Time leak — kill it!
Are you worried about your team’s efficiency?
Do you miss your goals week after week?
Even if you make good use of your team’s time, this post is for you. I’ll share my experience on how and where I improve performance with a few practical steps and a unique mix of common time management approaches.
As an R&D Manager at Yotpo with over a decade of experience in leadership positions within different domains, I find that one of our main challenges as leaders is to identify, manage, and reduce non-efficient time — the most expensive and limited resource we have.
Let’s take a look at the main sources of “time leaks” that I’ve identified in my day to day, and what works for me when tackling them.
DISCLAIMER: It took me a while to discover which approaches work best, and I can promise that the list of solutions that didn’t work is much longer.
So, where does my time actually go?
When ranking the top three reasons for a “time leak” in my environment — “Integrations” is the leader:
- Management tools
The time we spend reporting progress and status on each of our tools separately - Services and teams
Integration with services and\or teams, which is a mandatory condition for specific features or projects. For example, development of new API\functionality, a new flow between two services, and using infrastructure tools for team development - Support multiple R&D environments
Dealing and maintaining multiple environments to release a cycle pipeline, such as Local, Development, Staging, User Acceptance Tests, Production, etc.
The second “time leak” factor is the Company Culture:
- Meetings
A lot of long meetings, with too many participants and unclear goals, are in place.
The price we pay as a company for meetings is expensive relative to the price of mistakes or failures without all of those discussions.
We should be focusing on the need and culture for lean and focused meetings.
Stop here and ask yourself: How many repeatable meetings do you have every week? Are all participants in your meetings mandatory? How many status meetings do you have with the same people in the same week?
2. Emails
My inbox fills up on an hourly basis.
Am I the mandatory recipient for all of those emails? What is the percentage of emails that really have relevant data for me? How much time do I spend reading those emails during the day?
The last “time leak” factor is the Context Switches:
R&D has different stakeholders and consumers like Product Managers, Support, Business Development, Project Management, and more, they are all looking for outputs.
As leaders, we have to set priorities in a proper way, by refocusing our teams on the most important tasks. Every moment we are dealing with context switches and being out of focus is expensive time that we won’t get back.
What changes can we make?
The way I tackle and solve “time leaks” in my groups is a mix of some common time management concepts that I find work well for me:
Integration — management tools
I constantly encourage efforts for strong integration between existing management tools, in order to spend less time syncing between all of them manually.
For example, occasionally attending a team’s daily meetings has shown me that a lot of time is lost on maintaining two different tools, GIT and JIRA, opening new branches, code status, finding commits, and so on.
With a few webhooks, we were able to create a strong and efficient integration that gives high visibility without updating each tool separately — you can find more about it here.
We did the same for our Jira-Product Board and Jira-Slack that have native synchronization without specific maintenance.
Integration — services and teams
Set the integration part in the first phase of the feature, even in the POC.
Does your new feature require integration with a different team, new service, or new platform? Don’t leave those integrations for the last part of the feature, or I can promise you’ll be late with the delivery.
Rather, strive to implement and test the integration part from the beginning. So, approve the integration before you start developing the whole feature.
Integration — multiple environments
For many years, I was a prisoner of the concept of several running environments for a safe release pipeline. At Yotpo, we don’t use all those environments, we use production — one environment.
We develop locally, followed by an all test pyramid (unit, component, integration, contract). Sometimes we use feature flags to complete the tests in the production environment, which is the only environment we need to monitor, maintain, and support.
Meetings
An effective meeting agenda clearly states the meeting goals and discussion topics, and it only needs to be 30 minutes, and no more.
A clear definition of the agenda and goals helps team members get on the same page before, during, and after the meeting. It provides all the necessary information to set the team up for meeting success.
Here the slope is very steep; I constantly avoid sets or being part of repeated meetings. Instead I set an ad-hoc meeting when I need it, and ask the same from my colleagues.
I limit my meeting participants to 4–6 people and 30–40 minutes maximum, and I also challenge my colleagues when I get invitations for meetings that are over that time limit or number of participants.
In most cases, after this challenge, the organizer gives more thought to the most valuable stakeholders for the meeting.
The same approach applies to meetings without a clear agenda and goals. When the meeting doesn’t have those, the discussion will probably be out of the relevant topics’ focus.
The same goes for meeting minutes. I finish each meeting with an understanding of who is responsible for summarizing and setting the meeting minutes and monitoring the action items till done.
Context Switching
Be flexible, but do not hurry to change the plan.
I limit my time for catching up on new tasks and requests to only 30 minutes every morning. By heavily considering my responsibility to finish commitments, I manage to avoid context switching.
I encourage the teams to define golden tasks for the members, these are tasks that must be completed on the same day. This helps to set the focus on the task, but not on the working hours and daily noise.
For unplanned/new important requests, I do my best to find tactical and short-term solutions to keep the planning as is. The price of context switching between tasks is expensive and drags on after delaying our commitments.
Spam Email
Use emails to broadcast a message, don’t abuse it. Keep your inbox clean.
We spend hours every day reading and responding to emails, and to change this we need to take personal responsibility and have the right company culture.
I use Jira to issue new tasks, and Slack for direct messages to one or multiple people for a specific request — I don’t need to email them. I only use email to broadcast messages, taking care not to spam others with unimportant content.
Every email requires action on the same business day, and to avoid backlog I plan time for it:
- Important and urgent — I stop to consider it, then reply with thoughts or action items I’ve taken
- Urgent, but not important — I find a solution and reply with acknowledgement
- Important, but not urgent — I set a slot in my calendar to dive into it
- Unimportant and not urgent — delete, spam, notify sender
I use email rules and colors for dedicated subjects, senders, and roles to be more focused on priority.
Here’s a tip: Use one unique email color when you’re on the main distribution list, and a different one when you’re on ‘CC’.
Let’s sum it up
Time leaks are here to stay, so we need to look them straight in the eye and respond with an active approach to reduce the impact on our working environments.
The recipe is simple: be aware of the leak, measure it, and take action to reduce it.
Colorful calendars, discussions with team members and sprint retrospectives help me to measure where the time is actually spent versus original plans.
Now you should be ready to take an active approach to making those areas more efficient.
Be ready for efficient and high-velocity teams of happy and focused employees who understand your goals, priorities, and how much you appreciate their time.
