9 ms·

Focus Time Saved Me from Burnout

160 points by frankgrecojr 4y ago

frankgrecojr 4y ago
What companies do we think do this well!?
cryptozeus 4y ago
The one thing - great book
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  Yes! I love that book! It's done wonders to my productivity.
  - reidjs 4y ago
    I understand and agree that it's best to focus on the highest priority thing first. But how do you identify what the "one thing" is at any given time?
    - Androider 4y ago
      Usually it's pretty clear, e.g. you can say to yourself in the morning "If I complete X today, it will have been a good day". Yet somehow at the end of the day you will have spent all your time doing everything but X.
- vira28 4y ago
  How’s it different from deepwork?
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    They could share similar ideas! I put it on my reading list :)
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Some people constantly want more meetings because it's de facto money with zero effort. As someone who wants to do stuff one can feel a clear lack of meaning in all of it. It's like you are stuck in a web of trivialities. it's not overwork but work (and even just presence) without a sense of purpose and some progress toward a goal which leads to depression.
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  Yes agreed. I like to gain sticky consensus on work and then apply deliberate focus for me and my team so that we can ride a wave of motivation. By doing this, people are surprised with how fast things can get done.
- __underscores 4y ago
  This is very common and sometimes deeply ingrained in the company culture. At my previous company, we had a situation where no one wanted to be promoted to a team lead role due to the expectation that the person was completely moved off of any meaningful work to exclusively to participate in meetings (also the reason why the previous lead left).
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    This is something I have struggled with throughout my career as well. To be honest, i've only seen a few ICs successfully manage a balance.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  If you’re a builder - someone who lives to work, not just works to live - then you should start a company or work for yourself. Otherwise you’re wasting your potential by transferring it to someone else. Find your people or you will go insane. That’s my unsolicited advice for you.
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    That's an interesting take! I think I agree with it. Of course every builder might not have the risk appetite for that but they could join an early stage startup as an alternative.
Hadriel 4y ago
This is google workplace only btw
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  ~Can you expand on that thought?~ Oh do you mean the Focus Time feature?
- deadfece 4y ago
  Office 365 has also offered Focus Time scheduling for 18mos+ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/personal/use/focus-plan https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/personal/use/...
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    Thanks for this! I think I’ll add this to the blog
joegahona 4y ago
> For those who use Google calendar as I do, a recently introduced feature allows you to set up focus blocks with the option to decline conflicting events. I'd recommend against announcing that the meeting is being declined because of a focus block. Someone will read that as "free time" and demand you meet anyway. Put 3-4 fake "meetings" on your calendar during the time you need, so it just looks like you're booked. If your company requires you keep your calendar public, call the meetings something gross like "vendor review" or "Finance and Engineering Integration: Overlapping Initiatives" and nobody will question it.
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  That definitely is an alternative and is something I used to do. The reason I like the focus time feature (if implemented the way I suggest) is that the goal is to instill this culture across the team so that it's more of a team/company culture and less of something that just you do. I'd love to hear people's experience trying this out!
  - ffreire 4y ago
    I do this regularly, and to the extent that I'm able I put the task in the description so that my team knows more or less what I'm prioritizing. You can also create recurring OOO and Focus Time events now, so I have lunch blocked off and 30min at the end of each day to prepare for the next. It's a secret super power to staying on top of things and creating rituals that help me sign off at a reasonable hour instead of sliding into unproductively and less time with family. Really, my only gripe with Google Calendar at this point is that you can't define custom colors nor label those colors. I use that feature heavily now to give me an at a glance view of which projects or activities my time is going to on a weekly basis. The colors don't have consistency across months though because I have to re-use colors for different purposes.
    - frankgrecojr 4y ago
      The ability to create a recurring Focus Time event has been game changing!
cristianpascu 4y ago
I quit my job instead. If the schedule is randomly or unpredictably fragmented by meetings, being expected to also write high quality code is quite simply inhumane. It’s not you that should find tricks to save you from a burnout. It very much looks and sounds and it surely is a mess of a management.
madrox 4y ago
Everyone at my new job uses Clockwise, which will rearrange calendars across the org to maximize focus time for everyone (also address double-booking). This is my first time in 10 years since becoming an EM where I don't have to spend time managing my calendar every day to get focus time. The jump to my productivity is huge. Can't recommend focus time (and Clockwise!) enough. If I could buy stock in them, I would.
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  Clockwise is amazing! The issue i've had is getting everyone on my team to use it.
  - madrox 4y ago
    For us, it's top-down led. You may get more success if you convince your skip level or VP it's worth adopting.
- CSDude 4y ago
  I hate it rearranges a meeting that I know it'd happen in a few hours, I plan my day accordingly, boom it's changed. That's frustrating. I worked at a big corp and people loved fully packed calendars with meetings. Wondered when they'd get any actual work done alone, without a meeting. My calendar was mostly empty except meetings that were crucial. Even though I was in a Principal role, new grads had more packed calendars than me. As a result, Clockwise moved most of my meetings.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    This "when do you get actual work done" bugs me sometimes. It's true to some extent, but sometimes a bunch of engineers in a room together get a lot of work done. Sometimes even a lot more than if they each did their own thing, come together, and discover that it doesn't fit together. Not all meetings are like that, yeah, and there's a limit, but meetings not being "actual work" is not generally true. Also, since pandemic times, I've had it a few times that people were circling via chat or email on a topic forever, and a quick 15 minute online meeting (independently of whether the camera was on) resolved it immediately.
