Taking back control of your time
I’m the questioner Jason Fried referred to in his recent post: Wait, other people can take your time? I attended “The Basecamp Way To Work” and asked about how he’s able to have a mostly blank calendar. In my world as a CEO, other people dominated my time and my schedule. My calendar looked nothing like his!
What took up my time?
We had a daily standup at 8:30 am every day. My Monday afternoon was broken in to half hour blocks with each of my direct reports. Every Friday morning we had a standing team meeting for an hour. In addition to those meetings, I’d get invited to a bunch of different meetings during the week to check in on this project or that one.
Between my meetings I was struggling to get work done. I started blocking off 1/2 days and full days with a calendar event “No scheduled meetings” to avoid having people schedule meetings with me during those times. It didn’t work! Meetings would get scheduled over those times. I also tried having Sonja, our office manager be the gatekeeper to my schedule. If you wanted my time, it had to be in my schedule. Even my wife started expressing displeasure when I’d forget things and my solution was to ask her to send me a calendar invite. Pro-tip: Never tell your wife to send you a calendar invite!
I was miserable. Mistakenly, as a last ditch effort, I tried to exert more control over my schedule to solve the problem. My frustration level with my time not being my own had peaked.
Which brings us to Basecamp’s offices in Chicago and my question about Jason’s schedule and what to do when people want your time as CEO.
Jason described that nobody can just put something in his calendar. If people have something they want to talk about, they either write it up to share it, or they reach out when they need to discuss it and they’ll find a time that day to review it.
After getting gently chided for letting other people control my time, I had a range of emotions in the car on the way to the airport.
- I felt embarrassed that I wasn’t spending my time doing the things I knew were valuable.
- I felt jealous that Jason somehow was able to spend his time on things he cared about and his company has twice the people we do!
- I felt excited to go and try getting rid of all my meetings.
Here’s what I did next.
First I killed my weekly checkins
We use 15five as a way for people and their managers to give and get feedback. Instead of having standing meetings with all direct reports, I spend time reviewing their 15fives each week (which I didn’t have time for before). Then, if people need something during the week, they can reach out to me when they need it and chances are I’ll be able to help.
Then I killed the daily stand-up
We’ve been using a daily check-in in basecamp at the end of the day: “What did you work on today?”.
Most people in the team do it and you can catch up on it first thing in the morning. That led to us being able to kill the 8:30 am morning standup.
Then I started encouraging people to “write it up”
Our team has a tendency to want to get people on a conference call to discuss things. These calls sometimes appear in my calendar. Wherever possible I’ve been encouraging us to move them to asynchronous written discussions so that people can read and answer things on their own time and be more thoughtful in how they respond. This one simple change has meant a huge reduction in the number of internal scheduled meetings in my calendar.
Then I moved our company meeting to every 2 weeks
This one was hard for me and it’s a change I made just this week. Every friday morning we get together for an hour and talk about company things. Someone might demo a new feature. Someone else might share customer feedback. We would often have a pretty light agenda but use a lot of the time.
If you have an hour meeting scheduled, it’ll last an hour. Guaranteed. Since we don’t have the need to communicate critical things every week, I decided to try shifting the company meeting to once every two weeks instead.
How has life changed for me?
In the month since Jason gave me a hard time for my schedule, my day is totally different. I’m trying to have 0 or 1 scheduled items so that I can decide on that day how best to spend my time. This week I helped the team test a big new release, I wrote up some thoughts on simplifying a feature, and I wrote this blog post among many other things. My only standing meetings are a weekly check in with our Analytics consultant, and our company meeting every two weeks.
I’m much more productive, much happier, and feel like my time is my own again. What a breath of fresh air.
Customer.io helps onboard and retain users of a product. We don’t get everything right all the time (like when we used to have lots of standing meetings), but we do have a nice, remote team with some open spots.
