Dominica DeGrandis

When I ask teams what prevents them from getting work done, one of the more common responses I get is too many meetings. Like, "If I didn't have to go to so many meetings, I could get real work done."

So it appears that when you have too many interruptions, and too many different tools, and too many meetings, people feel overburdened, and it can lead to burnout.

Today, I want to talk about three things. I want to address the too-many-meetings complaint and what to do about it. I want to provide you with some ways to optimize your time, and then how to get buy-in and how to influence people to maybe reorganize your calendar.

A calendar chock-full of meetings, in some cases, leaves very little time to get important work done. Calendars, they only have so much room in them. There's physical space in the Google Calendar that I think is intended for just one meeting at a time. Yet they get double-booked, and they get triple-booked. In the case of Paula Thrasher, they get quintuple-booked.

And Paula Thrasher is not alone. The triple-booked calendar is just one of three calendar types we're going to explore. I call these three common types of calendars the 30-minute jam, the all-day cram, and the triple-booked wham.

Let's look at the 30-minute jam.

If you're managing a lot of people, you probably have a lot of one-on-ones. Your calendar might look like this: lots of small, maybe eight, nine, ten 30-minute meetings a day.

Or maybe you support multiple teams. If you're on a shared services team and you're supporting a dozen different projects, then maybe you're going to a lot of Agile stand-ups on a daily basis.

The problem with the 30-minute jam is the context switching. The context switching takes you away from the progress you are making and forces you to shift your mind.

It's like rush-hour traffic. Just when you get up to speed, you've got to stop, and you've got to jump into another meeting. You've got to jump on another call. It's this constant stop-and-go that people with the 30-minute jam are enduring.

Show of hands, how many of you are rocking the 30-minute jam?

I see about maybe 25, 30%. Keep your hands up if you're a people manager.

Again, same percentage. Yeah.

All right. Next, let's look at the all-day cram.

This calendar doesn't have a lot of white space in it. Every minute of the day is full most of the time.

Show of hands, who's sporting the all-day cram?

Okay, about 25%. Keep your hands up if you're in an executive or leadership position.

Okay, a good 15, 20%. Thank you.

The problem with all-day cram is there's zero room for variability. If something urgent comes up, that means you need to cancel a meeting, which means people are going to be disappointed. I am.

If I got a meeting with somebody from the executive team, I'm looking forward to it. Maybe I've prepared some questions to ask, and then it gets canceled. I'm like, "Ugh." Even if it gets rescheduled, that's okay, but still, I'm disappointed.

Some people might be thinking, "No way. I'm delighted if a meeting gets canceled." It's true. Sometimes that happens, too. But in that case, I would ask, do you need the meeting in the first place?

How often do meetings get canceled? That's an interesting data point. Or how often do meetings get rescheduled? How much time is wasted rescheduling meetings?

Which has got to be happening on what I affectionately call the triple-booked wham.

We cannot be in three places all at one time. So what happens if you're triple-booked? You either don't show, you do one of these, "Carry on without me," or you cancel the meeting. And both of those have a cost in rework.

Say you had a meeting on Thursday and it gets canceled, and it was a meeting to do review and make some decisions. If somebody spent a lot of time creating that material for people to review, if that meeting gets canceled or rescheduled to the following Thursday, now that person goes off, they work on something else that consumes the space in their head.

Then the following week, they got to come back. They have to do rework. They may have to look up new data. They got to wrap their head around it again. So there's a cost to that. Knowledge work is perishable.

The longer the time between when you needed that decision or feedback from that work to where you got it, the bigger the problem. The easier it is for people to forget what they were doing. It's just hard to get your head wrapped into it.

I want to bring up three calendar solutions for you to consider.

Paul Graham, he's founder of Y Combinator. He funds early-stage startups. He introduced the idea of two types of schedules: the maker schedule and the manager schedule.

The manager schedule is for decision-makers, so a lot of executives and middle managers are on the manager schedule. The maker schedule is for creative people, so developers, designers, writers. And they prefer big chunks of time.

Where the manager schedule, they do pretty well just parsing out their calendar to an hour at a time. The maker schedule want a lot of time because you can't really design or write something well in one hour. If I'm going to write a blog, I want a half a day because it's going to take me time to research, and write, and think. So one hour is barely enough time to get me started.

It's one reason that developers dislike meetings so much, because they don't have enough of their focus time.

Each calendar serves its purpose, except for when they collide. That's a problem, when people are on a different schedule.

What would an ideal maker calendar look like? It would look something like this, with large chunks of time. Time that allow people to focus without interruption so they can get into the zone.

The zone, it's referred to as flow. It's that mental state in which a person is fully immersed, energized, focused, and experiences joy in the activity. It's the complete absorption into what one does, so much so that they lose sense of space and time.

