Understanding The Manager’s Calendar

Like nice aged Swiss Cheese

When I was a developer, I could rattle off my day’s schedule from the top of my head. Hell, there were some days I didn’t even bother to open up outlook, I knew where I needed to be and when.

As a creative you need big blocks to time to, well, create. I always liked 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon. This allowed for long periods of time where I could get into the code and just write, debug and curse.

As a manager your time will be much more segmented. Your job isn’t to be creative as much as it is to transfer information. Your day will be divided into 16 30 min blocks. And if you are not careful you will begin to fill each of those blocks till your day is one solid wall of meetings. We call this the “Big Blue Wall” because your outlook is a solid streak of blue meeting invites. You have moved from a creative schedule to a management schedule and they’re completely different animals.

If you put 30 on the calendar for a developer at 10:30 in the morning you will torpedo their productivity. They will not only lose the 30 minutes to a meeting that they probably don’t need to attend but they will also lose up to an hour due to the context switch.

However, as a manager you can easily fit 30 minutes between your standup and your next 1 on 1. Context switching doesn’t hurt you because you are not doing something creative.

The most important rule as a development manager is to remember that your schedule in not the same KIND of schedule as the developers. You cant fit a meeting into their day where it is convenient for you. You have to think about how the meeting affects them.

Try not to schedule meetings with your developers. If you need to talk to them, wait till standup and ask them then. If it is personal in nature try and schedule it right after or before standup or lunch. Since they are already taking a break at these times they wont be hit with a big context switch when you come in to talk about the latest HR thing.

If you need to do something creative yourself, lets face it managers also need to THINK sometimes, then you have to be protective of your time as well.

• Cancel some meetings

• Block off an afternoon

• Turn off slack

• Focus on your task

There is no way to fit this kind of creative work into the 30 min between two meetings.