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How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? Usually the hardest people to schedule are the manager who w
by MarkMarine 4y ago
How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? Usually the hardest people to schedule are the manager who wants to sit in on every meeting, and the PM who also wants to be in every meeting. They look at my time and see something easy to schedule, there is a big empty block right there and it fits the tiny sliver of time they have free in the day.
There is an impedance mismatch between professional meeting attenders, and the people the build, and the meeting attenders are in charge.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoIf your manager does that, they are not very good at their job.
- stemlord 4y agoI like to fill in those spots with "FOCUSED WORK TIME" blocks instead of leaving it empty, it lets my PMs know I desire that time to work.
- onion2k 4y agoExactly. Google Calendar even has a specific category for it.
- onion2k 4y agoHow do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? The way I do it is to block out 4 hours in the afternoon in my calendar as "Focus Time" that people aren't allowed to touch, and let people schedule me into meetings any time other than that. If all the devs on a team do it then the meetings they're required in just naturally gravitate to being shorter ones in the morning with fewer gaps. I'm quite fortunate in the sense that the company I work in operates as a 'sociocracy' (https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/) so teams do actually get to define that this sort of thing is acceptable. In other companies it might be a harder sell, but most managers I've worked with do understand that there's other work to do besides meetings so they're usually open to talking about how to do better as a team. Especially if their bonus is related to performance. Even if they're not open to talking about it, you can always raise it in every single retro for months until someone starts getting annoyed enough to fix it.
- burnished 4y agoPut meetings on your own calendar to block out chunks of time. People will see the conflict and look for a better time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joncrocks 4y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- singron 4y agoThis can be a difficult social problem. Do you need to ask everyone permission? What can you move? Will you make the situation much worse for someone else? I work at a company trying to solve some of these problems: https://www.getclockwise.com https://www.getclockwise.com We let everyone describe their preferences and flexibility and then we optimize meeting placement accordingly. Sorry for the plug.
- MarkMarine 4y agoI used clockwise before, but the PMs that get slotted into the meetings were the problem. They have every minute blocked up with meetings so there is no flexibility.