As always, “Stop doing $negativebehavior” is less useful than the actual advice:<p>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.
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.<p>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.
My favorite story on the topic — <a href="https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-story-of-priorities-and-a-jar.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.odessa.edu/current-students/_documents/pdfs/a-st...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>They agreed that it was full.<p>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.<p>They chuckled and agreed that it was indeed full this time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>——<p>An often seen addition:<p>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.<p>There’s always time for a beer with friends.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>I think companies could benefit from that as a lot got done on those two end days.
Bundling meetings together <i>for one individual</i> is an improvement for that person, sure.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>If someone's able to create a system that can achieve (measurably) the same quality of outcomes that scheduled meetings do, <i>without</i> the time-restricting side-effects, they'll be on to a winner.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <i>still scheduled over</i>.<p>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...
My manager started using this Saas with us to automate this <a href="https://www.getclockwise.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getclockwise.com/</a>
I do this slightly differently, trying to accomplish the same thing: Long, uninterrupted blocks of time for deep work.<p>I schedule all meetings on Mondays and Fridays if at all possible.<p>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.<p>Sometimes I need to schedule a meeting on the other days, and it is not forbidden, but I work pretty hard to avoid it. :)
This sounds a lot like making sure you have adequate "Maker time":<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html</a><p>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.
Another key thing is: do _less_ stuff _better_. And by “less” here I mean concurrent projects, not necessarily less work.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>Over here that wouldn't be even open for discussion, 8h it is 8h, with a legal maximum of 10h per day.
How many people are even at liberty to just say “no sorry I’m not attending any meetings in this 4 hour block” ?<p>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
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.
> <i>Of course, that wasn't scalable.</i><p>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 <i>everyone</i> 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...
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
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.<p>Meetings in my opinion are mostly useless. Especially if they are not heavily moderated and action focused.
This also applies to personal time as well and I treat scheduling as a packing problem.<p>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.
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.<p>In every case, it’s a huge productivity boost.<p>The only challenges tend to be multi-function meetings, which require high-level support to move and consolidate. But it can be done!<p>Definitely follow this advice.
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.<p>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.
I have mixed feelings about this. The only time I block on my calendar now is my lunch.<p>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).<p>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.
This is actually good advice.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So I've blocked out my afternoons for "focus work", meaning, you can now only book time in my diary in the mornings.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Really thought provoking, and arrives at a time I'm going through some priority setting, so useful to have some more context.<p>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...
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>I try to get a big block of time booked too but it's usually just not possible to keep it.
I think if we changed the way we talk about meetings, schedules, work etc we could improve a lot of things.<p><a href="https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-change-our-language/" rel="nofollow">https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-c...</a>
If you are looking for a great app to help avoid these types of holes in your calendar I highly recommend MeetWell (<a href="https://www.meetwell.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.meetwell.app</a>). It can monitor and report on the health of your calendar to help avoid these types of issues.
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.
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.<p>Highly recommend this. Gives control of your time back to you.