Stop Swiss Cheesing your calendar
thinkingthrough.substack.com
thinkingthrough.substack.com
Schedule multiple blocks of time per week of sufficient length to allow for meaningful, independent work, rather than try fruitlessly to fit this work in around countless interruptions of, on average, less importance.
I don’t think it’s anymore odd than “French Fries” or “Greek Yogurt”. People like simple connections. Somebody long ago (perhaps unintentionally) did some good branding.
I have eaten yogurt all over the world. The "Greek" yogurt (or in some countries they call it "Greek Type" - to avoid 'lying' about the country of production/origin) is thicker/less of a liquid. It must be in the process. Most yogurts (plain, not sugary with fruites and other stuff) I've had are semi-liquid. The only 'good' yogurt I truly enjoy is the original Greek by "FAGE" called "Total" (not affiliated).
I assume that similar yogurt-making process must be a regional thing (Greece, Balkans), and perhaps Greece had the industries/factories to support exports on great volumes that helped them conquer/define this type of yogurt in the 80's, 90's and establish that name.
Semi liquid sounds excessive for actual yogurt, but what you may be looking for specifically is strained yogurts, which have a lower amount of whey (liquids) and are thus drier and thicker. Greek yogurt is indeed a common type of strained yogurt.
What you think of as "Greek" style yogurt is literally just normal yogurt run through cheese cloth or another similar filter (at home, I assume industry has a much more efficient method) to allow liquid to drain out.
The difference in the process is simply that once you're done making "normal" yogurt, you strain it to remove some liquid whey.
You can take this to varying degrees. While I was still dialing in my process, I made some yogurt so dry I questioned whether it was actually cheese. It made you thirsty to eat it. I've since reduced the time I spend straining it to something a little more moderate so it's still kind of creamy but not wet or runny.
The FAGE-Total, wherever I find it, it costs around £3, while the "Greek type" costs £1 is is significantly more muddy/wet. I can taste the differce in quality, and they definitely make for a different outcome in any sauce you are trying to make.
I think every culture and country probably has some oversimplification or stereotype of a far off place. E.g. for Italy, the "Americano" coffee.
On that basis we could conclude there are 2-3 times as many languages spoken in China than in Europe.
Exactly. For example the concept of 'Mediterranean diet' as referenced by the UK National Health Service [0] as a contrast to the UK's higher emphasis on meat and diary products.
[0] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/what-is-a-mediterranea...
The phrase we used to use a lot at work is 'Salami Slicing'. This was used to refer to time but more often to budgets, especially with the connotation that a budget proposed by a bid team would be reduced in lots of small ways before it went to the customer- e.g. to make the bid competitive, increase profit margins, increase the risk budget and many more.
The salami slicing almost always made it hard to produce a good solution within the eventual budget available to the engineers.
I completely accept the premise that there are many different kinds of cheese made in Switzerland, however it also seems pretty clear that the kind with holes is the one that has achieved a critical mass of global mindshare.
Perhaps "Defragment your calender" is more appealing to a CS audience. It's clear, and not a double negative.
What I instead moved to is scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar when people look at it, explaining when I prefer meetings to be scheduled. I've found that people are willing to accept such guidance, and follow my requests better than when I had large chunks of time blocked off.
scheduling daily reminders that appear at the top of my calendar Makes sense as long as people are respectful, there's some who won't be.
I think it's good to set the bar for my time up higher, otherwise there 's the risk of working on a lot of things that aren't helpful for my own goals.
There is the opposite side too though, when I know that someone on my team would hesitate to ask, I make it clear that they can always shoot me an e-mail and I'll try to find a solution within a timeframe that is reasonable on both sides. If I have the feeling they would still hesitate, I try to reach out to them more proactively to see if there's some action needed (something thats in my private calendar, so it actually doesn't interfere).
So the advice I usually give to more junior SWEs, data scientists, researchers (PMs usually know for themselves), it's to respect others and to be mindful, but also don't expect them to respect your time, so it's important to have a strategy for those who don't.
What I experienced both at startups and big corporations is that it's easy to end up in a path that has neither interesting nor difficult or even useful work. If you're forced to get promoted to get more interesting things to work on I think it forces some really selfish behaviour.
Of course it's possible to just move on (I did), but that has other implications.
One thing I liked at university was being able to switch teams and projects much more easily without a manager in the way with their own (not the organizations) goals. I ended up working on much more interesting things and experienced better team dynamics, making it much easier to get this balance right.