When I have my two hours of uninterrupted time before lunch, I can probably get a blog done. I can get my D1 done before noon. What's a D1? That's my deliverable one. That's the one thing that's the most important thing to do. It's my highest priority, and I want to get that done before lunch because then I'm motivated, and I like my job.

And ideally, if I can get a D2 in in the afternoon, then I'm very happy at the end of the day. So what I try and do is set two chunks of two-hour blocks of time to focus, and then coordinate all the meetings on either side of that, either before or after, or batch them up during lunch.

Why two hours? Because of ultradian cycles.

The brain naturally gets a lull in concentration every 90 minutes to 120 minutes when you're awake. It's kind of like circadian rhythms, but it's during the daytime. It's because the brain wave frequencies rise and then they sink. And so the body clock's natural rhythm is to focus really well for up to two hours before the brain needs a break.

That's why smart managers can understand why it's so important to consider. They can make organizations work to their frequency. They're in a position to do that. But if they know that people working for them need large chunks of time, then they can accommodate the calendar for them.

Let's give designers, and developers, and writers some time to do their very best work.

This is a manager calendar. And one way for managers to do that and still get their own important work done, because they've got a lot of important work to do, too, is to meet with other people who are on the same manager schedule during prime maker hours.

For example, here on this calendar, we've got meetings with people who are on the manager schedule between 9:00 and noon, for the most part.

I want to point out this unstructured time after a meeting like All Hands. If you have a department-wide meeting, like an All Hands, and the CEO is up there, and everybody's energized because they've just learned that revenue numbers are up or whatnot, and they've just told you the new plan for the year and people are energized, and then the CEO says, "Okay. Anybody got questions?"

Well, people don't feel comfortable raising their hand in front of 300 other people to ask a question. I don't. But if there's unstructured time after an All Hands, that leaves room for people to go up and talk to the speaker and ask questions.

Nobody gets interrupted then. The leadership, the people who are presenting at the meeting, don't get interrupted, and it doesn't interrupt maker time. It's a good way to make yourself available and approachable to folks with questions without interrupting you.

What's up for debate here is what time of the day works best for makers.

Then what about different time zones? If it's 1:00 PM in Boston, it's 10:00 AM in Seattle. So it's a decision that you may want to visit, what works for your organization.

The third calendar is just a combo calendar. There's a bit of 30-minute jam going on. There's some maker stuff. There's a little bit of triple-booked wham going on with the pink and green in the middle. Typical calendar. Meetings are randomly distributed across the day.

Here's what I suggest for that: to take advantage of a couple chunks of time in the late PM. And you could make this adjustment fairly easily by doing this.

Same calendar, same meetings. They're just rearranged to group most of the meetings in the morning. We did have to decline and reschedule two of the meetings because you can only be in one place at one time.

I wonder, though. I have a disclaimer. I noticed this happened to me today. I had three meetings on my calendar at one time, but it was because I had blocked time off, and then they set the formal meeting invite, and so that overlapped at the same time, but it was a little bit slightly adjusted.

I didn't go back and delete that meeting because secretly I wanted to have that extra time on my calendar. And I heard somebody else admit that they do that, too.

Typically, though, the root problem of a triple-booked calendar is lack of clear priorities. It's conflicting priorities. In this same room tomorrow, Troy Magennis is giving a talk on prioritization, so you might want to check that out.

Here we've just shuffled some things around, and we took advantage of the block on Monday and Tuesday for some large chunks of time.

In addition to rearranging your calendar to allow for larger chunks of focus time, there's some additional ways to optimize your time that I want to talk about. These are interruption busters. There's three of them I'm going to talk about today.

The first is Pomodoros.

Pomodoro is a kind of tomato sauce typically eaten with pasta, but it's also my interruption buster number one. It's a time-saving technique introduced by Francesco Cirillo. He's the author of The Pomodoro Technique.

Basically, you get a timer. I use a kitchen timer. You set it for 30 minutes, turn off Slack, turn off your phone, turn off the meetings, and it's heads-down focus. Intense focus is what it creates.

It's pretty amazing. I don't use my phone to time because I don't want to be distracted with Twitter noise. Pomodoros is how I finished my book. That's how powerful it was for me.

Next up is what I call do not disturb hours.

Let people know when you're not available. The most important point here is if it's at a regular cadence, then it's easier for people because they'll remember. If you change your do not disturb hours and they're different on Mondays than they are on Thursdays or Fridays, it's confusing.

If you have a regular cadence for do not disturb hours, it's helpful.

Some people will say, "Well, I don't have an office. I can't just put a clock up on my door saying when I'm going to be back." For that, I would say find some flag to put on your desk, or wear a hat, or something. Some people wear headphones. Do something.

