You own your time. This is a principle that we keep coming back to on this show.
And in today's episode, I'm going to give you some tactical ways to own more of your time.
Some ways of looking at how you're spending your weeks, how you're spending your days, is your minutes, your hours, and how to reduce your meeting load.
How to reduce the number of obligations.
And it doesn't just have to be meetings by the way.
You can look at tasks through a very similar lens.
The model that we're gonna use today.
But I wanna reinforce this idea that time, And why is it so critical that we take ownership over our time?
Time is the kind of single unifying factor.
Not only is it something that you can't create more of?
It's not a renewable resource.
It's not even a resource that you can hoard. But it's also an unknown amount that you will have. Now, we're not going to spend the entire time talking about mortality on today's episode.
don't worry, but instead I want to kind of reiterate the importance of owning your calendar, owning your time owning your tasks.
What you choose to do this is one of the first steps, especially if you are feeling burnt out if you are feeling tired, if you're feeling dragged through the mud if you're feeling you know worn out, if you have no energy.
One of the first steps is to evaluate whether or not you feel agency over your time and if you don't some of the steps we're gonna talk about today, this this kind of model that we're gonna use to help reduce some of that load could absolutely help you right so the model that we're gonna use today.
It is not the Eisenhower Matrix.
Although I certainly recommend you go check that out that might be helpful today, we're actually going to use a simple two -part model.
Alright. the two -part model to evaluate the flexibility in your schedule, right.
So what this means?
It kind of relies on another principle and and the principle that we're talking about here is that not all time is equal.
Not all time is equal!
And I can explain this in a couple of ways.
One of the simplest ways is to go back a few years to when my children were born, and I had the opportunity to be there for both of their births.
Now, the amount of time that I spent in the hospital during their births was probably a day or two, maybe three days per per child.
Now, this is not an incredibly long amount of time but some of the most sacred and most important time that I've ever spent away from work.
And we all have different kinds of sacred time in our lives.
It's useful, in fact, this is probably a good first step.
it is important for you to draw lines around the time that is sacred to you.
That might be certain holidays, it might be a certain hour of the week, certain time, maybe you have, you know, Friday night game nights with your friends.
Whatever that time is, it is not equal.
Think about, you know, the hour of 5 a .m. six am it's a very different kind of time than two to three in the afternoon and two to three in the afternoon is very different than uh you know the the hour that you spend with your friends at game night and so we shouldn't treat time equally similarly and and this kind of relies on the same principle but a little bit more on the psychology side of things our time is not equal during the day at work.
We might kind of account for our time very similarly.
But imagine if you had three straight hours of focus and then two or three hours of meetings, mostly back to back.
Or if you had meetings spread throughout the day.
Which one is going to be more productive?
Which one is going to allow you to focus the best?
What is what are you going to be able to optimize for?
Now importantly, there may be a world, let's say you're a manager for example, where meetings throughout the day might actually work okay.
And part of the reason for this is because a lot of your job is likely summarizing and taking down action items from a meeting that you just had.
And so not having meetings back to back may actually be an optimal strategy for you.
The important thing here isn't necessarily what that shape looks like, but instead to make it intentional.
For most engineers listening to this show, it's likely that you're going to get the most out of eliminating and consolidating meetings.
Getting rid of meetings that shouldn't be on your task list, getting rid of tasks that shouldn't be on your task list, not spending time doing things that are not useful.
and with the meetings that are remaining, trying to consolidate those.
And what this allows for is longer blocks of focus time, which allows you to deal with complexity without losing the context needed to stay focused and actually do that complex work to a high degree of quality.
So, if we're starting by owning our time and starting by understanding when our sacred time is and reinforcing the fact that not all time is equal.
The next thing we need to do is very tactical in nature.
We're going to look at two kind of characteristics of each of your obligations, okay?
So what you're gonna do is you're gonna look at each of your meetings, you're gonna look at each of your tasks, things that are going to take up your time and determine on a scale from one to 10 their pliability and their volatility.
Pliability and volatility.
What does that mean?
Pliability in this case means, is it able to be moved easily?
Is this something that could be flexible?
Could we change the amount of time that we're spending?
It's pliable. It's easily changed.
It may even be cancelable, right?