As you increase seniority, identifying the right balance will become more difficult. However unless you plan on switching to manager it's absolutely critical to take time out for hands on time.
I ended up just naming any times I want to block as “busy”. If anyone had questions or wanted to schedule over it, they would reach out and that was fine.
Technically, it is all your company's time since you are getting paid.
Now it is up to your company to decide if they want you to attend meetings or if they want you to do the job effectively.
So my approach is:
If the one scheduling the meeting is my boss, then I tell him I may not deliver in time if I accept his meeting, making it clear that I won't work overtime to catch up. It usually goes well, and he makes the necessary arrangement depending on how important he thinks the meeting is relative to my other tasks.
If the one scheduling the meeting is not my boss, I ask him to refer to my boss, or I do it myself.
If the boss is not here, and it is outside my boundaries, I generally refuse unless I know that my presence is essential and that it can't be delayed.
The following story is one that’s been circulating for awhile. I believe it holds a very important message regarding appropriately setting priorities in our lives.
A professor of philosophy stood before his class with some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks about two inches in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full.
They agreed that it was full.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly and watched as the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The professor then asked the students again if the jar was full.
They chuckled and agreed that it was indeed full this time.
The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. The sand filled the remaining open areas of the jar. “Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this jar signifies your life. The rocks are the truly important things, such as family, health and relationships. If all else was lost and only the rocks remained, your life would still be meaningful. The pebbles are the other things that matter in your life, such as work or school. The sand signifies the remaining “small stuff” and material possessions.
If you put sand into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks or the pebbles. The same can be applied to your lives. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are truly important.
Pay attention to the things in life that are critical to your happiness and well-being. Take time to get medical check- ups, play with your children, go for a run, write your grandmother a letter. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, or fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first – things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just pebbles and sand.
——
An often seen addition:
A student then walks up to the jar and pours in a beer. It flows into the little gaps between the sand and the pebbles and the rocks.
There’s always time for a beer with friends.
Yes.. even if your time is all blocked up, you can always have time/space for a coffee with a loved one!
As far as examining how the concept of "fullness" applies to jars, it's pretty straightforward to say that the jar is full every time, including before the giant rocks are added, but what it is full of changes. You can go in different directions from there -- say that "full" is underspecified and the students must infer a more specific meaning from context, or ask whether, if you cap a jar full of air with an airtight lid and chill it, it is still "full" -- but one place you can't go is "these rocks are actually your family".
I bet you it isn’t even factual and no such class ever happened.
Followup: why isn't this demonstration given by a "history professor"? They wouldn't be more relevant, so...?
Other options include guru, yogi, etc. But then the target auidence puts story in the woo-woo category and doesn’t take to the point.
Plenty of philosophers talk about how to live a full, meaningful and happy life. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Augustine, and plenty more.
It's not all metaphysics, qualia, or master-slave dialectics.
And all of that came under the umbrella of "philosophy" as the word was used centuries ago, but it doesn't today, and neither does the material here.
When I say "what philosophers talk about", I do not mean to imply that if Daniel Dennett remarks "nice day today", then common weather patterns are a topic in philosophy, and I hope that that lack of implication was obvious to most readers.
You implied that Aristotle discussing the good life was akin to Dennett discussing the weather, and that such a discourse is not considered "real philosophy" anymore.
I'm saying that absurd, and simply shows you don't know enough about philosophy.
Here's a quick search of philosophy journals and books that reference "Aristotle" and the "good life." Are you suggesting that these aren't modern philosophy? [1]
And how about the rest of them? Do articles on the Stoics not count as philosophy either?
(I realize that after a couple undergraduate courses in philosophy everyone covers Dennett, and maybe Wittgenstein and Hume and a few others, and comes away thinking that any discussion of "practical" philosophy isn't "true" philosophy, but that isn't the case at all. I don't know whether this applies to you or not.)
1. https://link.springer.com/search?query=aristotle+good+life&f... . Feel free to filter further by journal articles if you think books don't count as modern philosophy.
If you consider the life of a person in a poor region, the lack of sand is often the most salient feature that underpins their relation to the world and to others. At the extreme end, a homeless vagrant cannot escape preoccupation with sand and sees their life entirely directed by its lack.
Those already at an enviable position on the Maslow hierarchy cannot see the value of the sand anymore because they've always had enough.
