a giant complex picture in your head that goes "poof" and disappears when people interrupt you, or when you need to go to the bathroom, or when you go to lunch. Break things down into smaller parts. Encapsulate. Write things down. Get used to picking up where you left off. It takes practice just like anything else, but it's worth it. Demands on your time only become more intense as you advance in your career, so it's very beneficial to develop those skills early on.
    - judofyr 6y ago
      I have no idea why you're getting downvoted into oblivion. These all sounds like excellent ideas. Can someone elaborate what's so controversial in this comment?
      - disgruntled101 6y ago
        it has triggered mediocre CRUD maintainers that do not have fundamental development skills and yet think very highly of themselves because they know how to write a new API endpoint
      - 6y ago
dheera 6y ago
This also applies to personal time as well and I treat scheduling as a packing problem. It may sound non-intuitive at first but if someone asks me if I'm free for 1 hour on Saturday my answer will almost always be no, but if they ask if I'm free for 6 hours or free all day the answer may very well be yes assuming it's for something interesting. The reason is that 1-hour events like quick meetings or lunches put a hole in the calendar that prevents other 6-hour activities (e.g. hikes) from being scheduled.
pjmlp 6y ago
> This use to be my calendar. Every black box was a meeting. If you wonder when I did work, the answer was in the evenings (10 pm-1 am) and on weekends. Of course, that wasn't scalable. So I fixed it. Over here that wouldn't be even open for discussion, 8h it is 8h, with a legal maximum of 10h per day.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I don’t think that work was done on the clock.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It doesn't matter, 10 pm - 1 am isn't a legal work time for office work around here. Unless you're your own boss, or getting an union agreement with corresponding extra payments, that is.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Could the author be outsourced engineer in India, trying to sync his hours with American working time?
    - sverhagen 6y ago
      I also read it as them feeling maybe a need to make up for lost time... If you're a salaried employee, you won't get paid by the hour, but you may still feel a responsibility that exceeds the base hours (whether that's a good thing is obviously a different discussion). When I lived in the Netherlands, for the team I was on, such was a rare exception, but here in the USA I see a lot more of it. If you do it pseudo-voluntarily, it'd be hard to enforce rules on it, you may even do it against your company's formal rules. But I've never heard of a company actually locking you out of your work laptop at off hours. So then there you go...
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        I can lock myself of work hours, if not self employed, there is the worker protection agencies one can relate to.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I worked for a government agency that had flex days and that meant 1/4 of people were out of the office every Monday or Friday. While likely not intended, that had the benefit of essentially keeping those days free for work as a key stakeholder could easily be out of the office, making any meeting potentially useless. I think companies could benefit from that as a lot got done on those two end days.
- bartread 6y ago
  I've been having "meeting free Mondays" for about 2 years now. They're never entirely free of meetings, but often I'll only have one meeting mid-afternoon. The result is that I can spend most of the day focussing on work I actually need to get done myself. To help with this, even before the pandemic, I'd almost always work from home on Mondays as well. I also tend to try to keep mornings relatively free of interruption as I find getting a good start really sets the tone for the day as a whole. If I can spend 5 or 10 minutes planning out what I need to do, and then make useful progress on something during the first hour then I'm usually set for the rest of the day. My team know that they can contact me if they really need to, but it does massively cut down on casual interruptions as well as delivering the obvious benefits of a clear calendar.
rcarmo 6y ago
Another key thing is: do _less_ stuff _better_. And by “less” here I mean concurrent projects, not necessarily less work. I had 17 (yes, _seventeen_) calls last Friday (between 15m to an hour), mostly because I am involved in six (now seven) concurrent activities (some just starting, many ongoing) and they bunched up on the last possible day of the week. This is a intolerable pace, obviously, so I’m taking some drastic measures, but I already had Cortana booking me 3-hour blocks of “focus time” every day to “sandwich” that cheese, so the next step is to start booking off entire days.
- anticristi 6y ago
  Not saying that I like it, but I see this as a consequence of moving higher up the ladder. In 15 min, a senior architect can take a decision that potentially saves a junior developer 1 day of work. So, while the architect can't really "do" anything, overall team performance increases. Although I like minimizing interruption, I also accepted delegation as a way to make "myself" productive in the face of many interruptions.
  - sverhagen 6y ago
    I had to learn, and try to tell others every chance I get, that moving up that ladder will come with relearning how to manage your time, and learn to get gratification out of different things than earlier in your career. If you don't, you'll always walk around with the feeling that you didn't get any work done.
    - anticristi 6y ago
      That's exactly where I am at. Super-busy but not getting any work done. Thanks for the insight!
kristianov 6y ago
Before having children I used to wake up at 4 and work till 8. Those were productive days.
- juancb 6y ago
  A 20 hour work week, a pattern we should all strive to follow.
klausjensen 6y ago
I do this slightly differently, trying to accomplish the same thing: Long, uninterrupted blocks of time for deep work. I schedule all meetings on Mondays and Fridays if at all possible. I alredady have recurring commitments monday and friday mornings and afternoons, so when people want a meeting, they get my Calendy link, which only allows for booking on Fridays and Mondays - or I invite them at a time that is back to back with another meeting, trying to sneak in an uninterrupted block of time if possible. Sometimes I need to schedule a meeting on the other days, and it is not forbidden, but I work pretty hard to avoid it. :)
vncecartersknee 6y ago
How many people are even at liberty to just say “no sorry I’m not attending any meetings in this 4 hour block” ? My boss/team leader/other manager would just laugh in my face if I said I couldn’t attend meetings or asked to have them moved because of swiss cheese or something
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Depending on the org you work for it can range from "pretty much everybody" to "nobody".
- pletnes 6y ago
  I’m not so I just add something to my calendar. Busy meeting people often use the outlook scheduler to pick a time, and since I’m busy they don’t bother, and just find some other time. Works most of the time.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I was waiting for a comment like this; it implies that you yourself are in charge of your time. In practice, you're working with dozens (?) of other people that all have their tasks to do, and who need some coordination. Some can be done to change company culture to reduce and optimize meetings, of course. Hopefully.
- maigret 6y ago
  1. The way you counter such a request matters much more than the actual thing. Here, if you mention "swiss cheese", it's clear you'll get laughed at. However if you answer "I am currently bringing all meetings into clusters so I can fully focus on delivering urgent project X for the business outcome Y or client Z", you might get a different answer. 2. You have to actually try it to really know if that works or not 3. It might not stick the first time but if you do it a bit more often without being forceful (just asking "is there a time that would work in the afternoon too?"), then it might lead to a better outcome. Overall, frame it as a gain for the company, not for yourself.
- galoisgirl 6y ago
  You and your boss should have the common goal of you being productive. "I need a big chunk of time to do my job well" sounds very different from "attached is my list of demands".
tpoacher 6y ago
This works great right up until people find out the red block is 'me' time. Then you're labelled 'lazy to attend meetings so fakes them on their calendar', and people ignore either you or the presence of your block entirely.
- jimbobimbo 6y ago
  This technique does not have to work 100% of the time to be effective at what it does. Even at 80/20 it's great at preventing random folks from adding you to meetings. Effectiveness of this technique is better the larger the company is.
dmje 6y ago
Really thought provoking, and arrives at a time I'm going through some priority setting, so useful to have some more context. Although I full recognise the importance of not context switching all the time and having realistic chunks of work time, the first is hard when you're a generalist (I run a small business) and the second is hard when any code at all is involved. I find some mundane tasks take no time and then sometimes they take forever. It's really hard to time estimate in this scenario. In fact as a more general point, humans are rubbish at time estimation anyway, so it makes calendar blocking quite a challenge...
jpswade 6y ago