And you have to train people. People who normally come up and tap you on the shoulder and say, "Got a minute?" And it's like, "Well, I guess I do now because you've interrupted my train of thought."

Just let them know, like, this is a visual cue. When you see this, I'm intensely focused, but I'll be available after.

Do not disturb hours give you permission to do what matters most. My boss once asked me to meet at a 6:30 a.m. meeting.

Can you hear me okay?

Yeah.

I had to say no because that's the most important time of my day. From 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. is when I write. It's when I do yoga. The do not disturb hours give us permission to do what matters most.

Number three interruption buster is office hours.

This allows your team, or people whose time you value, to make a request to meet with you. Office hours, just like your teacher back in school.

And Paul Graham at Y Combinator, they use this. It's how they manage finding time to provide advice with so many startups. They're basically using office hours as a device to put a maker schedule on a manager calendar.

Several times a week, they set aside time to talk with people, with founders that they've funded.

Office hours.

What do you think people say when I bring up these interruption busters or the idea of modifying your calendar?

"There's no way that's going to work here. We are a heavy meeting culture. That's what we do."

Like, "Because we have so many meetings, we deliver lots of customer value."

"We have 1,000 developers, and there's no way you're going to get that many people to change the way they work. We just can't say no."

And to that, I would say, what if we look at Warren's message? What if we take that to heart and start ruthlessly protecting our time by saying no?

The calendar won't self-organize itself. The onus is on you to do so.

The interruption busters basically require you to ruthlessly protect your time. This means saying no to requests. And no is hard to say, but no you must say. You've got to say no if you're going to do the most important work of your life.

Gotta say no.

This is a sticker I made, and I have some. Come see me if you want one. I'll give one to you, or you can pick some up at the Tasktop booth.

Too much WIP, work in progress. Too much WIP just causes all kinds of problems, right? Causes conflicting priorities, causes things to take longer, causes people not to have time to...

If you don't have time to do your best work during the day, when do you do it? You do it after the kids go to bed at night. Sleep-deprived people walking around during the day because they've been up till 2:00 AM in the morning working on their program.

So how do you influence people?

I would say with facts. Facts form the foundation of belief. Facts help people believe. Use some science to help people come to a conclusion. Try an experiment. Form a hypothesis and test it out with some measurable evidence.

Troy Magennis, founder of Focused Objective, suggests measuring competing metrics because it's relatively easy to game one metric. So it's good to measure in four different areas: how fast, how productive, how good, and how predictable.

Because if a team is targeting one metric, if you're measuring a balanced set, three other metrics, you're going to be able to see the impact that it has on the other metrics.

Let's look at this exercise in metrics that can help you do that. I call this the balanced flowchart exercise.

I created this exercise. I used it in a workshop in Scotland last month, and I got a lot of good feedback. I did three exercises, and this one, people liked this one the most. It's pretty easy. You can take it back and use it in your organization.

I'm going to go through these four metrics.

The first one is how fast. With how fast, I'm going to look at flow time. Flow time, some people call that cycle time or lead time. That's a whole other talk. I'm just going to call it flow time.

The question is how fast, right? The Y-axis here is the number of days that it took an item to complete. The X-axis is the date that the work was completed on.

If you look at the dot that the red arrow is pointing at, that's a type of work called revenue generation, so a business request that finished on September 19th, and it took 14 days to do.

If you're sporting the all-day cram and you have three emergencies pop up, that means that you can't get to the work that you had planned to do that week. That work is now going to be postponed.

And if you're measuring your flow time, it's going to show up on this chart. The dot with the red arrow was supposed to be completed the previous week, but it got pushed out to the following week because of unplanned work.

There's a legend on the right here. Unplanned work is a triangle. The circle with a dot in the middle is what I call revenue protection work. That's the monitoring, the security, the maintenance, the keeping-the-lights-on work.

If you're not tracking unplanned work and you have a lot of it, it's a problem because it's hard to manage unplanned work.

Chart number two is how productive. This one's an easy metric. This is just throughput. You just count.

For each week, so this same chart is the month of September 2017, and it's split up into four weeks, throughput is just the total number of items. How many things did we do this week?

We're going to make that number visible at the top of the chart. The first week, that number is eight. We did eight things. And then the trend went down.

This is LeanKit's format for their speed report, and I liked it, so I'm borrowing it from them here.

The important thing to look at with these metrics is the trend. Here we're seeing that the trend of the flow time is going up over the course of the month, and that the trend of the throughput is going down over the course of the month.

And then you can see that. Why is that?

How would you game this data? How do people game flow time and throughput? You game that system by rushing to get your work out. Maybe you skip your validation state or your feedback, and the same holds true for flow time.