One reorg later (at a FAANG) my manager, a director, said I wasn’t respectful of others by blocking certain times of my calendar every day. So I was back to sitting in meetings that could have been emails and reading HN all day until I could get some work done at the end of the day.
Related from the famous @gselevator: If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying… Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.
I think companies could benefit from that as a lot got done on those two end days.
I also tend to try to keep mornings relatively free of interruption as I find getting a good start really sets the tone for the day as a whole. If I can spend 5 or 10 minutes planning out what I need to do, and then make useful progress on something during the first hour then I'm usually set for the rest of the day.
My team know that they can contact me if they really need to, but it does massively cut down on casual interruptions as well as delivering the obvious benefits of a clear calendar.
If you think about what meetings are attempting to achieve, it's about allowing a number of people to participate in a conversation, achieve progress on some decisions or plans, and if necessary communicate out the actions required.
If you think about it this way, then scheduling half-hour or one-hour blocks of time across groups of people requires significant scheduling and co-ordination overhead, and it places blocking time bounds on when each conversation officially begins (start of the meeting) and when it should conclude (end of the meeting).
The useful aspects of scheduled meetings are that they encourage the participants to prepare in advance, and a well-run meeting creates a sense of focus on a particular set of agenda items.
If someone's able to create a system that can achieve (measurably) the same quality of outcomes that scheduled meetings do, without the time-restricting side-effects, they'll be on to a winner.
The closest thing I can think of, off the top of my head, is issue tracking systems. They allow conversations to take place asynchronously over a long duration of time, and participants and communications can be looped into (and step out of) the thread when desired.
They also have the benefit that participants (current and future) can take more time than would be available in a real-time meeting to check the prior discussions, claims and statements that have led the group to their current situation.
Broadly, every meeting fall under three categories - "Decision", "Information" or "Discussion". In any case, each of these three categories should lead to "Who does What by When" (WDWBW). In my personal experience, if WDWBW outcome is achieved - meetings move things forward. Otherwise, they don't do so much. Some things which have personally helped me to get towards WDWBW
1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting
2. Define Agenda
3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time
4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it
5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand. Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information, Discussion or Decision
6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min - for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not, stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.
I feel like maybe they didn't do a great job on this, or should have like...at least faked a good result on their calendar...
It can also become known that you book focus time, and so people just ignore that you are busy, and book you in. It's also possible that once you are considered fairly respected that people trust you to decide what meetings you will attend.
IMO, Anyone with a calendar like the one in the article should start with a conversation with leaders at the company. This is massively bad for productivity if you doing anything remotely knowledge work related.
Booking focus blocks is a bit of a last resort. The problem isn't the calendar, it's the people and processes in the workplace.
I'm also somewhat curious when they even eat, some of their schedules require them to lunch before noon (in some case even 11am) or after 4pm, and it doesn't look like they start their day early.
Also what kind of cruel genius plans a daily meeting from 17:30 to 18:00?
Of course with 6 meetings per day you're not going to get much work done no matter how you plan your day, but you can at least try to do it in a way that's vaguely sustainable.
It also has useful preferences like "prefer morning/afternoon", "no meeting days", which it takes into account when scheduling.
I can't say enough good things about it. It's free at first but I would pay almost any money to keep it, the value of the extra time it gives you is enormous.
I schedule all meetings on Mondays and Fridays if at all possible.
I alredady have recurring commitments monday and friday mornings and afternoons, so when people want a meeting, they get my Calendy link, which only allows for booking on Fridays and Mondays - or I invite them at a time that is back to back with another meeting, trying to sneak in an uninterrupted block of time if possible.
Sometimes I need to schedule a meeting on the other days, and it is not forbidden, but I work pretty hard to avoid it. :)
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
That said, even if you're a manager you can benefit from the consolidation of things to keep you focused during the blocks you do have available if it works out for your team.
I had 17 (yes, _seventeen_) calls last Friday (between 15m to an hour), mostly because I am involved in six (now seven) concurrent activities (some just starting, many ongoing) and they bunched up on the last possible day of the week.
This is a intolerable pace, obviously, so I’m taking some drastic measures, but I already had Cortana booking me 3-hour blocks of “focus time” every day to “sandwich” that cheese, so the next step is to start booking off entire days.
Although I like minimizing interruption, I also accepted delegation as a way to make "myself" productive in the face of many interruptions.
Over here that wouldn't be even open for discussion, 8h it is 8h, with a legal maximum of 10h per day.