jobu 4y ago
The senior architects and principle engineers at my company have started scheduling focus hours as well as office hours for people to drop in and ask questions. They were getting stretched pretty thin by being invited to design meetings for multiple different teams, and the office hours have been a great way to combat that burden. People drop in, ask some design questions and leave. Since there are usually multiple people waiting to ask questions it keeps the discussion short and focused instead of filling up a 30-60 minute meeting just because that's what was scheduled. It also lets the architect decide to schedule a focused design session if it's needed instead of letting others fill their calendars.
- sharadov 4y ago
  Agree, office times were a lifesaver in my last job.
- curious_cat_163 4y ago
  Do we know anyone who is doing this in the "mostly" remote world that we are living in right now?
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  This is brilliant! I did this at my last gig with great success!
icedchai 4y ago
I used to work at a place that had so many meetings. They reserved a couple afternoons a week for "focus time." Unfortunately, that didn't work. People just started scheduling meeting during those times. Eventually, I got so disgusted with the constant interruptions that I found another job.
dan-g 4y ago
“Deep Work” by Cal Newport (and the related “Time Block Planner” he published as well) goes into depth about why deep work focus time is so important for knowledge workers, and has some additional tips for how to make the most of your workday. Would highly recommend both books! https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  Thanks! This book has been brought up a few times in this thread and i'm very motivated to read it now!
aeruder 4y ago
Sad, but I would occasionally use my "unlimited" PTO to take a week off and just get work done. Most of the pain started when we transitioned to a sprints from a lack of process. In theory, this was to make things faster (which actually most of the reasons we were so slow was unrelated to process). My week suddenly went from getting things done to: - 60 minute meetings fighting over whether tickets were 3 or 5 story points - turning our entire process into some kind of perverse waterfall method where stories involved days of prep work defining every step so that we could accurately estimate story points (I thought this was the opposite of agile?) - offers to "help" from project managers and managers when things took longer than expected - this help took the form of additional meetings. - absolute inflexibility over my noon standup. I could be in the deepest of zones and people would literally slack repeatedly until you showed up for that thing Cue the "oh you were doing <X> wrong!!" people. Modern software practice sucks. Its fine for small bugs and very well defined tasks. Outside of that it is just interruptions, interruptions, interruptions. I also ended up just quitting. New place is better, but still in many ways the same. At least here I don't have comparisons made to my old days of the pre-software-process productivity.
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  I've never worked anywhere with story-points, but reading about it now sounds like a metric that will be abused the moment there's any meaning or consequence behind it
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    From my experience, it only works if the entire company is completely bought in to the entire system. Even going so far as the SAFe framework. Companies think they can pick/choose which pieces they implement and this is a recipe for failure.
    - closeparen 4y ago
      Don't think I've ever disagreed more passionately with an HN comment. Being "bought in" to agile development means individuals over processes, teams pick and choose what works for them. Insisting that everyone everywhere goes all the way on the same predefined process is as far away as it gets.
dangus 4y ago
The only reason we can't book 4 hours of time a day is because our employers run "lean" and completely neglect to scale out personnel along with projects. I know people who would absolutely be replaced by 3 people if they quit. My advice? Advocate for yourself, because your boss and their boss doesn't actually have any clue how much work it is in the trenches. Management is almost never aware of all that much about what you're doing, and a lot of capacity issues like this eventually bubble up and catch them by complete surprise simply because individual contributors have just been silently dealing with the frog-boiling. This all means you should: 1. Come up with specific and measurable justification in terms of hours/dollars for why you need more employees as the company and therefore your workload grows 2. "Offer" to push back excess work and give your management choices while doing so: "Project A will take us X hours over capacity for next quarter, should I prioritize Project A or Project B? We can only deliver # projects in the next quarter at our current staffing level." Blocking off time on your calendar doesn't really solve the problem because it's something that a lot of people, especially customer-facing ones, simply can't do without doing everything I described above.
TillE 4y ago
Despite many well-intentioned attempts, it feels like the whole process of software development, from people management to software architecture, has barely improved in the past 20 years or so. It sounds like this guy should probably have a pure management role, where they're reviewing code but not expected to write very much themselves. Having a role with both responsibilities seems bound to lead to frustration.
_8j50 4y ago
Perhaps a "no meetings before lunch" policy would help many types of teams. Is this doable at your team?
jmcgough 4y ago
I used to work somewhere with three standups every day. I'd lose and hour and a half every morning for updates that often didn't involve me or could have been async.
PsySecGroup 4y ago
anotherevan 4y ago
I seem to remember reading about one or two companies that had a focus time or a no meeting time part of the day or week for the whole company - or at least the departments where it made the most sense (engineering, but not sales perhaps). I can really see the advantages of having focus time synchronised across your colleagues. If we all did focus times across different parts of the day, you would _never_ be able to schedule a meeting. (Hmmm, that may actually be a good thing...)
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  If I were running a company, there would be no meetings before noon.
ildavide 4y ago
Daily standup was helpful when covid first hit to be a means to help keep our team together. But since then it’s sort of morphed into a check-in just for the sake of checking in. Very little value. And folks don’t feel the need to address real issues because it wasn’t brought up in that daily standup. I think there should be more intention to keep folks focused and heads down when they need to be and schedule one-off meetings that serve a purpose.

