I’m Failing. I Need Schedule Optimization

Posted by Darren on Jul 10, 2011 • (Comments)

A few weeks back, I took my family on vacation as I needed to reset.  It was a short but sweet 6 day excursion but I was able to tune out enough to reset my body.  However, I already feel like I need another vacation.  I shouldn’t feel this way, so I’ve begun to explore why I do feel this way.  I’m writing this post not because I’m complaining or trying to show how busy I am, but rather, wanting to find other people who have optimized their schedule in the hopes of learning from them.

I analyzed my May and June calendar and found that on average, I have 24 internal meetings per week and 26 external meetings.  That’s about 50 meetings per week, or 200 per month.  My average meeting length is 40 minutes which means that out of a 160 hour work month (20 days * 8hrs) or 9600 minutes, I’m in meetings for 8000 of them.  83% of my day are taken up by meetings.  There is no way I can get all the work I need done in the remaining 17% of my work day, so I end up working about 12-15 hour days on average and most of these hours are outside typical business hours so I’m generally working in a vacuum.

Not healthy.

Here is my initial hypothesis I’m going to test for the month of August.  I’m going to see if it works and if so, I’ll continue through Q3 & Q4 and re-assess at the end of the year.

1.  External Meetings

I will only hold external meetings (phone or in-person) in the mornings – 9AM-12PM.  I will limit myself to 2-3 lunches & breakfasts per week.  Meetings cannot last longer than 30 minutes.  I typically hold longer external meetings (45mins-1hr) but I need to cut these down.  I figure I can get in 4-7 meetings per day if needed.  Proactive meeting management around making sure both parties understand my timing and will work hard to end meetings on time, as to maximize my schedule.

2.  Internal Meetings

While I cannot always control when these meetings will be, I will try and make them for the afternoon (1PM-?).

3.  Work Time

Instead of waiting until I get home at night to get “real” work done, I should be able to use my afternoons to work on presentations, meet with my teams, etc.  This is the most important time for me, because right now, this generally starts after 9pm (my kids go to bed by then).  By the time I’m done with Work Time, it’s around 12AM, so this needs to change.

The potential con of this hypothesis is that I might meet less people in person.   I’m going to have to do a better job of getting documentation and details in advance of meetings to vet them before I take them.  I think I probably have a 75% hit-rate of meetings – 25% of them being a “dud” or at least, not overly relevant to me.  If I can make it a 95% hit-rate, I should be able to keep on schedule.

This should be a good experiment and I look forward to kicking off on August 1.

If you have any time management skills or advice, I’d love to hear from you.

Tagged as , , , + Categorized as Darren Herman
  • The experience I have has shown me that less is more i.e. I am very selective of the meeting I agree to. This is tough so I fall back on a technique that allows me to focus on what is important rather than what is urgent and weeds out a lot of non-important meetings. How I do this is that I schedule most of my meeting 3 to 6 weeks in advance. Lots of people are taken a back by this but if something is important it can usually wait while I finish the important work I am currently attending to. When I have mentioned this to people in the past as a technique I almost always hear, "oh but my job is different, I have customers needing things at the drop of a hat", or something like this. I have had multiple businesses in several different industries over my career and I have found that this technique above most others keeps my customers happy, me well ahead of my competition and still allows me to have a life.

    Looking forward to hearing how your experiment goes,
    Best Wishes,
    Cameron Chell
  • Sounds similar. My meetings are scheduled well in advance not because I do that on purposes, but because my schedule is already jam packed. My experiment has started and really takes into effect next week.
  • I enjoyed this post entitled "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" by Paul Graham on how he manages his time: http://www.paulgraham.com/make...

    As someone who both "makes" and manages, trying to find a balance is incredibly difficult.  Good luck.
  • I find that when I'm doing intensive work, such as writing code, even one or two meetings in a day can really reduce my productivity (Paul Graham has an excellent essay on this http://www.paulgraham.com/make... ).  

    Recently I've been segmenting meetings by day rather than time of day - so all my meetings on Wednesday and Thursday for instance, and work the rest of the time.  This has really improved my own productivity, to the extend that I've been experimenting with  eliminating all meetings every other week as well.  Of course sometimes someone you really want to meet with has limited availability, but making an exception or two is manageable.
  • Eran Shir
    Darren, I (and many in my team) felt very similar coming from Dapper (startup - virtually no meetings) into Yahoo, (bigco - virtually constant meetings). In fact, initially, I thought my biggest contribution to Yahoo would be if I'll develop a plugin to the corp exchange server that randomly deletes 30% of the meetings every day..

    However, one of my Dapper colleagues had a better idea, which I still want to try, perhaps you can. Basically, give everyone a 'meeting credit budget', and remove a token from the credit for every 30 min meeting they invite a single person to. So if you invited 3 people for an hour, you lost 6 credits. Then, when your budget is done, the system won't let you invite anyone more to a meeting that week.