This is actually good advice. I read that any more than 4 meetings per day was too many, this seemed like decent advice. The reason was context switching, which makes sense. I know that if I get all my meetings done in the morning, it gives me a run at the afternoon uninterrupted or be it, dedicated interruption time if that's what's needed. So I've blocked out my afternoons for "focus work", meaning, you can now only book time in my diary in the mornings. This means meetings are now tightly packed together. No Swiss cheese. You could argue however, there's very little time to reflect, but I've yet to see negative effects of this as most of the meetings I'm in are set up to make decisions there and then, rather than to distribute information. I do finish my focus work time before the end of the day, incase anyone needs to book in an end of day catchup or otherwise check in.
- hedberg10 6y ago
  How do you get to focus in the afternoon? I can focus in the morning until maybe 3, then there's no juice left. So I do the opposite and block until then. It often has the benefit of clearing up whatever the people who were swiss cheesing my calendar "urgently"/"executively" needed to talk about.
harha 6y ago
I did that and it was a real productivity boost, not only by reducing context switching but giving me time to sit outside to think or switch to my desk without any external disturbance. Having the freedom of not having to constantly interact was super valuable. One reorg later (at a FAANG) my manager, a director, said I wasn’t respectful of others by blocking certain times of my calendar every day. So I was back to sitting in meetings that could have been emails and reading HN all day until I could get some work done at the end of the day.
- rriepe 6y ago
  Team pace is determined entirely by the manager's sense of urgency, which from what I can tell is directly proportional to how often they check their e-mail.
  - etripe 6y ago
    I got a good chuckle out of you not even considering the manager's self awareness, empathy and competence as factors. Are we living a Dilbert cartoon?
    - rriepe 6y ago
      I just finished a book (link in profile) in an obtuse/absurd humor style and there could be some overflow here.
    - harha 6y ago
      Communication is the key attribute to any promotion, no matter what they say they look for and you obviously get what you measure once the overcommunicators multiply to build their org. Related from the famous @gselevator: If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying… Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.
  - harha 6y ago
    I did actually end up solving the problem by setting up cross-functional 1:1s or whatever we called them with some friends in other departments as placeholders for private work time, came with the added benefit of a large meeting room and something for the manager to demonstrate “leadership” with.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
I try to do everything in my power to keep two days entirely free for real work. If that doesn't work, at least I'll usually have one day without a meeting / distraction. Obviously, this is not always something you can control, but if you can I highly recommend it. If you are in a position to do make this decision, make it clear to everyone all the time that you're e.g. not available on Tuesdays.
saberdancer 6y ago
I suggested this to my superiors and to HR in reviews (blockers). They all liked the idea but in the end it wasn't implemented. One other suggestion I had was to limit the number of "virtual rooms" in the company. When we were working onsite, we were constrained by number of meeting rooms. When we all moved remote due to pandemic, there is no upper limit to a number of simultaneous meetings so number of meetings increased. Meetings in my opinion are mostly useless. Especially if they are not heavily moderated and action focused.
rob74 6y ago
> Of course, that wasn't scalable. As opposed to this approach? I have my doubts. Of course, if you are a developer that's very important to the company, you may have the clout to push this through (which may then be perceived as a privilege given to you by colleagues: "ah, so-and-so is so important that he gets his undisturbed time, and we others have to schedule our meetings around him"), but what if everyone would be given the right to block off large portions of their calendar as they please? That would make it almost impossible to schedule meetings with a significant number of participants. For this to work, it would have to be embraced company-wide, e.g. a policy of "no meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays". Having customers involved further complicates things...
- aliceryhl 6y ago
  It obviously depends on the company, but it is possible in lots of places.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  It's really not that difficult so long as you allow a bit of flexibility. My team has a general rule that we schedule meetings in the morning, leaving afternoons free for focused work, but obviously if there's something that needs discussing with customers or other teams and the only time available is in the afternoon then we'll adapt to that. I also fairly frequently block out chunks of time to get actual work done - every now and then someone will ping me and ask if there's any flexibility, rather than just assuming I'm completely unavailable for the next week. People aren't robots, they'll get used to it.
kzrdude 6y ago
I must have missed its rise - is substack "the new medium"? After medium jumped the shark (i.e paywalled itself)
- Icathian 6y ago
  I'd say yes, but with a better business model for the authors. There's some really good stuff on there, though discoverability isn't great. Overall I like it, seems to re-strike the balance that Medium was going for and missed. I'd still prefer personal websites instead of centralized hosting, but this seems like a reasonable compromise.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"Swiss Cheesing your calendar" That's brilliant! That phrase is going into my 2021 lexicon!
Waterluvian 6y ago
Hide all the meetings where you're an optional attendee. Better yet, auto decline them.
mcenedella 6y ago
This is terrific advice. Whenever someone in my team complains about meetings, I ask that we get out their calendar and go through each and every meeting. We decide whether it’s required for them to be in the meeting or not. And then try to find a way to agglomerate the meeting times to allow for workblocks. In every case, it’s a huge productivity boost. The only challenges tend to be multi-function meetings, which require high-level support to move and consolidate. But it can be done! Definitely follow this advice.
codingdave 6y ago
Although I agree in principle, and I do book blocks of time for my own work, it is a fine line between settings boundaries in your work vs. presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. It can make you appear not only unhelpful, but arrogant. What I instead moved to is scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar when people look at it, explaining when I prefer meetings to be scheduled. I've found that people are willing to accept such guidance, and follow my requests better than when I had large chunks of time blocked off.
- harha 6y ago
  Respectfully disagree: presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. I learned that at the end of the day the company sees me as a contract and I should see the company the same way. Same goes for other people around, most of them aren't my friends, some of them won't hesitate to waste my time to get their work done. So if I can choose I'd rather work on my own tasks and career and need to prioritize my own time over others. scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar Makes sense as long as people are respectful, there's some who won't be. I think it's good to set the bar for my time up higher, otherwise there 's the risk of working on a lot of things that aren't helpful for my own goals. There is the opposite side too though, when I know that someone on my team would hesitate to ask, I make it clear that they can always shoot me an e-mail and I'll try to find a solution within a timeframe that is reasonable on both sides. If I have the feeling they would still hesitate, I try to reach out to them more proactively to see if there's some action needed (something thats in my private calendar, so it actually doesn't interfere). So the advice I usually give to more junior SWEs, data scientists, researchers (PMs usually know for themselves), it's to respect others and to be mindful, but also don't expect them to respect your time, so it's important to have a strategy for those who don't.
  - dasil003 6y ago
    Obviously it depends on the specific situation, but the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in requires figuring things out that would be intractable if everyone just focused on their tasks and didn’t make time to collaborate on something that wasn’t their direct goal. That doesn’t mean you have to let people waste your time, but it does call for an artful approach at balancing tasks, relationships and organizational goals.
amykhar 6y ago
I wish I could go back to this. But, I'm part of an international team now; so my productive mornings are a thing of the past. Now, I'm constantly in meetings with the European teams. Then, the American side wants some of my afternoons as well. I'm losing my mind with this.
- cbm-vic-20 6y ago
  It gets even more fun when you add folks from India- they're often on calls very late in their day. Or I'm up very early- we try to switch it up...
jimbobimbo 6y ago
Before Covid I had a recurring 12p-1p busy block in my calendar to prevent folks from dropping lunch time meetings on me. After work from home started, it became 12p-5p. Highly recommend this. Gives control of your time back to you.
