Making time, not work — the design manager journey
How to optimize your time (and calendar!) to be happier & more effective at work
Work is never-ending, there will always be more work, the second your finish one meeting, project, or task, there will be another waiting, and if there isn’t you’ll find one or make one up.
It took me years to get to where I am now with calendar management, and it’s not just about a set of practices and skills, it’s also about having the confidence to make rules and stick to them (for yourself, and for those booking your time!) It’s also about taking a risk and doing things different from your peers, which can be hard, social pressure is real!
Below is a series of behaviors and best practices that I use to ensure that I have appropriate, meaningful quality time during the workday for myself and my team. I’ve tried to organize them from easy to more advanced, that way you can start at the top and work your way down as you feel more confident and comfortable. I’ll be using Google Calendar, but very few if any of these examples is platform-specific.
Set your working hours (howto)
Setting your working hours doesn’t keep someone from booking outside of those hours, but it does alert them when they do, it’s a subtle but helpful reminder that they’re impinging on your time. I use both the working hours feature as well as the working days to block off focus days, but more on that later. Beyond alerting others who might schedule outside of your working hours, most calendar apps will visually show you space outside your work hours which is a nice self-reminder about the promise you make to yourself about what is and is not part of what you consider inside and outside of your work hours.
Color code your meeting types
As a manager, I find that my meetings fall into a few distinct categories. I often need to be in different mindsets for each meeting type. Am I learning and consuming information? Am I empathizing and connecting? Am I “selling” and convincing others? Am I focused and creating? Not only does the color help me to remind myself what “mode” I’m in for my upcoming meeting, but it also helps me when I want to “defrag” my calendar to do more active optimization. Not only is a swiss cheese (lots of short meetings with short gaps between meetings) calendar hard for me when it comes to the mental context switching, I also find that I’m more effective when I can stay in one mindset for as long as possible.
A few of my rules:
Regular recurring 1+1s — I have a lot of these, and I try not to reschedule them out of respect for my team members.
1-off 1+1s — Sadly these are the most likely to be rescheduled, they’re likely infrequent, and if I have to move something they tend to inconvenience the fewest people.
Meetings where I’m “on-stage” — These are the meetings where I’m presenting, convincing others, or a key stakeholder, they tend to need pre-review, or at least some mental prep. Seeing this color on my calendar is a clue that I should block off time before this meeting to ensure that I’m prepared to present or give effective feedback
Meetings where I’m being “presented to” — These tend to be meeting with lots of people, hard to schedule, and very disruptive if I need to cancel or reschedule. These are meetings where I want to be focused, so I try to avoid having any meeting that might be stressful or emotionally charged before them so I can focus on what’s being presented.
External guests — Anything where first impressions are extra important, or rescheduling is much harder, things like client meetings, external partners, or interviews.
In-betweens — I block off time to walk between buildings, grab lunch, take breaks when I’m expecting deliveries, get to, and leave work (when we’re not WFH), or anything else that’s not a meeting, but needs to be scheduled so someone doesn’t block off that time.
Emojis!
I use emoji’s in the name of meetings to help me have a glanceable understanding of what the meetings are about, from ↻ recurring meetings, to 💎 focus time, 🙌 all hands, and team meetings, and 🤘 office hours.
Ok, now we’re moving into advanced territory…
Focus days
I block off two days(!) a week as focus days, does this mean I only work 3 days a week, or that I don’t have meetings during my focus days? No! What it means is that I don’t allow recurring meetings to be scheduled on my focus days. I treat the time as my time, that I’m in total control of, I reject meetings without feeling bad at all. I might take the time to read or write, I might use the time to have an extended lunch with a work friend that I don’t want to lose contact with. I might use the time to review my team’s performance review material or reach out to their peers to help articulate their growth areas.
Life friendly Fridays
We’re long overdue as a society to switch to a 4-day workweek, but until that happens I do my best to enforce shorter work hours at the end of the week, most people, even if they love their jobs are a bit exhausted and worn out by the end of the week, taking a half-day, or at least wrapping a couple of hours earlier than usual, is a great way to start the weekend, make sure you catch some extra sunlight, beat the traffic, and start to (hopefully) relax, decompress, and move to a different mental space. I model this behavior by leaving earlier than my team, making a point of saying goodbye. There are still people, that consciously or not, that have this “get there before the boss, don’t leave until they do” mentality. Only by very visibly modeling that behavior do I feel like I’m ensuring that I’m “walking the walk” when it comes to supporting work-life balance for my team.
Make time for lunch!
You gotta take care of yourself, don’t eat at your desk! Even if you’re busy, focus on one thing at a time, your mind needs a reset and a change of scenery, step away from your desk, change your setting, change your point of view, eat with colleagues, eat alone, but just don’t do it at your desk.
A few calendar tools that I like
Clockwise Calendar — An AI tool that looks at your and your team’s calendars to optimize for “focus time” to resolve conflicts, and a few other small improvements.
Koalender — When I’m mentoring or meeting with external folks, I really like it as a free simple replacement for things like Calendly. It’s great because you can have it look at both your work and personal calendar to ensure that no one unwittingly creates scheduling conflicts on your calendar.
Calendar Colorizer — a script that will automatically change the color of calendar events based on the name of the event with simple rules. Organization is good, but saving time is what this is all about!
👋 Comment to let me know your favorite calendar hacks to get time back and focus on what really matters to you!
Let me know what you’d like to hear about next in my Design Manager Journey series 👋
