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How do I manage my time?

Learning to manage your time as your scope of responsibilities increases is one of the most important things to get a handle on as a manager and leader.

This is not a problem you can solve by brute force.

You're going to need a plan. Otherwise you can be sure that other people will plan it for you through ad-hoc emails, meeting invites, and Slack messages. Letting yourself be pulled from one urgent task to the next is a great way to feel busy, but a lousy way of getting important things done.

One of the first hard truths I had to acknowledge when I first started managing people was that I no longer had time to do everything. I no longer had the sustainable bandwidth.

Here are a few tactics I use to stay in control of my schedule and stay on top of the things that matter.

1. Block out time on your calendar to focus.

This idea comes from many different places, but a couple of specific sources are:

Good software engineering requires focus, which in turn requires large blocks periods of uninterrupted time. And constant interruptions from email, Slack, and text messages, combined with ad-hoc meetings peppered throughout the day are anathema to focus.

Since I'm a manager, and not an individual contributor software engineer, it's expected and generally required of me to be on what Paul Graham calls the "manager's schedule". I can't blow off and cancel all my meetings.

However, in order for me to be good at what I do, I still require periods of focus to think deeply about the engineering org I am responsible for. In order to facilitate this in my schedule, I try to block off 1.5 to 2 hours a day, 3-4 days a week, for this work.

Here are examples of what I might do in this time:

  • Explore new technologies that we might incorporate into our stack.
  • Analyze the various teams' sprint boards, to identify common bottlenecks that might be affecting our productivity.
  • Review our hiring pipeline to see where our process needs the most help.
  • Assess what our future staffing needs might be.
  • Write a longer email/document in response to an email I flagged earlier.

2. Only check your email and Slack messages at specific times during the day.

There's no better way to derail an entire day than to start going down the rabbit hole of your emails and Slack messages. So similarly to how I block time off to focus, I will designate specific blocks of time for checking email and Slack.

For email, I will generally check 2 or 3 times a day, for maybe 10-15 minutes at a time. Typically I'll check it once I've sat down after I've done some focused morning reading, then once after lunch, and then once more towards the end of the day as I'm preparing to shut things down.

Each scan through my emails, I identify:

  • which emails require short, quick responses that I can do now,
  • which ones need a more thoughtful response later, and
  • which ones can be delegated and/or not responded to.

Full disclaimer: I don't process to be very good at email, and my email strategy is very much a work in progress.

For Slack, I'll generally check it at the same time I check my email, and for the same reasons. On top of that, though, I like to take an office hours approach, where I'll set aside maybe an hour or so of time to be on Slack every day to respond to messages and have back-and-forth conversations with people.

3. Develop a communication escalation path.

Part of ensuring smooth communications that don't cause friction in your organization is being transparent about what you're doing and why.

To that end, I have an internal wiki page set up at work just to let people know how to reach me. It lays out the different ways to reach me, and what the general response time will be for each. I also lay out my requirements for when to use each communication channel.

For example, if there's a major production incident, don't email me or Slack me about it; call me directly or use PagerDuty to escalate the issue to the appropriate team.

I also clarify for Slack and email messages that they may not get a response for several hours, until one of my email/Slack checking windows.

Setting up a clear communication protocol will help set an example for how you expect your organization to communicate, and helps to reduce any potential misunderstandings, e.g. I sent that email to him an hour ago; why hasn't he responded?

Wrapping it up

I'll likely go into more details on these topics in future posts, but these are a few things that have helped me keep my days organized. I'd love to hear what others have done to keep their days in order.