- notacoward 6y ago
  I tried doing something similar because I was in a different time zone than most of my team. I blocked off 6-9pm my time, which was 3-6pm theirs, so I could have dinner etc. with my family. It didn't work. Out of more than a dozen team members, only two or three tried to accommodate my schedule. The rest either tromped over the reserved time or just left me off the invite for meetings where I should have been included. "Couldn't find a room at another time" was the excuse until COVID, but then the behavior persisted during WFH so I don't think that was really it. Based on that and other similar experiences (I worked from home for almost a decade), I'd say calendar tweaks are not the answer. The problem is culture/habits and therefore so is the solution. If other team members understand and respect the need for continuous blocks of solo time, they'll schedule meetings accordingly, or avoid scheduling meetings at all when the subject matter could/should have been addressed asynchronously. Dedicated "focus blocks" might help them do that better, but first they have to want to do it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
sailfast 6y ago
This sounds a lot like making sure you have adequate "Maker time": http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html That said, even if you're a manager you can benefit from the consolidation of things to keep you focused during the blocks you do have available if it works out for your team.
kleiba 6y ago
This is all good and well, except that scheduling a meeting also has to take other people's availabilities into account. The more people are supposed to participate, the harder the constraints.
jka 6y ago
Bundling meetings together for one individual is an improvement for that person, sure. If you think about what meetings are attempting to achieve, it's about allowing a number of people to participate in a conversation, achieve progress on some decisions or plans, and if necessary communicate out the actions required. If you think about it this way, then scheduling half-hour or one-hour blocks of time across groups of people requires significant scheduling and co-ordination overhead, and it places blocking time bounds on when each conversation officially begins (start of the meeting) and when it should conclude (end of the meeting). The useful aspects of scheduled meetings are that they encourage the participants to prepare in advance, and a well-run meeting creates a sense of focus on a particular set of agenda items. If someone's able to create a system that can achieve (measurably) the same quality of outcomes that scheduled meetings do, without the time-restricting side-effects, they'll be on to a winner. The closest thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is issue tracking systems. They allow conversations to take place asynchronously over a long duration of time, and participants and communications can be looped into (and step out of) the thread when desired. They also have the benefit that participants (current and future) can take more time than would be available in a real-time meeting to check the prior discussions, claims and statements that have led the group to their current situation.
- tchalla 6y ago
  > If you think about what meetings are attempting to achieve, it's about allowing a number of people to participate in a conversation, achieve progress on some decisions or plans, and if necessary communicate out the actions required. Broadly, every meeting fall under three categories - "Decision", "Information" or "Discussion". In any case, each of these three categories should lead to "Who does What by When" (WDWBW). In my personal experience, if WDWBW outcome is achieved - meetings move things forward. Otherwise, they don't do so much. Some things which have personally helped me to get towards WDWBW 1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting 2. Define Agenda 3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time 4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it 5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand. Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information, Discussion or Decision 6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min - for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not, stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.
pratio 6y ago
Yes, I suppose we would all love to have blocked time but it doesn't take into account the availability of others, add a spouse and kids to the mix and you're pretty much Swiss cheesing life. If the pandemic has proven one thing, it is that we can be pretty flexible when push comes to shove. So, maybe the focus of articles like these should be how to save the details from the current context when switching to the next one.
bussierem 6y ago
I gotta say, while I appreciate the sentiment, and outside of all the valid criticism laid on this by other commenters, does anyone else not notice that their "after" picture is NO BETTER than the "before" picture...? They just made bigger black boxes over multiple meetings rather than on each individual meeting, and their "work time" was still scheduled over. I feel like maybe they didn't do a great job on this, or should have like...at least faked a good result on their calendar...
- cjf101 6y ago
  I'm not saying the writer's workplace has a meeting problem, but there's a thing that happens at orgs that do have a meeting problem. It becomes normal to double book people, because you can never find a timeslot where someone doesn't have a meeting. It can also become known that you book focus time, and so people just ignore that you are busy, and book you in. It's also possible that once you are considered fairly respected that people trust you to decide what meetings you will attend. IMO, Anyone with a calendar like the one in the article should start with a conversation with leaders at the company. This is massively bad for productivity if you doing anything remotely knowledge work related. Booking focus blocks is a bit of a last resort. The problem isn't the calendar, it's the people and processes in the workplace.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Not only that I'm also somewhat shocked by the combination of their claim that they do work in 10pm to 1 am (which is bad enough on its own) and their meeting planned at 5:30 on friday. Clearly that's not a healthy combination (which perhaps sparked this blog post). I'm also somewhat curious when they even eat, some of their schedules require them to lunch before noon (in some case even 11am) or after 4pm, and it doesn't look like they start their day early. Also what kind of cruel genius plans a daily meeting from 17:30 to 18:00? Of course with 6 meetings per day you're not going to get much work done no matter how you plan your day, but you can at least try to do it in a way that's vaguely sustainable.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Cool idea yeah but not really working in real life. You can't just block out your time every day. In a multinational organisation you're dealing with people in different timezones and many other constraints, leading to there simply not being much choice. I try to get a big block of time booked too but it's usually just not possible to keep it.
jermaustin1 6y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. The only time I block on my calendar now is my lunch. Years ago I would block 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon to "work" but as I progressed my "work" began to shift, from just building things to talking to customers and then eventually to talking to everyone, which means my day went from 0-1 meeting per day, to 1-2 + 3-5 phone calls with customers, to eventually 4-8 meetings per day and my production of software diminished to almost nil. It was basically meetings all day (which I honestly didn't mind, so long as they provided food over my lunch break). Now I'm in a more development focused role, where I have almost no meetings, but I'm usually doing 1:1 with manager for 4-6 hours per day over the phone. So I get less done, but it is expected as "we aren't just hurling code, we are building software". So I get the equivalent of between 0-2 hours of software development done each day.
bradly 6y ago
If you are looking for a great app to help avoid these types of holes in your calendar I highly recommend MeetWell (https://www.meetwell.app https://www.meetwell.app). It can monitor and report on the health of your calendar to help avoid these types of issues.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I wish outlook offered an organizational annealing algorithm to suggest when recurring meetings should be by team... that would be cool :D
Flocular 6y ago
Sounds like "Let them eat cake" to me. Only bosses could follow this advise
polote 6y ago
If you really care about doing things. Stop attending to meetings. Delegates, empower people to decide by themselves. If you need to be in so many meetings, it means a lot of people think you need be consulted for a decision. It shows a bad culture
deleted 6y ago
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alien_ 6y ago
Love how the comments slightly start going off topic by discussing the Swiss cheese and then diverge completely towards the process of making Greek yogurt. Anyway... This calendar fragmentation is a real problem, I've noticed that my most productive period was when I was working 5h/day and was forced to attend only the critical meetings and ruthlessly make time for deep work as Cal Newport calls it. Nowadays with a very active 3yo child at home and a wife also working full-time remotely, we're working in 1-3 hour shifts and taking turns in taking care of the child so our calendars are perhaps the best example of Swiss cheese out there and I have no idea how to make it better.