But pliability is whether or not you can adjust it.
Usually, usually one -on -ones are a reasonably pliable meeting.
Now I will reinforce that if you are a manager and you are changing your schedule for your one -on -ones often, that is going to have a negative effect on your relationship with your reports.
It sends a signal to that report that they are not very important.
And that brings us to volatility.
So even though your one -on -ones may be pliable in the sense that it would be fairly easy logistically speaking to move the one -on -one around, all you really have to do is talk to one person.
And a lot of the time the objective and a one -on -one is something that you could do an hour later or a day later.
If you are considering moving a one -on -one, you should also consider the volatility.
What does volatility mean?
It means what is the risk associated with changing this?
Not just the logistics associated with it, but the risk.
What are the downsides?
What are the negative effects of me not attending this meeting?
Of me asking to reschedule the meeting?
What are the side effects of that shift?
So you're looking at those two characteristics, those two metrics.
And we kind of did them backwards.
the ordering here is likely volatility first and then pliability, right.
Volatility first then pliability.
Because if something is highly volatile, and here we don't necessarily mean that it's, you know, it's a bad situation, volatile in this case means changing it has some compound effect, right.
It's going to potentially blow up if you change something about it.
Doesn't mean that it's a bad thing.
It doesn't mean that it's, you know, you could imagine, for example, that if you had planned a birthday party for someone and you told them that they were going to have a birthday party and then you're changing it to the following day, you know, the party itself is not volatile.
The changing of the party might be right.
Shifting something around, it might have implications on relationships, might have implications on your project information.
you could end up blocking somebody, think about the volatility.
And usually this is kinda what we would call priority, right?
This is usually the only thing that we would consider.
Now, importantly, volatility doesn't necessarily mean that you can't shift the time around, right?
So if you do have high pliability and you have maybe medium volatility, then it's possible, right?
it's possible that you could shift the time around.
You could work on consolidating that meeting into a single work block, or whatever you need to do to protect or optimize for your specific kind of work.
For most engineers, again, this is gonna be optimizing for focus time.
But if something has a high enough volatility, you should be asking yourself, and this isn't a perfect system.
You can't say, okay, I'm gonna always move everything that has a two and a six, you know, two on volatility and a six on pliability.
That's something that you can consider doing, right?
That's kind of the point of this model is if there's a high score on both of them, then probably don't touch it, right?
So it gives you some idea, but you still have to use some intuition.
You still have to use some wisdom, right?
Step back from the situation and try to evaluate, okay, what am I risking if I move this thing, right?
Why is this volatile?
In what way is this volatile?
Is moving it by 20 minutes actually going to trigger the negative downsides that I'm thinking of?
Or is it really just that we can't cancel it?
We do need to get it done.
Maybe there is some specific day that we should get it done by.
I'll give you a good example.
I have a deadline that's coming up this week.
But fulfilling the deadline doesn't really matter whether it happens on Thursday or Friday.
So, we could delay from Thursday to Friday.
That could happen. But if we were to delay too far, like later into next week, then the volatility problems are triggered.
So, there is some level of flexibility, pliability in this case, right?
And there is a certain kind of volatility, but there's a little bit of an asterisk there.
Okay, so this is how you can evaluate, you know, the ways that you're spending your time to tasks that are you're on your board Look at both of these metrics.
If something is not very volatile at all.
You don't expect it to become volatile.
There's no trigger associated with this thing and it has a high pliability and it's very likely that you can either move it You can make it smaller or you can cancel it all together with very little downside Now, the other thing that's important to know is that most of the time, most of the time, the perception that you have of the criticality of your tasks, the criticality of your meetings is going to be inflated.
Okay, why is that? There is a phenomenon happening here where our world seems very important to us.
that seems natural of course.
But most of the time our world is not only not important but completely unknown to many other people.
And so if you were to not make it to a specific meeting, the ramifications versus what you imagine the ramifications might be, usually has a major difference.
Usually the ramifications are much smaller than what we expect them to be.
So this goes back to owning your time.
You should be ruthless in identifying how you spend your time.
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
I hope you'll be able to put this method into use, especially if you're feeling burned out, if you're feeling dragged down, if you're feeling tired.
This is a very important skill to learn.
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