160 points by frankgrecojr 4y ago

frankgrecojr 4y ago

What companies do we think do this well!?

cryptozeus 4y ago

The one thing - great book

frankgrecojr 4y ago
Yes! I love that book! It's done wonders to my productivity.
- reidjs 4y ago
  I understand and agree that it's best to focus on the highest priority thing first. But how do you identify what the "one thing" is at any given time?
  - Androider 4y ago
    Usually it's pretty clear, e.g. you can say to yourself in the morning "If I complete X today, it will have been a good day". Yet somehow at the end of the day you will have spent all your time doing everything but X.
vira28 4y ago
How’s it different from deepwork?
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  They could share similar ideas! I put it on my reading list :)

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Some people constantly want more meetings because it's de facto money with zero effort. As someone who wants to do stuff one can feel a clear lack of meaning in all of it. It's like you are stuck in a web of trivialities. it's not overwork but work (and even just presence) without a sense of purpose and some progress toward a goal which leads to depression.

frankgrecojr 4y ago
Yes agreed. I like to gain sticky consensus on work and then apply deliberate focus for me and my team so that we can ride a wave of motivation. By doing this, people are surprised with how fast things can get done.
__underscores 4y ago
This is very common and sometimes deeply ingrained in the company culture. At my previous company, we had a situation where no one wanted to be promoted to a team lead role due to the expectation that the person was completely moved off of any meaningful work to exclusively to participate in meetings (also the reason why the previous lead left).
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  This is something I have struggled with throughout my career as well. To be honest, i've only seen a few ICs successfully manage a balance.
TechBro8615 4y ago
If you’re a builder - someone who lives to work, not just works to live - then you should start a company or work for yourself. Otherwise you’re wasting your potential by transferring it to someone else. Find your people or you will go insane. That’s my unsolicited advice for you.
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  That's an interesting take! I think I agree with it. Of course every builder might not have the risk appetite for that but they could join an early stage startup as an alternative.