224 points by maddynator 6y ago

I think if we changed the way we talk about meetings, schedules, work etc we could improve a lot of things. https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-change-our-language/ https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-c...

etripe 6y ago
I'd say it's more about how we feel about them. A lot of it is in the standard modus operandi for extraverts and introverts. For extraverts, meetings feel productive, because they get their energy from social stimulation. They also like brainstorms and similar initiatives, despite research saying they decrease productivity and innovation. Most "people person" and "idea guy" functions tend to be extraverts, so they drive the narrative. For introverts, discussing ideas provides energy. Meetings discussing feelings, inter-departemental drama, brainstorming, etc feel like the waste of time they are. A lot of meetings are poor replacements for thinking ahead or actual planning.

phnofive 6y ago

As always, “Stop doing $negativebehavior” is less useful than the actual advice: Schedule multiple blocks of time per week of sufficient length to allow for meaningful, independent work, rather than try fruitlessly to fit this work in around countless interruptions of, on average, less importance.

somedude895 6y ago
This year I've begun to put down all my todos in my calendar as blockers. It has reduced the time I spend in meetings drastically.
- alexdig 6y ago
  Have you experienced any backlash for doing so?
  - somedude895 6y ago
    Not at all. If there's a need for an actual important and urgent meeting people usually tell me my calendar's really full and if I can move something out of the way, which I then usually do. But nobody has questioned the method itself... yet.
- RhysU 6y ago
  This is nice in that as more work arises more back pressure appears on one's calendar.
- cathyreisenwitz 6y ago
  Classic time blocking! I really thought OP was going to be about that. https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-time-blocking https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-time-blocking
ec109685 6y ago
I actually think stop Swiss cheesing is a pretty succinct way of what you are saying in your second paragraph.
- sschueller 6y ago
  Odd that the phrase "Swiss cheesing" is used. As it implies all Swiss cheeses have holes yet only a few do. Especially odd that in the United States "Swiss Cheese" refers to one specific cheese which is the Emmentaler [1] when there are so many different kinds of cheese in Switzerland. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmental_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmental_cheese
  - WoodenChair 6y ago
    > Especially odd that in the United States "Swiss Cheese" refers to one specific cheese which is the Emmentaler [1] when there are so many different kinds of cheese in Switzerland. I don’t think it’s anymore odd than “French Fries” or “Greek Yogurt”. People like simple connections. Somebody long ago (perhaps unintentionally) did some good branding.
    - HenryBemis 6y ago
      > “Greek Yogurt” I have eaten yogurt all over the world. The "Greek" yogurt (or in some countries they call it "Greek Type" - to avoid 'lying' about the country of production/origin) is thicker/less of a liquid. It must be in the process. Most yogurts (plain, not sugary with fruites and other stuff) I've had are semi-liquid. The only 'good' yogurt I truly enjoy is the original Greek by "FAGE" called "Total" (not affiliated). I assume that similar yogurt-making process must be a regional thing (Greece, Balkans), and perhaps Greece had the industries/factories to support exports on great volumes that helped them conquer/define this type of yogurt in the 80's, 90's and establish that name.
      - masklinn 6y ago
        > Most yogurts (plain, not sugary with fruites and other stuff) I've had are semi-liquid. Semi liquid sounds excessive for actual yogurt, but what you may be looking for specifically is strained yogurts, which have a lower amount of whey (liquids) and are thus drier and thicker. Greek yogurt is indeed a common type of strained yogurt.