If people are incentivized because they're being measured in a certain way, they're going to game data. Tell me how you're going to measure me, and I'll tell you how I'm going to behave.

Oh, and then the second part of that from Eli Goldratt is: don't expect me to behave in a logical manner if you're going to measure me in an illogical fashion. I might have had that backwards, but you get the idea.

If you're gaming the metrics, then that could have an impact to your quality metric, right? If people are rushing to get work done, and the metrics look good because throughput is up and flow time, you got a lot of things finished, but what about quality?

Quality's hard to measure, but here I'm using failure demand. I put a pink circle around the items that were a result of some kind of error, some kind of failure happened. Production went down, and because of that, obviously, we have to get that up and running again.

And so we look at a quality metric. If we're tracking failure demand, we can look at change failure rate. Change failure rate is a ratio. It's the number of failed-demand items that were done divided by the total number of all the done items for that week.

The change failure rate is just listed at the very top. For the first week, it was 25%. Twenty-five percent of our work is due to failures, failure demand.

I like everything on one page, so that's why I tried to make a visual that was easy for people to look at, and it's just all on one page.

Okay. Lastly, how predictable?

If you want to be more predictable, then you need to look at probability. Well, you don't have to, but I'd suggest that.

Instead of asking the question, "What date is this due?" ask the question, "What's the probability of finishing this work within so many days?"

We're trying to be approximately right instead of exactly wrong.

If we look at a percentile, like the 90th percentile, where in this view, I filtered it, by the way, we're just looking at revenue generation type of work. The 90th percentile is basically the value for which 90% of all the data points, all the dots on this chart, are smaller than that number, and there's 10% that are higher.

So nine out of ten times, you're going to get this type of work done in less than the number. For the first week, there's 8.7 days. And it's going up. You can see the trend goes up.

Based on this data, you could say, with a fair amount of confidence, that revenue generation work is going to take between eight days and 20 days.

Is 90% good enough for most work? If you're making pacemakers, then you got to go with 100%. But if it's not that critical, I bet you 90% is pretty darn good.

I worked in an organization, and we tried to hit 75%, and the business was thrilled because before that, it'd only been 67%. So we were at least 75% more predictable, and they were happy as could be about that.

If the work has a huge cost of delay to it, then here you could bump it up and say, "We'll deliver that to you between 8 and, say, 25 days."

The idea is you have a range. You set a range, not one specific due date, because there will always be variability in the system that we work in. Cars go in the shop, and kids get sick, and the logo changes on your website, and now the marketing material has to be redone. There's just always something that's coming up.

If you're already successfully capturing this kind of data and you're going through this big transformation, everything's working real well, the next interesting challenge to look at is how to expand that.

Because you could do this chart as one person. You could do this exercise with your team. You could do it with the department. You could do it across the whole organization.

How cool would that be to understand how long it took something to take from the time it was this brilliant idea all the way through funding and all the upfront business needs that have to happen, and design, and development, and build, including the time it takes to check in code, and build, and deliver, and sustain?

And so for that, let's look at the end-to-end workflow.

I'm just going to leave it at that for now and suggest you go watch Carmen DeArdo and Mik Kersten's talk on Wednesday. They're going to talk about how they connect their architecture throughout their value stream for Nationwide. How does Nationwide do that?

I'm going to circle back to too many meetings.

Different kinds of meetings for different purposes. If you haven't been to a Lean Coffee-style meeting before, I want to invite you. We're having one upstairs in Imperial Ballroom A at 4:10 today. First come, first served. There's a max capacity of 100 people.

It's just people gather, they build an agenda, they begin talking. It's an opportunity for you to be heard and to hear what's going on with other people at this conference on topics that you also want to discuss.

Somebody is going to influence your team. It might as well be you.

Be the voice of reason in your organization. Use facts. Do an experiment. And because of the natural tension across the four metrics, how fast, how good, how predictable, how productive, it enables a balanced perspective, just like a balanced calendar.

With that, I'm going to end on a note with these four books that I pulled from my bookcase for this talk.

There's a lot of different ways to structure meetings, and Death by Meeting is a great book that looks at the purpose. Every kind of meeting has a different purpose.

The Flow book describes, there's a TED Talk on it, too, by the author on this book, describes how to get in the zone, how to get into the flow, and all the things and the science involved with that.

If you really struggle with saying no, there's a book, 250 Ways to Say No. You can go get your no cred with that.

And then Making Work Visible has all the interruption busters in it, and it talks about the metrics.

Connect with me. There's a variety of ways here that you can connect with me. If you do send me an email, put "DOES17 Flow" on the subject so I have a visual cue, I know where that's coming from.

Thank you very much.