As an engineering manager, it's easy to lose control of your calendar. A colleague schedules an ad hoc meeting and another adds a recurring working group sync. To make room for an initiative that's slipping, a 1:1 is the first thing cut. I have recurring half-hour 1:1s with 24 people - direct reports, skip levels, cross-functional partners, peer engineering managers, and others I depend on to get work done. Here is the system I use to protect those meetings.
Principles
The core idea is intentionality. I want a calendar that reflects my priorities, not just the accumulation of requests from others. I find it helpful to frame my priorities by results and retention. That means protecting thinking time in blocks of 90 minutes or longer, and leaving buffer time so I don't become a bottleneck.
Cycle planning
- Plan meetings for half-year cycles. The cycle-end deadline forces a review, giving me an opportunity to realign my calendar with up-to-date priorities. My meeting cycles run from January to June and July to December.
- Draft a meeting plan before sending invites. At the beginning of a cycle I create a document with each day of the week planning which meetings I'll have on which day. I'll try to balance the days to have roughly the same amount (with the exception of Monday and Friday). Drafting on a personal document rather than directly in the calendar lets me sanity-check the full week at once before anyone gets a notification.
- As much as possible, I try to be the one who schedules the meeting invite. It's much easier to reschedule the meeting as the owner. I work to earn that goodwill by gathering time-of-day preferences from folks and mutually optimizing both our calendars.
Scheduling heuristics
- Schedule meetings with people who have harder-to-schedule calendars first. Often these are Product Managers, Program Managers, and other Engineering Managers.
- Schedule meetings for my leads earlier in the week. Often discussions with leads relate to planning, which they can act on the same week rather than waiting over a weekend.
- Capitalize on the lunch hour when working with other time zones. As one of a few west-coasters who works on an east-coast-based team, I can schedule meetings with a fellow west-coaster during East Coast lunch hour (9-10am PT). I make it a point not to schedule during someone's local lunch hour - so this gives me a whole extra hour of availability.
- When possible, I avoid scheduling recurring meetings on Monday and Friday. These days are most often holidays and vacations, and recurring meetings require rescheduling.
- Block off end of day Friday. I use that time to rethink my calendar for the next week. E.g. I can cancel 1:1s for folks who have upcoming time off and resolve meeting scheduling conflicts.
Batching
- Group meetings together to protect longer thinking blocks — two hours (four half-hour meetings) strikes the best balance for me.
- Schedule meetings with subsets of the group immediately following larger meetings. E.g. scheduling a 1:1 with a direct report right after the standup. We can roll directly into the next meeting and often end early. This works especially well if the people involved are on video conferencing software.
- When in the office, schedule back-to-back meetings in the same conference room. Less physical travel time gives more grace for meeting overages.
- Use the same time slot for biweekly meetings. E.g. if there's a biweekly meeting Tuesday from 1:30-2, then fit another biweekly meeting from 1:30-2 on the opposite Tuesday. This optimizes for more available slots for regular weekly events. This is particularly effective when the other person and I share the same two biweekly meetings.
Before I started doing this, I'd spend energy throughout the week second-guessing whether I had the right meetings on the calendar. Now that decision is made once per cycle. The calendar stops being a source of anxiety and becomes an execution plan I trust.