KETpXDDzR 6y ago

IMO there should be a cost for inviting ppl to meetings. Eg, the department should pay the attendees salaries.

somedude895 6y ago
There should be some kind of tool that tracks how much of people's time each department uses, simple (attendees from other departments) * (hours), and then each quarter the departments have to justify their use of resources and the goal should be to reduce that number. Wonder what effect that would have on company culture.
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  That could quite easily backfire, with different departments forming silos as they avoid inviting members of other departments to meetings.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  This is what it is like to work in defense. Having charge numbers for projects does not reduce meetings.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
How about the cost being that the organizer needs to do more planning; have them fill in a standard form, clearly illustrating the purpose of the meeting, an agenda, and a timeline. And someone actually leading the meeting. I think a big issue is that meetings are too informal and on a whim. If they cannot produce that, they cannot plan a meeting. Of course, before that they need to ascertain whether it could just be an email or a quick question to someone.
erik_seaberg 6y ago
“I’m continuously amazed by how many people have to ask permission to buy a $50 book, yet are empowered to call a meeting that costs tens of thousands of dollars.” — @QuinnyPig

Yan-solucracy 6y ago

On a side note : there are no holes in swiss cheese :-) , the cheese with holes in it is french and called Emmental.

killingtime74 6y ago

My manager started using this Saas with us to automate this https://www.getclockwise.com/ https://www.getclockwise.com/

bjterry 6y ago
I use Clockwise for managing my calendar. It's quite convenient if you are a manager because it can handle all your flexible meetings (aka 1:1s) even without everyone on board at your company using it. Definitely recommend it.
npunt 6y ago
Clockwise is excellent and pretty much purpose-built for this problem.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
What does it cost? I see “get started for free,” but that doesn’t tell me how they make money.
SpikeMeister 6y ago
+1 for Clockwise, it does a great job of automating this. It easily doubled my team's work time ("focus time" in Clockwise). It also has useful preferences like "prefer morning/afternoon", "no meeting days", which it takes into account when scheduling. I can't say enough good things about it. It's free at first but I would pay almost any money to keep it, the value of the extra time it gives you is enormous.
xutopia 6y ago
I loved Clockwise but unfortunately not allowed to use it at my workplace anymore. If you can use it do so! It is the best personal assistant I had in ages!

Swizec 6y ago

My favorite story on the topic — https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-story-of-priorities-and-a-jar.pdf https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-st... The following story is one that’s been circulating for awhile. I believe it holds a very important message regarding appropriately setting priorities in our lives. A professor of philosophy stood before his class with some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks about two inches in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was full. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly and watched as the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The professor then asked the students again if the jar was full. They chuckled and agreed that it was indeed full this time. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. The sand filled the remaining open areas of the jar. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this jar signifies your life. The rocks are the truly important things, such as family, health and relationships. If all else was lost and only the rocks remained, your life would still be meaningful. The pebbles are the other things that matter in your life, such as work or school. The sand signifies the remaining “small stuff” and material possessions. If you put sand into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks or the pebbles. The same can be applied to your lives. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are truly important. Pay attention to the things in life that are critical to your happiness and well-being. Take time to get medical check- ups, play with your children, go for a run, write your grandmother a letter. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, or fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first – things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just pebbles and sand. —— An often seen addition: A student then walks up to the jar and pours in a beer. It flows into the little gaps between the sand and the pebbles and the rocks. There’s always time for a beer with friends.

HenryBemis 6y ago
Yes, I paused reading your note, to read the PDF, and I came back to add the coffee/beer comment, but it was already there! Yes.. even if your time is all blocked up, you can always have time/space for a coffee with a loved one!

twblalock 6y ago

Learn to deal with interruptions. It's not reasonable to expect 4+ hours of uninterrupted time per day. We aren't monks copying sacred texts. Being productive despite interruptions is a job skill. It can be achieved. It's a more realistic path to success than blocking off 4+ hours per day, because most people are in a position where they need to attend the meetings they are told to attend.

sedgjh23 6y ago
context switching is the mind killer
- twblalock 6y ago
  > context switching is the mind killer Only if you let it be. Minimize the context. It turns out that good programming practices work well for this: break things down and encapsulate them. You haven't done that if you need to maintain a giant complex picture in your head that goes "poof" and disappears when people interrupt you, or when you need to go to the bathroom, or when you go to lunch. Break things down into smaller parts. Encapsulate. Write things down. Get used to picking up where you left off. It takes practice just like anything else, but it's worth it. Demands on your time only become more intense as you advance in your career, so it's very beneficial to develop those skills early on.
  - judofyr 6y ago
    I have no idea why you're getting downvoted into oblivion. These all sounds like excellent ideas. Can someone elaborate what's so controversial in this comment?
    - disgruntled101 6y ago
      it has triggered mediocre CRUD maintainers that do not have fundamental development skills and yet think very highly of themselves because they know how to write a new API endpoint
    - 6y ago

dheera 6y ago

This also applies to personal time as well and I treat scheduling as a packing problem. It may sound non-intuitive at first but if someone asks me if I'm free for 1 hour on Saturday my answer will almost always be no, but if they ask if I'm free for 6 hours or free all day the answer may very well be yes assuming it's for something interesting. The reason is that 1-hour events like quick meetings or lunches put a hole in the calendar that prevents other 6-hour activities (e.g. hikes) from being scheduled.

pjmlp 6y ago

> This use to be my calendar. Every black box was a meeting. If you wonder when I did work, the answer was in the evenings (10 pm-1 am) and on weekends. Of course, that wasn't scalable. So I fixed it. Over here that wouldn't be even open for discussion, 8h it is 8h, with a legal maximum of 10h per day.

Aeolun 6y ago
I don’t think that work was done on the clock.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It doesn't matter, 10 pm - 1 am isn't a legal work time for office work around here. Unless you're your own boss, or getting an union agreement with corresponding extra payments, that is.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Could the author be outsourced engineer in India, trying to sync his hours with American working time?
  - sverhagen 6y ago
    I also read it as them feeling maybe a need to make up for lost time... If you're a salaried employee, you won't get paid by the hour, but you may still feel a responsibility that exceeds the base hours (whether that's a good thing is obviously a different discussion). When I lived in the Netherlands, for the team I was on, such was a rare exception, but here in the USA I see a lot more of it. If you do it pseudo-voluntarily, it'd be hard to enforce rules on it, you may even do it against your company's formal rules. But I've never heard of a company actually locking you out of your work laptop at off hours. So then there you go...
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I can lock myself of work hours, if not self employed, there is the worker protection agencies one can relate to.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I worked for a government agency that had flex days and that meant 1/4 of people were out of the office every Monday or Friday. While likely not intended, that had the benefit of essentially keeping those days free for work as a key stakeholder could easily be out of the office, making any meeting potentially useless. I think companies could benefit from that as a lot got done on those two end days.

