A colleague and I were comparing notes yesterday on balancing the need to meet with people (via zoom) vs delivering on our own personal work commitments.
Here are three things I do to manage my time and balance my calendar:
1. Daily work blocks - Sacred time that I don’t allow anyone to schedule over (even me!). This is 1.5-2 hours of my day, every weekday.
2. Containers - Need a better name for this, but containers are standing meetings with specific groups of people in them that are needed to solve problems, make decisions, get alignment, etc. In a remote-first setting, solving problems one-to-one just doesn’t scale. One-to-many problem solving is key (note: I’m not saying you shouldn’t have one to ones with your people).
Containers I have are my staff meeting, a weekly meeting with the CSM team leaders, a “war room” for renewals, go to market leaders (ceo, cmo, cpo, cro, cco), product (ceo, cco, cto, cpo), and more…
We defer many discussions to these meetings so that we decide or solve together. This reduces the number of meetings we have to have, and also simplifies communications after a decision is made.
3. Work / think day - Every 6 weeks I take a vacation day to get work done and think deeper about strategy, structure, and how we are executing. (Someone will flame me for this, don’t worry I get plenty of real vacay in too).
I am no expert at all of this, but I’m working on it.
Curious what others are doing to be more effective in a remote-first environment?
