4 to 8 meetings a day.
100+ emails
Teams and slack constantly going off
Yet I'm still supposed to produce actual quality code as well.
It's like trying to work in a mosh pit
Now I work in a 3-men company where the CEO is mostly absent and it's me and another developer, that's it. We manage 5 different products. A single team in big corp would've not been able to handle even one of those I'm 100 % sure of it.
I grew to appreciate more small teams made of quality strongly independent people, productivity is infinitely higher than big teams in big corps, those are doomed to be slow and inefficient.
The only con in the current arrangement is that company is obviously very vulnerable to losing me or even my other colleague which is way more proficient and expert than me on many aspects. Our CEO understands that and his priority is to make us happy financially and by allowing us to work how we prefer, at the time we prefer.
Best deal I've ever had in my life. I work much more than I did, but I like it, it's still less than 8 hours per day, but it's not meetings/youtube/chats/some coding.
Are You me? Jokes aside, my company used to be a lot bigger, but most left, and others were moved to big bang rewrite project into modern js (which seems to be going nowhere). And now me and other developer, one admin and one product/sales guy keeps 20-modules app (modules as modules in ERP line env - meaning CRM, Accounts Recivable, Correspondence etc.) written in old forsaken tech working smoothly with new features added daily for 10 quite big customers.
Its really amazing what can be achieved with small team who can focus their whole attention on helping customers directly, ignore unecessary meatings, work from home at whatever hours they want, and not re-doing the same stuff over and over with new shiny technology.
I don't check my email more than 5 times a day: start of day, mid morning, before lunch, mid afternoon, end of day. In your case that's 20 emails to look at each time and I bet adding some inbox rules would break it up into something even more manageable (3 to 5 emails per folder they hit).
Teams and slack chats are muted by default for me unless I'm mentioned and that's what most people expect.
This yields good ~90 minute chunks for me to work with despite all the noise. I don't even block out my schedule. I just let some days be shitty if they're going to be (usually no more than about 3 half days lost per week).
It drives me bonkers and I tell people off but somehow it still happens.
I think direct conversations online is turning people into junkies of the now.
I actually day dreamed about going back to emails sometimes last week... Then I woke up when the notification bell went off.
A better way to handle this is to just stop responding. Disable alerts, turn off Slack if you must. Put a message in your bio setting ground rules for how to engage with you with some context on your time management philosophy. If folks complain, have a conversation with your manager about it. In some cases prioritizing responsiveness may be a priority, but this naturally comes at the expense of deep work, and it needn't be everyone all the time. Twice an hour is ridiculous for an IC in any case, hard to diagnose without more details, but it definitely indicates some kind of problem that a competent manager should be able to help you address.
I have this pet theory that you're never as productive as the first year of employment, where you know your stuff and you're getting things done but people don't know it's you yet!!
- people might try to figure things out, or find an answer that might not strictly how things works, but consistant with it. (this last thing can be extremely powerful, as it can lead to better communication with clients).
- people will internalize that they won't have instant answer and organise themselves with that immuable fact. They'll naturally end up to compound potential questions, and that probable async replies lead them to refine their question in a more precise way.
- occasional instant reply gets valued for what it is.
If instant replies with sync conversation are expected, there is an organisational problem, and it's not sustainable. It's bad habit, being small business is not a good enough excuse.
Slack and Teams at the same time is a disaster.
I miss only email too.
You can remove that number, and I highly recommend you do so (and, more, that you set your taskbar to auto-hide).
Also, nobody has to be put on the spot. Leaving them waiting a couple of hours max for an answer is usually the same wait time anyway. In the meantime you can also ask refining questions before producing the final answer.
Seriously. Keeping these conversations in DMs keeps the knowledge siloed and ensures the current situation will never get better.
(Not your job, Slack.)
Not sure if such an app exists for web/desktop.
They're stuff like standups or sprint planning for projects I'm not always actively contributing to. If I need to be there it's because I have a significant number of Jira issues assigned to me.
The other meetings I set to tentative are the huge (hundreds of attendees) quarterlies, monthlies, etc.
I don't usually do this for one-off meetings unless the organizer just optimistically added people from the org chart. In that case I will ask about it.
I'm not saying I won't attend, but just that I don't know if I can. It's an honest answer. All this time adds up.
First of all, thats not a very nice way of putting things. Secondly your answer has little conversational value, you are not adding to the debate. Thirdly - that’s just like, your opinion, man.
If you ain’t good work on that. If they are struggling then the decision is whether to stay (based on your ethics and situation)
Too many meetings indicates some issue with the division or prioritization at work.
Tell them if you do 2 unrelated tasks and switch between them then it is guaranteed they will get work product later than if you do one at a time. This is guaranteed.
If the tasks are related it might be OK but this is a rare exception in coding. Building sheds it may be ok (lay all the foundations first). But then laying all the foundations is the task unit so again this might apply.
Tell them that if management keep changing their mind, it is like calling the pizza restaurant and changing your order every 15 minutes. Food will come late.
Also context switching loses time. For non technicals that don’t understand this give them an IQ test, them every 10 minutes pull the sheet away from them and swap it for a reading comp. test and then every 5 minutes tap them on the shoulder and ask about their pets. Just describing that means they should get it as almost every person had been subjected to those tests in interviews at one point.