bartread 6y ago
I've been having "meeting free Mondays" for about 2 years now. They're never entirely free of meetings, but often I'll only have one meeting mid-afternoon. The result is that I can spend most of the day focussing on work I actually need to get done myself. To help with this, even before the pandemic, I'd almost always work from home on Mondays as well. I also tend to try to keep mornings relatively free of interruption as I find getting a good start really sets the tone for the day as a whole. If I can spend 5 or 10 minutes planning out what I need to do, and then make useful progress on something during the first hour then I'm usually set for the rest of the day. My team know that they can contact me if they really need to, but it does massively cut down on casual interruptions as well as delivering the obvious benefits of a clear calendar.

rcarmo 6y ago

Another key thing is: do _less_ stuff _better_. And by “less” here I mean concurrent projects, not necessarily less work. I had 17 (yes, _seventeen_) calls last Friday (between 15m to an hour), mostly because I am involved in six (now seven) concurrent activities (some just starting, many ongoing) and they bunched up on the last possible day of the week. This is a intolerable pace, obviously, so I’m taking some drastic measures, but I already had Cortana booking me 3-hour blocks of “focus time” every day to “sandwich” that cheese, so the next step is to start booking off entire days.

anticristi 6y ago
Not saying that I like it, but I see this as a consequence of moving higher up the ladder. In 15 min, a senior architect can take a decision that potentially saves a junior developer 1 day of work. So, while the architect can't really "do" anything, overall team performance increases. Although I like minimizing interruption, I also accepted delegation as a way to make "myself" productive in the face of many interruptions.
- sverhagen 6y ago
  I had to learn, and try to tell others every chance I get, that moving up that ladder will come with relearning how to manage your time, and learn to get gratification out of different things than earlier in your career. If you don't, you'll always walk around with the feeling that you didn't get any work done.
  - anticristi 6y ago
    That's exactly where I am at. Super-busy but not getting any work done. Thanks for the insight!

kristianov 6y ago

Before having children I used to wake up at 4 and work till 8. Those were productive days.

juancb 6y ago
A 20 hour work week, a pattern we should all strive to follow.

klausjensen 6y ago

I do this slightly differently, trying to accomplish the same thing: Long, uninterrupted blocks of time for deep work. I schedule all meetings on Mondays and Fridays if at all possible. I alredady have recurring commitments monday and friday mornings and afternoons, so when people want a meeting, they get my Calendy link, which only allows for booking on Fridays and Mondays - or I invite them at a time that is back to back with another meeting, trying to sneak in an uninterrupted block of time if possible. Sometimes I need to schedule a meeting on the other days, and it is not forbidden, but I work pretty hard to avoid it. :)

vncecartersknee 6y ago

How many people are even at liberty to just say “no sorry I’m not attending any meetings in this 4 hour block” ? My boss/team leader/other manager would just laugh in my face if I said I couldn’t attend meetings or asked to have them moved because of swiss cheese or something

yoz-y 6y ago
Depending on the org you work for it can range from "pretty much everybody" to "nobody".
pletnes 6y ago
I’m not so I just add something to my calendar. Busy meeting people often use the outlook scheduler to pick a time, and since I’m busy they don’t bother, and just find some other time. Works most of the time.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I was waiting for a comment like this; it implies that you yourself are in charge of your time. In practice, you're working with dozens (?) of other people that all have their tasks to do, and who need some coordination. Some can be done to change company culture to reduce and optimize meetings, of course. Hopefully.
maigret 6y ago
1. The way you counter such a request matters much more than the actual thing. Here, if you mention "swiss cheese", it's clear you'll get laughed at. However if you answer "I am currently bringing all meetings into clusters so I can fully focus on delivering urgent project X for the business outcome Y or client Z", you might get a different answer. 2. You have to actually try it to really know if that works or not 3. It might not stick the first time but if you do it a bit more often without being forceful (just asking "is there a time that would work in the afternoon too?"), then it might lead to a better outcome. Overall, frame it as a gain for the company, not for yourself.
galoisgirl 6y ago
You and your boss should have the common goal of you being productive. "I need a big chunk of time to do my job well" sounds very different from "attached is my list of demands".

tpoacher 6y ago

This works great right up until people find out the red block is 'me' time. Then you're labelled 'lazy to attend meetings so fakes them on their calendar', and people ignore either you or the presence of your block entirely.

jimbobimbo 6y ago
This technique does not have to work 100% of the time to be effective at what it does. Even at 80/20 it's great at preventing random folks from adding you to meetings. Effectiveness of this technique is better the larger the company is.

dmje 6y ago

Really thought provoking, and arrives at a time I'm going through some priority setting, so useful to have some more context. Although I full recognise the importance of not context switching all the time and having realistic chunks of work time, the first is hard when you're a generalist (I run a small business) and the second is hard when any code at all is involved. I find some mundane tasks take no time and then sometimes they take forever. It's really hard to time estimate in this scenario. In fact as a more general point, humans are rubbish at time estimation anyway, so it makes calendar blocking quite a challenge...

jpswade 6y ago

This is actually good advice. I read that any more than 4 meetings per day was too many, this seemed like decent advice. The reason was context switching, which makes sense. I know that if I get all my meetings done in the morning, it gives me a run at the afternoon uninterrupted or be it, dedicated interruption time if that's what's needed. So I've blocked out my afternoons for "focus work", meaning, you can now only book time in my diary in the mornings. This means meetings are now tightly packed together. No Swiss cheese. You could argue however, there's very little time to reflect, but I've yet to see negative effects of this as most of the meetings I'm in are set up to make decisions there and then, rather than to distribute information. I do finish my focus work time before the end of the day, incase anyone needs to book in an end of day catchup or otherwise check in.

hedberg10 6y ago
How do you get to focus in the afternoon? I can focus in the morning until maybe 3, then there's no juice left. So I do the opposite and block until then. It often has the benefit of clearing up whatever the people who were swiss cheesing my calendar "urgently"/"executively" needed to talk about.

harha 6y ago

I did that and it was a real productivity boost, not only by reducing context switching but giving me time to sit outside to think or switch to my desk without any external disturbance. Having the freedom of not having to constantly interact was super valuable. One reorg later (at a FAANG) my manager, a director, said I wasn’t respectful of others by blocking certain times of my calendar every day. So I was back to sitting in meetings that could have been emails and reading HN all day until I could get some work done at the end of the day.

