5 reasons why your Engineering Managers are drowning in meetings
I previously wrote a post on how to hack your calendar as an Engineering Manager. It contains tips and hacks, learnings from the trenches on how I learnt to manage my time more wisely.
I ended the post saying that sometimes it’s “just calendar management”, but — your calendar chaos might also be a symptom of something else. That’s what this post is about — when good ol’ time management won’t solve the problem.
If you’ve tried it all and your time is still unmanageable, it’s time to put your detective hat on. Because honestly, whenever there’s a chance to be a secret agent, you should take it. Look at patterns in how your calendar is filled up. You might spot one of these:
1. Collaboration is missing
When people who need to work closely together don’t, they end up “syncing” instead. If you find yourself with a calendar that’s full of “Project X sync”, consider if there are places where closer collaboration could happen. It might be that you or your team are working on something where they should actually embed or form ONE team during a period of time.
2. Too many things in parallell
We all know this so I won’t beat a dead horse, but just once I’ll say — Stop Starting, Start Finishing. The more things you/your team/your department/your company runs in parallell, the more meetings it will introduce. And the more likely it is, that you’ll end up in point number 1 👆of sync hell, because naturally you’ll have different priorities. Consider if there are ways to pause/limit WIP so more people have the same prio #1.
3. Too many dependencies between teams
If 1 and 2 isn’t the case, it might be that your organization has an issue with dependencies between team and thus you and your team are in countless meeting sessions with others. The dependency can be either or both of the following —
Process issues — Your company having a habit of doing big BANG RELEASES of NEW Feature Y where Press comms needs to go out at the same time as the code is pushed to production (sync sync sync) and customer Q&A bank needs to be updated at the same time (sync sync sync),
or
Architectural issues — that one team can’t operate independently because of what the code base looks like, and thus need to sync sync sync together.
Consider if there are ways to decouple your work (that’s not always an easy fix, I know!).
4. You have a Reporting culture
“We need to prep for the lead team meeting tomorrow”
“I don’t have time, I have a presentation I need to get done”
“The CEO has asked me for a brief before noon”
Sounds familiar? Some companies end up in a situation where they spend just as much time on reporting to higher-ups as doing the actual work. It usually comes from a lack of visibility or sense of control. What you want to accomplish is in the words of David Marquet — “Bring authority to information, not information to authority”. Invite leads to a weekly demo, have a dedicated channel for release notes/project updates — whatever can help visibility, make people feel in the loop and save time that otherwise goes to reporting status.
5. You‘re managing too many people
Inevitably, if you have too many direct reports you are also more likely to have too much meetings scheduled on your calendar. Even if you’re diligent with 1:1s, don’t underestimate the meetings that will pile up for Development talks, if someone goes on sick leave, emergency requests, etc.
It’s hard what “too many” is — it all depends on your context, how close you work together and how well people (and teams!) are doing. My general rule of thumb is that more than 10 people makes me a worse manager.
So now what?
Sucks to be you, really. Nah, jk!
Hoping you can look at your calendar with some new perspectives in order to put words to what’s going on for you. It can serve as a conversation starter for you and your peers, and your manager in how to support you.