calendars and slack
decide how much you can afford to give
I started to reply inline in Twitter and immediately struggled with the format. I have thoughts, they’re not well sculpted yet, making them hard to compress into a few tweets. For me the biggest challenge with calendaring in leadership positions has been finding a balance between being available to everyone that seeks my time, my interests and making time for myself to think or do any sort of work that isn’t essentially a meeting with someone.
There’s a long stream of recurring relevant meetings: planning, leadership syncs, staff meetings, team/project meeting and rituals, 1:1s, calibration, performance reviews, etc. When we’re in a hiring cycle, add in a mix of: panel calibration, phone screens, on-sites, debriefs, offer strategy sessions. Now spice things up with the unexpected — the big and small crisis that come up from a deploy/rollback, a strategic opportunity presents itself, a long time customer throws their weight around, an executive gets excited about something, sales needs one thing to close a deal, …
The demands can be endless.
The best I’ve come up with came from reading Elegant Puzzle. And it’s more of what I saw as a recurring theme in the book rather than something I remember Wil explicitly stating. It comes down to capacity. No matter what work-life balance I choose for the week, month, year … I/we all have a fixed practical capacity.
It first clicked for me working with one of my managers and our recruiting team. The thing about recruiting is that it can absorb a lot, potentially all, of a hiring managers time. Lead times from outreach and calendar coordination with the candidate can make it feel like being on-call for an unstable system. We want to hire folks, we want to be available when they’re available, and because it’s often a numbers game we have to talk to a lot of people.
Back to Capacity. It’s pretty easy for me to type: “Hey, decide how much time you want to allocate to a type of thing each week. Give yourself some wiggle room. That’s your capacity. Don’t exceed your capacity.”
Recruiting was the first place we were able to apply that advice. It was a great place to start for two reasons. First we were looking at the team as well as the managers, which can help silence the “well I’ll just suck it up for now” voice. And second we have a lot of quantitive pipeline/funnel metrics. We could model how many emails to phone screens to interviews to close a candidate, as well as the time impact to the interview panel participants. Long story short, we arrived at some numbers. A budget — at most X hours and some constraints like no more two on-site back to back, …
That was a really big thing.
Before we had a fixed budget, it was essentially whatever they could spend. If they had a super effective week, then the hiring manager would have a lot of phone screens. If it was otherwise a smooth week, that could be fine, if there were other struggles, it could be really hard for that manager. If the candidate flow was good then the team would have a lot of interviews in a row offsetting whatever work had been planned for that sprint.
So, that happens to be about recruiting. It was a good place to start.
Identify the top three-five things I need to do this month or quarter.
Budget what it would take to do those things.
Be honest. Really, like pessimistically honest.
Slack is important — you need to space to work on the unplanned. Budget for that as well.
Adjust (1) as needed.
Socialize/confirm w/ the Organization around you to set expectations.