rriepe 6y ago
Team pace is determined entirely by the manager's sense of urgency, which from what I can tell is directly proportional to how often they check their e-mail.
- etripe 6y ago
  I got a good chuckle out of you not even considering the manager's self awareness, empathy and competence as factors. Are we living a Dilbert cartoon?
  - rriepe 6y ago
    I just finished a book (link in profile) in an obtuse/absurd humor style and there could be some overflow here.
  - harha 6y ago
    Communication is the key attribute to any promotion, no matter what they say they look for and you obviously get what you measure once the overcommunicators multiply to build their org. Related from the famous @gselevator: If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying… Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.
- harha 6y ago
  I did actually end up solving the problem by setting up cross-functional 1:1s or whatever we called them with some friends in other departments as placeholders for private work time, came with the added benefit of a large meeting room and something for the manager to demonstrate “leadership” with.

jonathanstrange 6y ago

I try to do everything in my power to keep two days entirely free for real work. If that doesn't work, at least I'll usually have one day without a meeting / distraction. Obviously, this is not always something you can control, but if you can I highly recommend it. If you are in a position to do make this decision, make it clear to everyone all the time that you're e.g. not available on Tuesdays.

saberdancer 6y ago

I suggested this to my superiors and to HR in reviews (blockers). They all liked the idea but in the end it wasn't implemented. One other suggestion I had was to limit the number of "virtual rooms" in the company. When we were working onsite, we were constrained by number of meeting rooms. When we all moved remote due to pandemic, there is no upper limit to a number of simultaneous meetings so number of meetings increased. Meetings in my opinion are mostly useless. Especially if they are not heavily moderated and action focused.

rob74 6y ago

> Of course, that wasn't scalable. As opposed to this approach? I have my doubts. Of course, if you are a developer that's very important to the company, you may have the clout to push this through (which may then be perceived as a privilege given to you by colleagues: "ah, so-and-so is so important that he gets his undisturbed time, and we others have to schedule our meetings around him"), but what if everyone would be given the right to block off large portions of their calendar as they please? That would make it almost impossible to schedule meetings with a significant number of participants. For this to work, it would have to be embraced company-wide, e.g. a policy of "no meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays". Having customers involved further complicates things...

aliceryhl 6y ago
It obviously depends on the company, but it is possible in lots of places.
jon-wood 6y ago
It's really not that difficult so long as you allow a bit of flexibility. My team has a general rule that we schedule meetings in the morning, leaving afternoons free for focused work, but obviously if there's something that needs discussing with customers or other teams and the only time available is in the afternoon then we'll adapt to that. I also fairly frequently block out chunks of time to get actual work done - every now and then someone will ping me and ask if there's any flexibility, rather than just assuming I'm completely unavailable for the next week. People aren't robots, they'll get used to it.

kzrdude 6y ago

I must have missed its rise - is substack "the new medium"? After medium jumped the shark (i.e paywalled itself)

Icathian 6y ago
I'd say yes, but with a better business model for the authors. There's some really good stuff on there, though discoverability isn't great. Overall I like it, seems to re-strike the balance that Medium was going for and missed. I'd still prefer personal websites instead of centralized hosting, but this seems like a reasonable compromise.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"Swiss Cheesing your calendar" That's brilliant! That phrase is going into my 2021 lexicon!

Waterluvian 6y ago

Hide all the meetings where you're an optional attendee. Better yet, auto decline them.

mcenedella 6y ago

This is terrific advice. Whenever someone in my team complains about meetings, I ask that we get out their calendar and go through each and every meeting. We decide whether it’s required for them to be in the meeting or not. And then try to find a way to agglomerate the meeting times to allow for workblocks. In every case, it’s a huge productivity boost. The only challenges tend to be multi-function meetings, which require high-level support to move and consolidate. But it can be done! Definitely follow this advice.

codingdave 6y ago

Although I agree in principle, and I do book blocks of time for my own work, it is a fine line between settings boundaries in your work vs. presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. It can make you appear not only unhelpful, but arrogant. What I instead moved to is scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar when people look at it, explaining when I prefer meetings to be scheduled. I've found that people are willing to accept such guidance, and follow my requests better than when I had large chunks of time blocked off.

harha 6y ago
Respectfully disagree: presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. I learned that at the end of the day the company sees me as a contract and I should see the company the same way. Same goes for other people around, most of them aren't my friends, some of them won't hesitate to waste my time to get their work done. So if I can choose I'd rather work on my own tasks and career and need to prioritize my own time over others. scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar Makes sense as long as people are respectful, there's some who won't be. I think it's good to set the bar for my time up higher, otherwise there 's the risk of working on a lot of things that aren't helpful for my own goals. There is the opposite side too though, when I know that someone on my team would hesitate to ask, I make it clear that they can always shoot me an e-mail and I'll try to find a solution within a timeframe that is reasonable on both sides. If I have the feeling they would still hesitate, I try to reach out to them more proactively to see if there's some action needed (something thats in my private calendar, so it actually doesn't interfere). So the advice I usually give to more junior SWEs, data scientists, researchers (PMs usually know for themselves), it's to respect others and to be mindful, but also don't expect them to respect your time, so it's important to have a strategy for those who don't.
- dasil003 6y ago
  Obviously it depends on the specific situation, but the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in requires figuring things out that would be intractable if everyone just focused on their tasks and didn’t make time to collaborate on something that wasn’t their direct goal. That doesn’t mean you have to let people waste your time, but it does call for an artful approach at balancing tasks, relationships and organizational goals.

amykhar 6y ago

I wish I could go back to this. But, I'm part of an international team now; so my productive mornings are a thing of the past. Now, I'm constantly in meetings with the European teams. Then, the American side wants some of my afternoons as well. I'm losing my mind with this.

cbm-vic-20 6y ago
It gets even more fun when you add folks from India- they're often on calls very late in their day. Or I'm up very early- we try to switch it up...

jimbobimbo 6y ago

Before Covid I had a recurring 12p-1p busy block in my calendar to prevent folks from dropping lunch time meetings on me. After work from home started, it became 12p-5p. Highly recommend this. Gives control of your time back to you.

notacoward 6y ago
I tried doing something similar because I was in a different time zone than most of my team. I blocked off 6-9pm my time, which was 3-6pm theirs, so I could have dinner etc. with my family. It didn't work. Out of more than a dozen team members, only two or three tried to accommodate my schedule. The rest either tromped over the reserved time or just left me off the invite for meetings where I should have been included. "Couldn't find a room at another time" was the excuse until COVID, but then the behavior persisted during WFH so I don't think that was really it. Based on that and other similar experiences (I worked from home for almost a decade), I'd say calendar tweaks are not the answer. The problem is culture/habits and therefore so is the solution. If other team members understand and respect the need for continuous blocks of solo time, they'll schedule meetings accordingly, or avoid scheduling meetings at all when the subject matter could/should have been addressed asynchronously. Dedicated "focus blocks" might help them do that better, but first they have to want to do it.
- deleted 6y ago
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sailfast 6y ago

