Time Management 101

Tech Manager Handbook: A Series

The most finite resource is your time

As your team scales, you will continue to feel stretched. Having up to 10–12 direct reports should be the upper limit; between 7–8 is maybe the most optimal range (depending on your team’s seniority and how long you’ve worked with each person since more senior/familiar employees may require less supervision or time to manage). Over time you are likely to lead teams that vary in size from small to medium to large — the goal here is to provide you with some basic tips and tricks to help keep your schedule relatively sane in all cases.

It is important to manage your time carefully not solely because you can’t find time to get everything done, but also because if you jam too much stuff into your schedule, you may either find yourself completely burned out at the end of each day/week or letting things slip — neither of which is sustainable. Moreover, when new things crop up that you want to dedicate time to or need to focus on, you will want to have taken steps proactively to ensure that you are able to.

Know what your priorities are

Keep track of your personal priorities for the week in a short list and order the list. Reflect on this list daily and use it as a constant reminder of what your top priorities are; this will help you avoid getting pulled into other directions, sucked into distractions, or drifting into a body of work that is more fun but isn’t actually high up on the list.

Filter the noise; hit snooze

There is no shortage of real-time pings now that tools like Slack are ubiquitous, but just remember that not every ping needs to be responded to right away or even the same day. Prioritize messages from your direct reports, your boss, senior executives, or things you know are urgent. You can even let non-urgent things sit for a day or two even if you actually had the time to get to it earlier (“hit the snooze button”). If you always respond right away to every ping, you are training people to ping you more often. If people need to set-up an ad hoc tactical meeting mid-week (which can happen a lot), default to finding time the following week instead of right away (unless obviously urgent). This will prevent you from accidentally blowing up the current week and not preserving the time to focus on the things you already told yourself were your top priorities. Remember the (absolutely true) cliché that saying “yes” to one thing is saying “no” to something else.

Cluster your meetings

Cluster your meetings as best you can; some meeting times may be out of your control but others may have a lot of scheduling flexibility (e.g. 1:1s) and can be moved around to stack up against the immovable meetings to eliminate small time gaps between meetings. Short gaps between meetings are the enemy — aside from catching up on a few emails or Slack threads or using the bathroom, there really isn’t much you can do with a single empty 30-minute meeting free slot (essentially just wasted time). Attempting to make progress on large tasks during these slots is challenging since the overhead from context switching is usually too high to make any meaningful progress over such a short period of time. Consider this: it is much more productive to have 2 hours of back-to-back meetings followed by a 2-hour block of focus time rather than a handful of short meetings scattered randomly over a 4-hour period with a few short 30 minute gaps.

If you find yourself spending ~65-75% of your working hours in meetings (not unusual for a manager, including team syncs/stand-ups, 1:1s with direct reports and cross-functional partners/leads, ad hoc problem solving, and interviews), then being deliberate about how you organize and structure the remaining 25–35% of your time is essential in order to be productive during all of the non-meeting work you have to do. Too often managers who aren’t deliberate about this find themselves routinely working late into the evenings or falling behind.

Claim time on your own calendar with private focus blocks

As a manager with a full schedule or meetings, 1:1s, and interviews, you realistically only have a few blocks of time in any given week where you can focus on the things that you need to do, so you’ll need to ensure that you both organize and spend them wisely. You may find it helpful to put private blocks on your calendar in advance to focus on specific things; pro-tip: people tend to respect private blocks on calendars more than publicly visible “do not schedule” or “heads-down time” blocks because if it is marked as private they have no way of knowing just how flexible that block of time is or isn’t. Over time, most other meetings that pop up will tend to adapt to your schedule and not the other way around.

Another strange but useful tip about creating private meeting blocks is that shorter private meetings tend to be respected more than long ones. Why? Well, a 3-hour block in the middle of your day is likely a bit suspicious and if it happens every week at the same time people will slowly clue-in to what it’s for. Also, if on occasion there are certain kinds of meetings or people that you need to make exceptions for (e.g. urgent HR issue or an interview with limited candidate availability, senior exec, etc.) and those wind up sitting on top of your long private focus block, it sends a signal to everyone else that this is a block that can be scheduled over; it has become fair game.

Pay attention to which days and times you find yourself doing your best focus work and be selfish about claiming those specific times for yourself as much as possible. Personally, I try to claim most mornings before ~11am because after a long day of meetings I often find myself feeling too tired to go deep into something that requires a lot of focus.

Audit your calendar

Meetings (especially recurring ones) tend to slowly accumulate on your calendar over time. Every few months, flip forward a few weeks (to get a clean view without ad hoc meeting and interviews) and observe your steady-state schedule — are there things on there that provide little-to-no value? Are there meetings that you could delegate entirely? Are there cross-functional 1:1s that could have a less frequent cadence? Question everything on your calendar and try to knock a few things off every once in a while, even another free hour per week can go a long way. That being said, be mindful of what you opt out of and what signal that might send; reach out to those that will be most impacted by a cancellation or a reduced cadence and see if that also works for them (in my experience, nobody ever says no).

Your steady-state calendar should really only be about 50% full, even if you typically find yourself spending 75% or more in meetings. A big chunk of any given week is usually spend in ad hoc meetings, one-off 1:1s, or interviews — if you don’t reserve a large enough buffer outside of the steady-state for those things to land then you’ll quickly find yourself spending 100% of your time in meetings and not being able to get anything else done without working nights and weekends.

Interviews tend to have the highest week-to-week variance — one month you might find yourself with 5+ open roles and doing 10+ interviews a week, in another month you might find yourself with no open roles and only an occasional cross-functional interview here or there. Consider when your hiring needs are going to be significant or minimal and proactively adjust your schedule to account for it.

Delegate, delegate, delegate

The more you delegate, the less you need to do — more specifically, the less time you’ll need to spend. For the sake of not repeating myself, check-out my thoughts on delegation. If you are delegating efficiently it not only gives you more time to spend elsewhere at work but makes it easier to unplug on a sick day or even take a worry-free vacation knowing that others can fill-in for you while you are out. This includes not just delegating work but delegating meetings when you can too!

Create healthy boundaries

Adjusting to 100% working from home has been challenging for some people more than others, often because they haven’t found a way to set effective boundaries between work and life. Some people roll right out of bed, open their laptop, and get sucked into email and Slack. Others might not have any plans in the evening so they “just kind of keep working.” Decide for yourself when you plan to log on and log off every day and enshrine that on your calendar to enforce it. I personally put large 7–9:30am and 5:30–8pm blocks on my calendar to signal when I expect my work day to (more or less) begin and end. This helps prevent a 40 hour work week from sliding into a 50 or even 60 hour work week. Outside your normal working hours, silence notification settings for Slack, email, etc. so that you aren’t getting pings that might suck your brain back into work mode.

Enable yourself to take time off

Besides managing your daily and weekly working schedule, you should also ensure that you have the ability to take time off and plan for it. This could be opportunistically when you notice things have temporarily slowed down (e.g. no interviews or urgent sprints) or scheduled well in advance so you can plan for who will cover for you while you are out. The grind of the week-to-week will burn you out eventually no matter how well you manage your work days.

Final thoughts

You should take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt — implementing all of these practices might be a bit idealistic or even too robotic. Consider them useful tips and practices that you should start to weave into how you manage your time but don’t become so inflexible that working with you becomes a challenge for others. At the end of the day, remember that there are very few things that are so critical that they need to be done “right now by you”; if you don’t get to something today there is always tomorrow or next week.