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> Put non-meetings on the calendar I'd love to do that. But once you throw in real meetings, no meetings days, PTOs, time zones it becomes difficult to schedul
by bgirard 3y ago
> Put non-meetings on the calendar
I'd love to do that. But once you throw in real meetings, no meetings days, PTOs, time zones it becomes difficult to schedule a work meeting because now there's no overlapping block of time when you need to meet. Now all meetings get pushed out even more and the calendar time required for certain tasks increases.
- dboreham 3y agoAllow read access to your calendar for teammates and instruct them to override your "Thinking time" slots in situations where the matter is urgent.
- 1024core 3y agoThat's what I do, and it works very well.
- bgirard 3y agoThere's several issues with this: * I work with too many people to reasonably instruct them of this preference and expect them to follow it. * The definition of urgent is highly subjective. What's urgent to one person isn't to someone else. * Some will be more aggressive and book over it, while others will be more passive/shy like junior engineers. You're now further rewarding aggressive behavior over passive behavior. But more importantly non-urgent meetings are still important. If everyone does this then the minimum turn around time for engineering tasks needing help/consensus between 3 engineers goes up from a few hours to a few days. You compensate this by juggling more tasks. I think in practice the downstream problems are much worse than the original problem you're solving. I prefer to just decline any meetings that aren't a good use of my time.
- 1024core 3y agoThe best time to put such "non-meetings" on your calendar is when you switch teams. You're new and the meeting vultures haven't noticed the new piece of meat yet. I switched teams a year ago and quickly blocked off 2-3 hour slots every day as "focused work time". It's been a godsend for my sanity. Edit: typo
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoThis is a feature, not a bug. Most meetings could have just been an e-mail or a slack thread. They don't want to spend 20 minutes writing an e-mail, so instead they spend an hour in a meeting where they find out they still need to spend 20 minutes thinking about something and writing it up. People need to learn to work without meetings. Open Source projects get work done with virtually no meetings at all.
- kevan 3y agoEverything in moderation I suppose. I've experimented with marking large blocks (2-4hrs) as tentative for IC work a couple days/week recurring and it does help avoid the Swiss cheese of 30m meetings spread across the entire day. Lately for a 1-3 day horizon I've been adding everything I'm working on as blocked. That definitely helps me visualize my priorities for the next couple days and whether I have room to fit more meetings or tasks. The main downside is I'm used to a more free-flowing schedule where I pick a task based on how I'm feeling.