Taking a cold hard look at my time…

Gabriel Adamante -

I came to the only conclusion possible: I need to cut down on meetings.

I am re reading The Effective Executive over the last few days, and it is amazing to me how a book written in 1966 aged so well. It seems to be more relevant each day that passes.

The first principle that Drucker lays out in it is: Know Thy Time






This whole chapter is a punch to the gut regarding how I am spending my time.

More specifically, how hard it is to realize:

1) How little time I actually have, and

2) How quickly it is all slipping away (and mostly in meetings)

I think about the day or week I just had, and I wonder, was that really the best use of my time? If I were to take an honest inventory of my time, would I be proud of how I used it, or would I be embarrassed?

The answer, unfortunately, is often the latter.

So, I sat down to actually calculate exactly how much time I spent last week and in what things.

  • I worked 36 hours because we had a holiday, so I took half of the day off.

Out of these, I spent:

  • 8:35 hours on 1-1s (23% of time)
  • 4:00 hours on company wide meetings (11% of time)
  • 7:30 hours on team-specific meetings (20% of time)
  • 1:30 on outside companies meetings (4%)

So, about 60% of my time was consumed in meetings alone.

And then, if I look at some free time I had in between meetings on Thursday and Friday for instance, it would be safe to assume that I wasted them on busywork and/or feeling too tired to do anything important.

And then, to be absolutely honest with myself, I probably worked about 3 or 4 hours the whole week in things that are high-leverage tasks.

About 11% of my time.

So, if I put this learning visually, I would see my time being split like this:

  • 6/10 blocks of time go to meetings
  • 3/10 blocks of time go to meetings overhead / shallow work
  • 1/10 blocks of time go to deep work

So, if I want to 2x my output to the company, I should try to have a routine like:

  • 4/10 blocks of time go to meetings
  • 2/10 blocks of time go to meetings overhead / shallow work
  • 4/10 blocks of time go to deep work

Yes, if I quadruple my deep work/ focus time, I will probably double my output of meaningful work.

That's because work doesn't scale linearly with time. It’s more like a decreasing marginal gains situation – the more time you spend on a single task, the less productive you become.

But wait, there's more.

The other way I could increase my output is by delegating or automating a part of my shallow work, so that I can focus on deep work even more.

And that takes me to the next painful reality: I don’t know what is the shallow work I am doing specifically - I have a hunch that most of it revolves around answering things on Slack - but it is impossible to delegate work that I don't know that is.

This is what I took out of this:

  • I need to cut back 30% of my time in meetings; That is 6 hours a week.
  • I need to discover how exactly I’m spending my time on shallow work, to see what can be delegated/automated/made more efficient.

If I look at the previous week, 12:40 hours (~60%) were spent on recurring meetings. It should be easy to cut down around 3 hours on these.

The problem is that the other 40% of the meetings were one-off and/or unexpected.

These are specially hard to fend off - and the less recurring meetings I have, the more likely it is that they will creep up on my schedule. And because they are contextual, it’s harder to say no.

Finally, my action items are:

  • Cut down 3 hours a week on recurring meetings and 1-1s.
  • Every time an one-off meeting is scheduled, note down when, by whom and why (I have to do this for a month, so I can find the root cause of this problem)
  • Re-schedule recurring meetings in blocks so it's easier to reduce their overhead;
  • Have a logbook for shallow work and tasks done during meetings overhead - so I write down exactly what I am doing; One or two weeks sampling should be enough for that.

PS: I'm writing down this more of a journal entry than anything else. Writing helps me think, and helps me learn. I also hope this also helps someone else out there.

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