In the world of software development, time is everything. That is why it is important for developers to have uninterrupted blocks of time in order to write, debug and refine code. However, a common challenge arises when tech lead managers, who are often well intentioned but relatively inexperienced, create a calendar full of meetings. These meetings, which were supposed to enhance communication and alignment, can become a real productivity nightmare if not managed well.
The Problem with Overloading Meetings Imagine this: your team is working on a critical feature, and every day is packed with meetings where everyone is expected to participate. Your developers have very little time to actually work on their core work. The issue isn’t just the time spent in meetings—it’s the disruption of focus and the difficulty of context switching. You can lose hours of a developer’s work flow even for a 30-minute meeting in the middle of a work session.
While meetings are inevitable in a work setting, too many or poorly scheduled meetings can:
- Reduce productivity by disrupting work time into small chunks.
- Possess the potential to annoy and demotivate developers.
- Result in a delay in the completion of projects.
Good Intentions, Poor Execution Tech lead managers tend to schedule more meetings than needed in order to:
Ensure that everyone is in sync. Prove that they are leading the team. Solve problems and remove obstacles in real-time. While these goals are fine, the management of the leaders ensures that they do not involve their team members in activities that may hinder their productivity. With no knowledge of the notion of communication vs. focus time, they may be setting up a situation where the developers are more likely to be talking about working rather than actually working.
A Better Way: How to Manage Meets and Focus Time Equitably for Employees. Here are some principles that good managers follow to ensure their teams remain productive:
- Meeting Time: Developers should not spend more than one hour each day in meetings. This makes it possible for them to have enough time for deep work without being interrupted.
- Combine and Streamline Meetings: Instead of having several small meetings, why not have all the discussions in one full meeting? For example, daily standups can be kept short and sweet with the nitty-gritty details of the team’s work discussed during dedicated planning meetings.
- Respect Developer Time: Managers and project managers can engage in detailed discussions and provide the team with the necessary information in the form of briefings. In this way, developers get the information that they need without getting bogged down in details.
- Asynchronous Communication: Use tools like Slack, email, or shared documents for information and post messages that do not require an immediate response.
- Set Realistic Expectations: When setting time goals for developers, include the time they spend in meetings. This is because if this is not done, then the developer will be setting very short timelines for the work to be done and this will cause a lot of stress.
As a developer, how much time do you think is appropriate for meetings? I think one hour per day is about the maximum—anything above that is productive work time. Project managers should be able to deal with more extensive discussions and provide the team with the necessary conclusions.