This sounds a lot like making sure you have adequate "Maker time": http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html That said, even if you're a manager you can benefit from the consolidation of things to keep you focused during the blocks you do have available if it works out for your team.

kleiba 6y ago

This is all good and well, except that scheduling a meeting also has to take other people's availabilities into account. The more people are supposed to participate, the harder the constraints.

jka 6y ago

Bundling meetings together for one individual is an improvement for that person, sure. If you think about what meetings are attempting to achieve, it's about allowing a number of people to participate in a conversation, achieve progress on some decisions or plans, and if necessary communicate out the actions required. If you think about it this way, then scheduling half-hour or one-hour blocks of time across groups of people requires significant scheduling and co-ordination overhead, and it places blocking time bounds on when each conversation officially begins (start of the meeting) and when it should conclude (end of the meeting). The useful aspects of scheduled meetings are that they encourage the participants to prepare in advance, and a well-run meeting creates a sense of focus on a particular set of agenda items. If someone's able to create a system that can achieve (measurably) the same quality of outcomes that scheduled meetings do, without the time-restricting side-effects, they'll be on to a winner. The closest thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is issue tracking systems. They allow conversations to take place asynchronously over a long duration of time, and participants and communications can be looped into (and step out of) the thread when desired. They also have the benefit that participants (current and future) can take more time than would be available in a real-time meeting to check the prior discussions, claims and statements that have led the group to their current situation.

tchalla 6y ago
> If you think about what meetings are attempting to achieve, it's about allowing a number of people to participate in a conversation, achieve progress on some decisions or plans, and if necessary communicate out the actions required. Broadly, every meeting fall under three categories - "Decision", "Information" or "Discussion". In any case, each of these three categories should lead to "Who does What by When" (WDWBW). In my personal experience, if WDWBW outcome is achieved - meetings move things forward. Otherwise, they don't do so much. Some things which have personally helped me to get towards WDWBW 1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting 2. Define Agenda 3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time 4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it 5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand. Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information, Discussion or Decision 6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min - for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not, stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.

pratio 6y ago

Yes, I suppose we would all love to have blocked time but it doesn't take into account the availability of others, add a spouse and kids to the mix and you're pretty much Swiss cheesing life. If the pandemic has proven one thing, it is that we can be pretty flexible when push comes to shove. So, maybe the focus of articles like these should be how to save the details from the current context when switching to the next one.

bussierem 6y ago

I gotta say, while I appreciate the sentiment, and outside of all the valid criticism laid on this by other commenters, does anyone else not notice that their "after" picture is NO BETTER than the "before" picture...? They just made bigger black boxes over multiple meetings rather than on each individual meeting, and their "work time" was still scheduled over. I feel like maybe they didn't do a great job on this, or should have like...at least faked a good result on their calendar...

cjf101 6y ago
I'm not saying the writer's workplace has a meeting problem, but there's a thing that happens at orgs that do have a meeting problem. It becomes normal to double book people, because you can never find a timeslot where someone doesn't have a meeting. It can also become known that you book focus time, and so people just ignore that you are busy, and book you in. It's also possible that once you are considered fairly respected that people trust you to decide what meetings you will attend. IMO, Anyone with a calendar like the one in the article should start with a conversation with leaders at the company. This is massively bad for productivity if you doing anything remotely knowledge work related. Booking focus blocks is a bit of a last resort. The problem isn't the calendar, it's the people and processes in the workplace.
contravariant 6y ago
Not only that I'm also somewhat shocked by the combination of their claim that they do work in 10pm to 1 am (which is bad enough on its own) and their meeting planned at 5:30 on friday. Clearly that's not a healthy combination (which perhaps sparked this blog post). I'm also somewhat curious when they even eat, some of their schedules require them to lunch before noon (in some case even 11am) or after 4pm, and it doesn't look like they start their day early. Also what kind of cruel genius plans a daily meeting from 17:30 to 18:00? Of course with 6 meetings per day you're not going to get much work done no matter how you plan your day, but you can at least try to do it in a way that's vaguely sustainable.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Cool idea yeah but not really working in real life. You can't just block out your time every day. In a multinational organisation you're dealing with people in different timezones and many other constraints, leading to there simply not being much choice. I try to get a big block of time booked too but it's usually just not possible to keep it.

jermaustin1 6y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. The only time I block on my calendar now is my lunch. Years ago I would block 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon to "work" but as I progressed my "work" began to shift, from just building things to talking to customers and then eventually to talking to everyone, which means my day went from 0-1 meeting per day, to 1-2 + 3-5 phone calls with customers, to eventually 4-8 meetings per day and my production of software diminished to almost nil. It was basically meetings all day (which I honestly didn't mind, so long as they provided food over my lunch break). Now I'm in a more development focused role, where I have almost no meetings, but I'm usually doing 1:1 with manager for 4-6 hours per day over the phone. So I get less done, but it is expected as "we aren't just hurling code, we are building software". So I get the equivalent of between 0-2 hours of software development done each day.

bradly 6y ago

If you are looking for a great app to help avoid these types of holes in your calendar I highly recommend MeetWell (https://www.meetwell.app https://www.meetwell.app). It can monitor and report on the health of your calendar to help avoid these types of issues.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I wish outlook offered an organizational annealing algorithm to suggest when recurring meetings should be by team... that would be cool :D

Flocular 6y ago

Sounds like "Let them eat cake" to me. Only bosses could follow this advise

polote 6y ago

If you really care about doing things. Stop attending to meetings. Delegates, empower people to decide by themselves. If you need to be in so many meetings, it means a lot of people think you need be consulted for a decision. It shows a bad culture

deleted 6y ago

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alien_ 6y ago

Love how the comments slightly start going off topic by discussing the Swiss cheese and then diverge completely towards the process of making Greek yogurt. Anyway... This calendar fragmentation is a real problem, I've noticed that my most productive period was when I was working 5h/day and was forced to attend only the critical meetings and ruthlessly make time for deep work as Cal Newport calls it. Nowadays with a very active 3yo child at home and a wife also working full-time remotely, we're working in 1-3 hour shifts and taking turns in taking care of the child so our calendars are perhaps the best example of Swiss cheese out there and I have no idea how to make it better.