Unless you're your own boss, or getting an union agreement with corresponding extra payments, that is.
If they cannot produce that, they cannot plan a meeting.
Of course, before that they need to ascertain whether it could just be an email or a quick question to someone.
My boss/team leader/other manager would just laugh in my face if I said I couldn’t attend meetings or asked to have them moved because of swiss cheese or something
Some can be done to change company culture to reduce and optimize meetings, of course. Hopefully.
2. You have to actually try it to really know if that works or not
3. It might not stick the first time but if you do it a bit more often without being forceful (just asking "is there a time that would work in the afternoon too?"), then it might lead to a better outcome.
Overall, frame it as a gain for the company, not for yourself.
"I need a big chunk of time to do my job well" sounds very different from "attached is my list of demands".
> these constant meetings are killing my productivity
Let them decide that the meetings are worth killing productivity.
As opposed to this approach? I have my doubts. Of course, if you are a developer that's very important to the company, you may have the clout to push this through (which may then be perceived as a privilege given to you by colleagues: "ah, so-and-so is so important that he gets his undisturbed time, and we others have to schedule our meetings around him"), but what if everyone would be given the right to block off large portions of their calendar as they please? That would make it almost impossible to schedule meetings with a significant number of participants. For this to work, it would have to be embraced company-wide, e.g. a policy of "no meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays". Having customers involved further complicates things...
I also fairly frequently block out chunks of time to get actual work done - every now and then someone will ping me and ask if there's any flexibility, rather than just assuming I'm completely unavailable for the next week. People aren't robots, they'll get used to it.
Meetings in my opinion are mostly useless. Especially if they are not heavily moderated and action focused.
It may sound non-intuitive at first but if someone asks me if I'm free for 1 hour on Saturday my answer will almost always be no, but if they ask if I'm free for 6 hours or free all day the answer may very well be yes assuming it's for something interesting. The reason is that 1-hour events like quick meetings or lunches put a hole in the calendar that prevents other 6-hour activities (e.g. hikes) from being scheduled.
In every case, it’s a huge productivity boost.
The only challenges tend to be multi-function meetings, which require high-level support to move and consolidate. But it can be done!
Definitely follow this advice.
Obviously, this is not always something you can control, but if you can I highly recommend it. If you are in a position to do make this decision, make it clear to everyone all the time that you're e.g. not available on Tuesdays.
Years ago I would block 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon to "work" but as I progressed my "work" began to shift, from just building things to talking to customers and then eventually to talking to everyone, which means my day went from 0-1 meeting per day, to 1-2 + 3-5 phone calls with customers, to eventually 4-8 meetings per day and my production of software diminished to almost nil. It was basically meetings all day (which I honestly didn't mind, so long as they provided food over my lunch break).
Now I'm in a more development focused role, where I have almost no meetings, but I'm usually doing 1:1 with manager for 4-6 hours per day over the phone. So I get less done, but it is expected as "we aren't just hurling code, we are building software". So I get the equivalent of between 0-2 hours of software development done each day.
I read that any more than 4 meetings per day was too many, this seemed like decent advice. The reason was context switching, which makes sense.
I know that if I get all my meetings done in the morning, it gives me a run at the afternoon uninterrupted or be it, dedicated interruption time if that's what's needed.
So I've blocked out my afternoons for "focus work", meaning, you can now only book time in my diary in the mornings.
This means meetings are now tightly packed together. No Swiss cheese. You could argue however, there's very little time to reflect, but I've yet to see negative effects of this as most of the meetings I'm in are set up to make decisions there and then, rather than to distribute information.
I do finish my focus work time before the end of the day, incase anyone needs to book in an end of day catchup or otherwise check in.
So I do the opposite and block until then. It often has the benefit of clearing up whatever the people who were swiss cheesing my calendar "urgently"/"executively" needed to talk about.
Anyway... This calendar fragmentation is a real problem, I've noticed that my most productive period was when I was working 5h/day and was forced to attend only the critical meetings and ruthlessly make time for deep work as Cal Newport calls it.
Nowadays with a very active 3yo child at home and a wife also working full-time remotely, we're working in 1-3 hour shifts and taking turns in taking care of the child so our calendars are perhaps the best example of Swiss cheese out there and I have no idea how to make it better.