Hadriel 4y ago

This is google workplace only btw

frankgrecojr 4y ago
~Can you expand on that thought?~ Oh do you mean the Focus Time feature?
deadfece 4y ago
Office 365 has also offered Focus Time scheduling for 18mos+ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/personal/use/focus-plan https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/personal/use/...
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  Thanks for this! I think I’ll add this to the blog

joegahona 4y ago

> For those who use Google calendar as I do, a recently introduced feature allows you to set up focus blocks with the option to decline conflicting events. I'd recommend against announcing that the meeting is being declined because of a focus block. Someone will read that as "free time" and demand you meet anyway. Put 3-4 fake "meetings" on your calendar during the time you need, so it just looks like you're booked. If your company requires you keep your calendar public, call the meetings something gross like "vendor review" or "Finance and Engineering Integration: Overlapping Initiatives" and nobody will question it.

frankgrecojr 4y ago
That definitely is an alternative and is something I used to do. The reason I like the focus time feature (if implemented the way I suggest) is that the goal is to instill this culture across the team so that it's more of a team/company culture and less of something that just you do. I'd love to hear people's experience trying this out!
- ffreire 4y ago
  I do this regularly, and to the extent that I'm able I put the task in the description so that my team knows more or less what I'm prioritizing. You can also create recurring OOO and Focus Time events now, so I have lunch blocked off and 30min at the end of each day to prepare for the next. It's a secret super power to staying on top of things and creating rituals that help me sign off at a reasonable hour instead of sliding into unproductively and less time with family. Really, my only gripe with Google Calendar at this point is that you can't define custom colors nor label those colors. I use that feature heavily now to give me an at a glance view of which projects or activities my time is going to on a weekly basis. The colors don't have consistency across months though because I have to re-use colors for different purposes.
  - frankgrecojr 4y ago
    The ability to create a recurring Focus Time event has been game changing!

cristianpascu 4y ago

I quit my job instead. If the schedule is randomly or unpredictably fragmented by meetings, being expected to also write high quality code is quite simply inhumane. It’s not you that should find tricks to save you from a burnout. It very much looks and sounds and it surely is a mess of a management.

madrox 4y ago

Everyone at my new job uses Clockwise, which will rearrange calendars across the org to maximize focus time for everyone (also address double-booking). This is my first time in 10 years since becoming an EM where I don't have to spend time managing my calendar every day to get focus time. The jump to my productivity is huge. Can't recommend focus time (and Clockwise!) enough. If I could buy stock in them, I would.

frankgrecojr 4y ago
Clockwise is amazing! The issue i've had is getting everyone on my team to use it.
- madrox 4y ago
  For us, it's top-down led. You may get more success if you convince your skip level or VP it's worth adopting.
CSDude 4y ago
I hate it rearranges a meeting that I know it'd happen in a few hours, I plan my day accordingly, boom it's changed. That's frustrating. I worked at a big corp and people loved fully packed calendars with meetings. Wondered when they'd get any actual work done alone, without a meeting. My calendar was mostly empty except meetings that were crucial. Even though I was in a Principal role, new grads had more packed calendars than me. As a result, Clockwise moved most of my meetings.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  This "when do you get actual work done" bugs me sometimes. It's true to some extent, but sometimes a bunch of engineers in a room together get a lot of work done. Sometimes even a lot more than if they each did their own thing, come together, and discover that it doesn't fit together. Not all meetings are like that, yeah, and there's a limit, but meetings not being "actual work" is not generally true. Also, since pandemic times, I've had it a few times that people were circling via chat or email on a topic forever, and a quick 15 minute online meeting (independently of whether the camera was on) resolved it immediately.

jobu 4y ago

The senior architects and principle engineers at my company have started scheduling focus hours as well as office hours for people to drop in and ask questions. They were getting stretched pretty thin by being invited to design meetings for multiple different teams, and the office hours have been a great way to combat that burden. People drop in, ask some design questions and leave. Since there are usually multiple people waiting to ask questions it keeps the discussion short and focused instead of filling up a 30-60 minute meeting just because that's what was scheduled. It also lets the architect decide to schedule a focused design session if it's needed instead of letting others fill their calendars.

sharadov 4y ago
Agree, office times were a lifesaver in my last job.
curious_cat_163 4y ago
Do we know anyone who is doing this in the "mostly" remote world that we are living in right now?
frankgrecojr 4y ago
This is brilliant! I did this at my last gig with great success!

icedchai 4y ago

I used to work at a place that had so many meetings. They reserved a couple afternoons a week for "focus time." Unfortunately, that didn't work. People just started scheduling meeting during those times. Eventually, I got so disgusted with the constant interruptions that I found another job.

