Finding Time for Coding

While my management activities are important, they're not a full time job. In a small company like mine, my coding skills are still valuable. Where I’ve struggled is in finding large blocks of time to make meaningful progress.

At first I had my meetings spread across the week. While this kept my meeting-time low on any given day, it ate into my open work time. I have rarely had more than 1 consecutive hour to get any kind of deep work accomplished.

I made this problem worse by scheduling my 1:1s with a 30 minute buffer between each person. It looked nice on calendar and gave space for meetings to run long. But after a year I’ve found most 1:1s end 5-10 minutes early. The result was frequent blocks of 30 minutes of waiting time.

Recently I’ve switched to scheduling all my meetings on Tuesday and having my 1:1s back-to-back. There is one person that I sometimes goes long with, but I put them at the end of the day.

While Tuesday is a write-off, I now have 3 other days with completely open schedules. I have much more time to program on my own, in mobs/pairs, and to do other management activities.