- Focus time is important for everybody, managers included. All meetings need to “pay rent”
- Tests for “should this meeting exist?”: can you write an agenda for the meeting? Is it as short as it can be (15 minutes)? Could this meeting have been a medium-length Slack supplemented with a Loom?
- Think of total meeting cost, in people-hours. There’s a reason this Tweet got 13.5M Views
- Meetings are necessary (we can’t Vulcan Mind Meld). Don’t spam meetings, but 0 meetings is also bad
- PMs should not be in meetings all day. If a PM is in meetings >50% of their day, I immediately infer that they are not being as effective as they could be
- They might be in meetings they shouldn’t be, and don’t know how to politely excuse themselves
- Their scope may be too big, and they could benefit from trying to do one thing at a time
- They may be spending too much time on things that only need to be performed at B+ level (c.f. Half Assing it with Everything You’ve Got)
- A rough number of what I believe to be healthy is 60% Focus Time, 40% Meeting Time. Focus Time CAN include pairing and synchronous collaboration, but the key to that is that it’s ad hoc, timeboxed, and unblocks you/team
- You are a human. I am a human. My partner, parents, friends, and (hopefully one day) children are all humans. Which means that we aren’t here on this planet to work
- We are here to eat croissants; paint amateur-to-good watercolors; watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on repeat (oh, is that just me?); laugh and cry with close friends; eat croissants; listen to music; take care of and be kind to as many creatures as we can; enjoy the rain and snow with a hot mug of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, with an optional glug of whiskey; eat more croissants; go for long and meandering walks; dance inexpertly but joyfully; foam roll; convince ourselves that we can pull off bangs; try to practice whistling; and did I mention the croissants? It’s also best to do these things with friends, family, loved ones, and if you feel brave, strangers
- In the times that we’re not doing the above, we try to build things that solve Real Problems for Real People
- We bring a full effort to work. Not so much effort that there’s nothing left over for our loved ones; but we care and we show up
- When we judge a coworker to be lazy, we dig in and get curious about what might be going on in their lives to explain this
- I strive to be kind to myself and others. When I make a mistake, I don’t tell myself “I’m stupid and this is a personal failing”. I try to nudge others to treat themselves this way as well. An easy test for this is: “would you say what you’re telling yourself to your little sister/a small child/your grandparent?”
- If I am managing you, I would LOVE to hear your feedback. I will try to model continuously asking for open and kind feedback. At the same time, I know that it is really tough to give upward feedback. If you DO decide to put in the effort, and I’ve done enough to earn your trust, I promise to honor that effort. If easier, give me anonymous feedback here: https://www.admonymous.co/alexdou
- Ambiguity kills. I reference these all the time:
- Other assorted ways I work:
- Build time into your schedule at work to learn
- I adhere to the European Standard of PTO: try to take 5 business weeks off throughout the year. Also, taking PTO to do errands (e.g. moving houses, going to the DMV, etc) does not count
- The other side of this coin is that when I AM here, I show up
- I try to give timely and specific feedback
- Timely: one month after the fact is not timely. I will try to give feedback as close to the event as I can—if appropriate, in the moment. If we’re in a meeting with a bunch of people and it would be inappropriate, I will try to do it after the meeting
- Specific: I will explicitly say what I observed (which, notably, is different from what actually happened AND what your intention was). But I will try to go through the following points:
- This is what I observed
- This is the impact of what I observed, and why I think it is important to give feedback about it
- Here is my suggestion
- 15 minute rule
- Some traumas/areas of development of mine:
- In my early career, I got fired, then fired again, and then laid off. That was really rough, and so sometimes I still fear that it’s going to happen again when I least expect it