I am an Engineering Manager at a large Startup
I have 18 meetings a week.
I try my hardest to stack them all onto Mon and Wed, leaving the other 3 days as meeting free as possible.
Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
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Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#82I am an Engineering Manager at a large Startup I have 18 meetings a week. I try my hardest to stack them all onto Mon and Wed, leaving the other 3 days as meeting free as possible.
What do you do on the 3 days
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#83Unnecessary meetings are the bane of my existence. I want to suggest a hack to shorten meetings, and eliminate unnecessary ones: remove all chairs from meeting rooms. All meetings have to be done while standing up. No sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall.
This idea is what created "standups" in scrum.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#84Senior Software Engineer
* ~2 hours of 1-1s with mentors/mentees/manager (manager is weekly, others are biweekly)
* 1 hour team operations meeting
* 2 hour company-wide operations meeting that I don't have to buy enjoy attending
* 1 hour sprint planning every other week
* 1 hour demos every other week
* Another 4-10 hours worth of ad-hoc meetings throughout the week
So somewhere around 10-15 hours worth of meetings, but all of the pre-planned meetings are either very early in the day or very late in the day. The worst weeks are when the ad-hoc meetings go way over 10 hours (several design cycles lining up or several emergent emergencies that need attention), but otherwise I really enjoy it.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#85Chief Architect.
About 15h per week, or almost half my time basically.
* ~1h daily for status meetings
* ~2h twice a week for project coordination and discussion
* ~4h once a week for overarching architecture decisions across all projects
* Various other 30min to 1h meetings depending on the week
It's terribly inefficient, but I cannot change it; believe me, I tried.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#86I am an engineer (ie, IC), and I currently have about 8-12 meetings per week. At my worst I've had over 20 meetings in a week, and in a previous position (but same company), I had about 15 meetings per week. A decent chunk of these meetings are interviews, which are two meetings each (the interview itself, plus the debrief).
I'd say anywhere from 5-15 hours per week in meetings. But the real killer is the dead little "pockets" between the meetings. Hard to get any real, deep work done when your day is chopped into pieces.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many companies criminally underhire talented technical PMs and team assistants. The latter in particular are fantastic and you’d be amazed just how much can be handed off to them. You can completely transform how much time you have for people by investing more in these areas. The phrase “executive assistant” is just one huge mistake. It makes the role sound like a secretary to one person, which makes people think the…
what tasks would this team assistant do that a team leader/manager is not doing now? I'm a team lead and I consider myself a facilitator/server of my team mostly.
It's not about doing things that you're not doing. It's about delegating some of what you do so that you can focus on a smaller set of tasks and do them better than you currently do. It's about elevating the quality of everything that's going on from the small to the big and making it easier to grow if that's the trajectory you're on.
Scheduling meetings and aiding in calendar management for everyone. Running meetings and taking notes. Collecting and assembling agenda items in advance for any and all meetings. Setting up and handling logistics for team events. Managing team-related documentation on the company wiki so it's always up-to-date. Helping schedule any phone calls or meetings you need with candidates, partners in industry, customers, etc. Catering food for customer meetings. If someone's going to give a presentation, making sure everything is in order, setting up and running A/V, recording the presentation if desired, etc. Keeping track of annual review, six-month, and quarterly check-in cycles and helping you make sure you're hitting every single checkbox for all of your people. I could keep going but after a certain point many of the duties end up being specific to your team or organization. In general, though, there are probably many things you do that don't necessarily require your specialized expertise and knowledge.
There's some overlap with what PMs do, but generally this person is focused on the team itself instead of specific projects. You might feel that's what you're supposed to do, but once the team is big enough you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have time for the people on the team anymore -- or at least not as much as you feel like you should.
Offloading this stuff frees you up to focus on people, hiring, retention, unexpected urgent things of a variety of natures, and engineering (maybe not writing code but working with folks to make sure everything that's going on makes sense, meshes together, is aligned with broader objectives, etc.). If you run a larger organization and have managers under you, it frees up your managers to do the same. They'll spend more time with their people and less time on logistics.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#88I hate to be that guy, but if you're looking for a simple way to defend yourself from too many meetings and/or conflicts, my startup might be interesting to you.
Our first product, https://lifeworkcalendar.com, blocks out your work calendar when you have personal events. And our next product (coming soon), https://reclaimai.com, does a whole bunch more to align your calendar to your priorities.
Email us if you're interested in a demo -- I love the Hacker News crowd and our target audience is busy managers/directors/VPs in product orgs :)
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#89I'd say I'm lucky to get an hour a day that's free to actually do engineering work, 3 hours would be a godsend, and rare. Its definitely hard to be effective as an engineer with such little time to deeply engage. Ive sometimes thought about booking a meeting with myself to go get work done!
Do it. It’s the only way I get free slots on my calendar.
Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?
#90I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc). I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fr…
I found this effective to handle fragmentation by accepting only meetings before lunch, doing only post lunch also works . Either mornings or afternoons are fully free to do focused work