dan-g 4y ago

“Deep Work” by Cal Newport (and the related “Time Block Planner” he published as well) goes into depth about why deep work focus time is so important for knowledge workers, and has some additional tips for how to make the most of your workday. Would highly recommend both books! https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

frankgrecojr 4y ago
Thanks! This book has been brought up a few times in this thread and i'm very motivated to read it now!

aeruder 4y ago

Sad, but I would occasionally use my "unlimited" PTO to take a week off and just get work done. Most of the pain started when we transitioned to a sprints from a lack of process. In theory, this was to make things faster (which actually most of the reasons we were so slow was unrelated to process). My week suddenly went from getting things done to: - 60 minute meetings fighting over whether tickets were 3 or 5 story points - turning our entire process into some kind of perverse waterfall method where stories involved days of prep work defining every step so that we could accurately estimate story points (I thought this was the opposite of agile?) - offers to "help" from project managers and managers when things took longer than expected - this help took the form of additional meetings. - absolute inflexibility over my noon standup. I could be in the deepest of zones and people would literally slack repeatedly until you showed up for that thing Cue the "oh you were doing <X> wrong!!" people. Modern software practice sucks. Its fine for small bugs and very well defined tasks. Outside of that it is just interruptions, interruptions, interruptions. I also ended up just quitting. New place is better, but still in many ways the same. At least here I don't have comparisons made to my old days of the pre-software-process productivity.

humanwhosits 4y ago
I've never worked anywhere with story-points, but reading about it now sounds like a metric that will be abused the moment there's any meaning or consequence behind it
- frankgrecojr 4y ago
  From my experience, it only works if the entire company is completely bought in to the entire system. Even going so far as the SAFe framework. Companies think they can pick/choose which pieces they implement and this is a recipe for failure.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    Don't think I've ever disagreed more passionately with an HN comment. Being "bought in" to agile development means individuals over processes, teams pick and choose what works for them. Insisting that everyone everywhere goes all the way on the same predefined process is as far away as it gets.

dangus 4y ago

The only reason we can't book 4 hours of time a day is because our employers run "lean" and completely neglect to scale out personnel along with projects. I know people who would absolutely be replaced by 3 people if they quit. My advice? Advocate for yourself, because your boss and their boss doesn't actually have any clue how much work it is in the trenches. Management is almost never aware of all that much about what you're doing, and a lot of capacity issues like this eventually bubble up and catch them by complete surprise simply because individual contributors have just been silently dealing with the frog-boiling. This all means you should: 1. Come up with specific and measurable justification in terms of hours/dollars for why you need more employees as the company and therefore your workload grows 2. "Offer" to push back excess work and give your management choices while doing so: "Project A will take us X hours over capacity for next quarter, should I prioritize Project A or Project B? We can only deliver # projects in the next quarter at our current staffing level." Blocking off time on your calendar doesn't really solve the problem because it's something that a lot of people, especially customer-facing ones, simply can't do without doing everything I described above.

TillE 4y ago

Despite many well-intentioned attempts, it feels like the whole process of software development, from people management to software architecture, has barely improved in the past 20 years or so. It sounds like this guy should probably have a pure management role, where they're reviewing code but not expected to write very much themselves. Having a role with both responsibilities seems bound to lead to frustration.

_8j50 4y ago

Perhaps a "no meetings before lunch" policy would help many types of teams. Is this doable at your team?

jmcgough 4y ago

I used to work somewhere with three standups every day. I'd lose and hour and a half every morning for updates that often didn't involve me or could have been async.

PsySecGroup 4y ago

anotherevan 4y ago

I seem to remember reading about one or two companies that had a focus time or a no meeting time part of the day or week for the whole company - or at least the departments where it made the most sense (engineering, but not sales perhaps). I can really see the advantages of having focus time synchronised across your colleagues. If we all did focus times across different parts of the day, you would _never_ be able to schedule a meeting. (Hmmm, that may actually be a good thing...)

frankgrecojr 4y ago
If I were running a company, there would be no meetings before noon.

ildavide 4y ago

Daily standup was helpful when covid first hit to be a means to help keep our team together. But since then it’s sort of morphed into a check-in just for the sake of checking in. Very little value. And folks don’t feel the need to address real issues because it wasn’t brought up in that daily standup. I think there should be more intention to keep folks focused and heads down when they need to be and schedule one-off meetings that serve a purpose.