Although I full recognise the importance of not context switching all the time and having realistic chunks of work time, the first is hard when you're a generalist (I run a small business) and the second is hard when any code at all is involved. I find some mundane tasks take no time and then sometimes they take forever. It's really hard to time estimate in this scenario. In fact as a more general point, humans are rubbish at time estimation anyway, so it makes calendar blocking quite a challenge...
Being productive despite interruptions is a job skill. It can be achieved. It's a more realistic path to success than blocking off 4+ hours per day, because most people are in a position where they need to attend the meetings they are told to attend.
Only if you let it be.
Minimize the context. It turns out that good programming practices work well for this: break things down and encapsulate them. You haven't done that if you need to maintain a giant complex picture in your head that goes "poof" and disappears when people interrupt you, or when you need to go to the bathroom, or when you go to lunch.
Break things down into smaller parts. Encapsulate. Write things down. Get used to picking up where you left off. It takes practice just like anything else, but it's worth it. Demands on your time only become more intense as you advance in your career, so it's very beneficial to develop those skills early on.
1. It tries to address the sympthoms without solving the problem. Building a workflow around the distractions assumes that my time is less important than everybody else's.
2. Programming is hard. The comment suggests that the solution to the overhead caused by context switching is... adding more overhead. How about letting people work in peace instead?
I didn't downvote the comment (yet), but I understand why many people did: It's incredibly dismissive and wrong! Yes, you should adopt methods for keeping the context so you don't lose it and continue from where you started. I've added plenty of tools to my mental toolbox, and now I work on more complex problems more quickly then before. However, even with good context-keeping skills, protecting a block of time will still 10x your productivity over being interrupted constantly.
Developers don't demand focus time for their own comfort. It's because the focus time is necessary for good work.
In short: my work is rarely "beads on a string" that can easily be popped off, and to the degree they are, the unit of time is typically hours, not a half hour.
I agree that context switching and interruption has a high cost, but isn't the cost pretty much the same regardless of your job?
I'll admit that trivial CRUD applications are boring, but with that kind of application it's about understanding and shaping the domain. Naming things, if you will. (disclaimer: I'm working on a CRUD app as we speak, thousands of fields in dozens of modules).
also, what does original work mean? If you mean in the sense of PhD level research, I haven't worked in a lot of places where 'original work' was done. it is mostly glueing together other people's work (which is original to the person doing the glueing maybe).
Now, I don't know what the job description was of the person who wrote the article, or yours. Maybe your saying that distractions in management need to be expected and dealt with? You could be right, I don't really know. :)
When flying IFR then you've planned ahead, filed that plan, and either received exactly what you want or gotten an updated plan. If things change along the way you get small digestible updates. And you are of course going to brief your approach before executing it.
Meetings are much more dynamic.
I can deal with interruptions, but I’m also able to setup work blocks? People wouldn’t dream of interrupting me during a four hour meeting, and they don’t need to know my work blocks are that, rather than meetings.
I let people know "ask me before you schedule over a meeting". They'll do it anyway, but this allows me to decline a meeting with an excuse if I don't need to be there. If it's important: they're not likely to explain their justification for me (in doing so providing me with more context on their problem).
If by luck 4/5 days stay unbooked you have 16 focus hours of work. I use 2 hour blocks 5 days a week
I try to get a big block of time booked too but it's usually just not possible to keep it.
https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2021/02/06/meetings-ugh-lets-c...
A lot of it is in the standard modus operandi for extraverts and introverts. For extraverts, meetings feel productive, because they get their energy from social stimulation. They also like brainstorms and similar initiatives, despite research saying they decrease productivity and innovation. Most "people person" and "idea guy" functions tend to be extraverts, so they drive the narrative.
For introverts, discussing ideas provides energy. Meetings discussing feelings, inter-departemental drama, brainstorming, etc feel like the waste of time they are. A lot of meetings are poor replacements for thinking ahead or actual planning.
Highly recommend this. Gives control of your time back to you.
Based on that and other similar experiences (I worked from home for almost a decade), I'd say calendar tweaks are not the answer. The problem is culture/habits and therefore so is the solution. If other team members understand and respect the need for continuous blocks of solo time, they'll schedule meetings accordingly, or avoid scheduling meetings at all when the subject matter could/should have been addressed asynchronously. Dedicated "focus blocks" might help them do that better, but first they have to want to do it.
That's brilliant!
That phrase is going into my 2021 lexicon!
Overall I like it, seems to re-strike the balance that Medium was going for and missed. I'd still prefer personal websites instead of centralized hosting, but this seems like a reasonable compromise.