When you have so many management duties that you have little time to code, you can start to feel like your day has been taken hostage by the whims of others. You start to see the meetings pile up: the one-on-ones, the planning meetings, the status updates. Standups. Sit-downs. Fight fight fight!
Wait, no — no fighting in the war room!
It’s time — now — for you to figure out how to manage your time. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with days gone by and little to show for them. You still have responsibilities as a manager. You still have deliverables that require you to do more than sit in a meeting — things like setting goals for the team, helping your product team put details on the product roadmaps, and making sure that an assigned task actually got finished. That last one, following up on task completion, can become one of the biggest time sinks and distractions in your day if you aren’t careful.
Time management is a personal thing. Some people are very organized, and those people develop complex strategies for managing their calendars and to-do lists. I applaud these people. I am not generally one of them. However, I have found the ideas in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done1 to be useful to think about, and I recommend reading it even if you don’t adopt the whole process.
In the meantime, my general time-management philosophy will serve you well no matter what your tactics might be. Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency. Pretty much all of your tasks will fall on a graph of these two elements. Roughly, they are in one of four quadrants (see Table 6-1).
| Not urgent | Urgent | |
|---|---|---|
Important |
Strategic: make time |
Obvious work |
Unimportant |
Obvious avoid |
Tempting distractions |
If it’s important and urgent, you’re doing it. You know what I’m talking about. There’s a major outage that you’re helping to fix. Performance review write-ups are due tomorrow. You want to make an offer to a great candidate who has another competing offer expiring in two days. If you drop the ball on a task in this category, you lose something tangible. It’s unlikely that you’re blind to the need to get these sorts of things done.
A big part of the challenge of time management emerges when you start to lose the sense of importance. Urgency is often more clearly felt than importance. Responding to email is a good example. It’s easy to get sucked into email as a distraction, because the red dot tells you there’s something new, and it feels urgent to you to acknowledge it. And yet how often is email really urgent? Email is probably the worst vehicle for conveying urgent, time-sensitive information. It feels urgent, but it isn’t urgent. This is why so many precise time-management tips encourage reading and responding to email at specific times of the day. We also tend to substitute obvious for urgent in determining something’s value. If a meeting is on your calendar, it’s obvious where you should be at that time, but is that meeting really urgent, or are you using it to avoid thinking about the best way to use your time?
There are many things that feel urgent that aren’t. The whole of the internet, for example. News, Facebook, Twitter. Chat can feel urgent, but chat is almost as bad as email for communicating truly urgent and important information in the case of a collocated team. We’ve moved a lot of communication in the modern tech workplace out of email into chat systems like Slack and HipChat. This has benefits and drawbacks, but it’s important to note that moving communication is not the same thing as eliminating communication. The words and information keep flowing, they just move to different places, and you can get even more distracted by the ever-moving trickle of information in chat.
It’s likely that you’re spending a lot of your time on things that are urgent but only slightly important, and sacrificing things that are important but not urgent. One example of an important but not urgent task is actually preparing for meetings so that you can guide them in a healthy way. Healthy meetings require involvement from all parties, and a culture that favors short but productive meetings requires that participants do some up-front work to come to the meeting prepared. As a manager of multiple teams, you can win back a lot of time by pushing an efficient meetings culture down to your teams. Hold people accountable to prepare in whatever way makes sense. Ask for agenda items up front. Any sort of standard meeting that involves a group of people, whether it’s planning, retrospective, or postmortem, should have a clear procedure and expected outcomes.
One of the major changes at this level compared to the previous level is that your boss will expect you to be mature enough to manage yourself and your teams independently. This means that your manager trusts you to proactively deal with all those important but not urgent things before they become urgent, and especially before they become urgent for your manager. No one will tell you how to manage your calendar to give yourself the time to do this. I’ve seen managers fail at this point because they just could not juggle all the different tasks in an organized fashion.
Meetings can fall into that urgent but not important category, and you may decide to simply not attend them where you’re not clearly needed. Be very careful with over-deploying this strategy at this particular level of management. The responsibility of keeping your teams successfully moving forward and happily engaged is on your shoulders. When you stop going to all of their internal meetings, you run the risk of missing out on the very clues that will help you catch problems early — a major one being the existence of too many boring meetings. During meetings, look around the room at your team and notice their engagement. If half of them are falling asleep, staring off into space, on their phones or laptops ignoring the proceedings, or otherwise disengaged, the meeting is wasting their time. Your attendance at these meetings is partially to pay attention to the dynamics and morale of your team. A happy team will feel energized and engaged. An unhappy or unmotivated team will feel drained or bored.
Back to matters important but not urgent. Thinking about the future is high on this list. There are undoubtedly things that you know you should do but have put off. Perhaps it’s writing job descriptions for roles you’re hiring for. Perhaps it’s developing a hiring plan at all. It might be reviewing the current work on a project to make sure no obvious problems are creeping in, or talking to a manager on another team where there is conflict or a difference of opinion on how to move forward on a shared issue. It might be cultivating the list of things that are important but you haven’t thought about in a while, so you know what to focus on. If you don’t set aside some time to focus on these issues, they’ll sneak up on you in negative ways. As a manager of multiple teams, you’re responsible for balancing breadth and depth of thinking, for knowing the details of your teams today but also looking at where you need to be going in the future and what you need to get there.
As you navigate your new obligations, start to ask yourself: How important is the thing I’m doing? Does it seem important because it is urgent? How much time have I spent this week on urgent things? Have I managed to carve out enough time for things that are not urgent?