    There are already a number of variations (for example, you pay based on who you invite - an engineer's hour is worth 10 credits, while a PM you can get for free :), but the idea is to actually close the externality loop that meetings cause and get people to realize that their meetings have a real cost.

    The best variation we came up with is that if you save your credit, it translates into a real money bonus - now that will reduce the number of meetings..

    Cheers,
    Eran
  • Have you tried doing internal or external office hours? When people know you have office hours, they are way less likely to ask you for a large chuck of your time. Often external meetings can take 1 hour, but they only need to take 20 min...
  • I like the internal office hours approach; need to create a central external place for external office hours.  I tend to use the office hours approach for external phone calls / meetings.
  • You can use Ohours.org ;)
  • :) I like ohours, just haven't made the time to use it :)
  • Ecarey
    I *try* to accomplish certain goals/task by day of week instead of time of day. For example, Monday I'm a little slow, so will try to get my computer work done and not be in meetings. PPTs, outbound client emails, setting up meetings that will occur Tues-Thursday, longer term deliverables, reading trades, or even doodling ideas to bring to meetings. Tuesday-Thursday I'm in the zone. Friday I will consult dashboards and do analysis to see whats working, whats not, and what needs attention next week.

    The reason this works for me is that I perform at different levels on different days. Monday - a little creaky - Wed I'm full of passion and energy. Not sure why this is.
  • Thankfully, my time is not quite as compacted as yours, but a few best practices that I think work effectively spring to mind:

    1) I would not meet with people in the morning. Most people find it easier to actually get work done first thing in the morning. If you have enough control over your schedule to try to keep internal meetings from happening in the AM, reserve the AM for work time. Get your work done right out of the gate.

    2) Make more of your internal meetings stand-up meetings and make them 15 minutes long. Set those right next to each other and standardize the format and time.

    I think the key to getting real work done is to achieve Flow. The best way to find my flow is a 4 hour block of uninterrupted time. This either comes in the morning or at night, for me. (This is influenced by reactions from my blog post on "Flow": http://www.cogmap.com/blog/201...
  • I prefer leaving the mornings to get work done, and leave the meetings to the afternoon.

    And the emphasis on flow is the key. Scheduling long chunks of time is critical for getting real deep work done.
  • The 4 hour block of time is key for me too.  Just need to find a lot more of it... and I think August should give me some of that time.
  • My advice is based on stale (ten+ year old) work experience but here goes: your time and how you spend it is most valuable to you.  When people request meetings with you you need to make a judgement call on the value to you (whatever way you choose to measure that is up to you).

    • Block out work time on your calendar, make it inviolate.  Leave a chunk of time in the morning, and a second chunk of time in the afternoon for meetings. 

    • Become ruthless in rejecting meetings that don't meet your own objectives (value to you, your organization, your clients, etc).

    • Shift the stuff that is potentially interesting but not necessarily of much value onto others, delegate.  If there's no one to delegate to then drop it on the floor.

    You will definitely meet fewer people in person. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
    You're definitely going to miss things, but you likely already are if this is the schedule you're on.

    If there's truly this much demand for your time you need to put a price tag on your time. I don't mean you have to bill people, but do all the meetings have to be ~40 minutes long?  Can some be trimmed? Do you really need to be at the meeting?

    I'm biased because I burned out and crashed hard.  I made it through a couple of years of 6 am to 10 pm days but found people just kept demanding more and more time and, duh, there's only so much time in the day. And rather than push back hard and say "sorry, these X hours are all you get for meeting with me" I kept trying to juggle my life around and trust me, it doesn't work.  Time doesn't scale.
  • Great stuff.  I love the "become ruthless in rejecting meetings" component.
  • Have you ever read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?  I don't remember much of it now but what stuck with me was Covey’s notion/matrix of Important vs. Unimportant and Urgent vs. Non-Urgent.  I set up a mail filter (in Lotus Notes, this was incredibly painful to do) to classify mail along Important/Unimportant and Urgent/non-urgent and basically focused my efforts on Important & Urgent, Important & Non-urgent.  If it was something that was unimportant and urgent then it was a candidate to be delegated or redirected elsewhere in the organization, and if it was unimportant and non-urgent then, well, it was not quite spam but not something I felt I had to spend any time dealing with unless I had time to kill.

    I also found that people got highly offended when they learned or realized I was filtering my interactions with them based on that urgent/importance matrix.  Part of what that matrix leaves out is that in some interactions (meetings, email, etc) the value of your interaction is worth much more to the others than their value to you.  I don't have a set answer for that scenario.  It got easier with people with whom I'd had a sort of level setting "this is how you have to work with someone who's got 300 emails to deal with every day" and while they may not have liked it they quickly got that it wasn't personal or organizational bias, just a fact of my situation then.  Others though thought that the best use of my time was to explain to executives up the chain why I wasn't spending more time with them, and that typically did not end well for them.
blog comments powered by Disqus