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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree in principle, and I do book blocks of time for my own work, it is a fine line between settings boundaries in your work vs. presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. It can make you appear not only unhelpful, but arrogant.

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.

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Respectfully disagree: presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company. I learned that at the end of the day the company sees me as a contract and I should see the company the same way. Same goes for other people around, most of them aren't my friends, some of them won't hesitate to waste my time to get their work done. So if I can choose I'd rather work on my own tasks and career and need to prioritize my own time over others.

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.

Obviously it depends on the specific situation, but the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in requires figuring things out that would be intractable if everyone just focused on their tasks and didn’t make time to collaborate on something that wasn’t their direct goal. That doesn’t mean you have to let people waste your time, but it does call for an artful approach at balancing tasks, relationships and organizational goals.

Absolutely, there's one big catch here: the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in

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.

> presenting an attitude that your time is more important than anything else going on in the entire company

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.

I’ve found it matters what you title the time you block out for yourself. If it’s named “zwily’s Personal Work Time DO NOT TOUCH!!!” then it’s probably going to raise eyebrows. (And I’ve seen plenty of people making blocks like that).

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.

I just call it “work block” or “deliverables.” Like yours, simple and to the point goes a long way towards making it acceptable.

If you appear in the calendar as busy for the work blocks there is no way for others to tell if you are busy with other meetings or project work, they just see you busy. At least this is what others can see in my calendar; I made exceptions in the past for some of my direct managers (not all), for everyone else it was just a black box telling I am busy. No attitude here. At some point even the lunch break was a black box in the calendar.

Your company generally pays you to deliver results and not sit in meetings. Even if you can provide useful insight in the meeting or may be necessary for the meeting - if there is no one available to pick up the result then there is no value in the meeting.

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.

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