Are meetings taking over your calendar? Here is how I fixed mine.
I restructured my week around the 3Ps with one clear goal: keeping 50% of my calendar open.
This week, I have been reflecting on the changes that I made to my weekly schedule once I got to leading multiple teams. The way I managed my time as a manager of a single small squad didn’t scale to bigger teams and way more projects.
This is why I wanted to share with you the changes that worked for me, in case they could also work for you.
Let’s dive in!
Are you a newly promoted manager? Or, if you already are a manager, do you remember your transition coming from an individual contributor role? As of the time of writing, I have been leading data science teams for the past 4 to 5 years, but I still remember one the my main struggles at the beginning of my journey as a manager: time management.
Data Scientists or Sr Data Scientists individual contributors tend to focus on 1 or 2 problem spaces. The IC role is supposed to provide you the space to deliver on a deep problem, removing noise from other projects and admin work. You will probably have some ad-hoc chats with engineering colleagues or other data science peers, but these are the necessary because technical designs and system dependencies are important for delivery. Of course, one must attend weekly meetings with stakeholders, but probably you get 1 of these per week. Therefore, let’s say that as an IC, your week is around 20% meetings with 80% technical work.
Now… what would happen if, instead of working on 1 project, you oversee 3 to 5 projects and 6 to 12 direct reports? If you are not careful with time management, the hourly balance can balloon to 80% meeting time with only 20% of time to focus on actual project details.
In my opinion, this is not healthy. If you find yourself in this situation, I hope this article can show you a different way of organising your week.
A challenging recent personal experience: leading 2 Data Science squads.
Due to a set of circumstances, in January 2024 I found myself leading 2 data science squads. I had been leading the marketing DS team for a couple of years, and senior leadership asked me to steer the hotels team. In total, with both teams, I was overseeing 10 individual contributors and 5 projects. I knew that time was going to be a problem, and I was right. This is how my calendar looked like.
Don’t worry too much about all the colour coding and details. We will cover these in detail in a later section. The important bit is the lack of white spaces for unscheduled meetings.
Clearly, I was not complying with what I mentioned in the introduction. My open calendar had <30% of the weekly allocation. I had too many direct reports, too many projects, too many deep dives and too many squad ceremonies. At the time, we also had a problem of seniority in the team, which meant that delegation was complicated; therefore it fell on me to attend pretty much all these sessions. It wasn’t a bad time management problem. It was a being too thinly spread out.
Nevertheless, this highlights what I also said in the introduction: this is not healthy. I couldn’t sustain that level of detailed work, nor I was offering the best of me to my direct reports. In addition, I got feedback that there was no space in my calendar for impromptu chats.
In this case, I managed the situation up and put pressure on senior leadership to make changes in the team. For example, we got a new manager to lead one of the two teams and reallocated senior data scientists so that they could become accountable for some of these projects. Whilst I would still oversee 2 areas (marketing and hotels), the hotels space would have a dedicated lead. This meant that the volume of 1–1s, ceremonies and project deep dives would be significantly smaller for me, and thus, creating open space in the agenda.
If you find yourself with barely 20 or 30% of your calendar open for unscheduled meetings or deep work, it is time to think how to solve it.
The 50:50 goal
As a data scientist, I need a metric of success to measure and target. In this case, I came up with having a split between scheduled meetings vs open slots in the agenda of 50:50.
Scheduled meetings are the irreplaceable ones. These are the time investments that you need to make to ensure that your teams are working smoothly and that project delivery is on track. Because they are irreplaceable, you shouldn’t have more than 50% of your agenda committed to them. You will not have flexibility or capacity for other important, but maybe not as rigidly scheduled, tasks.
For example:
When would I have time to do interviews?
What if there was a meeting to discuss urgent problems?
What if I needed to extend my 1–1s to talk about something important with one of my team members?
What if I need to travel for work?
I can guarantee you that the open slots tend to be filled out if you are in a senior manager position. The idea of having open slots is not to have deep focus work (although if I get some, I massively appreciate it). The purpose is to make sure you have the flexibility to attend unexpected needs or move 1:1s around if necessary.
My current calendar view
Even though I currently have 6 direct IC reports and 1 manager (who oversees another 5 reports), and am responsible for 2 big areas such as marketing and hotels, I managed to meet my 50:50 goal.
Lets unpack all the details being shown in the calendar screenshot.
What are the 3Ps?
Up until now, we have covered the issue of not having enough open slots for flexibility. Now, we will focus on the irreplaceable meetings. Let me ask you a question: what are the most important things to focus on if you can only invest up to 50% of your week time?
For me, these are:
People
Projects
Process
(and in that order of importance)
People
It will sound topical, but the most important part of your role as a manager is to empower your team. And you can only do that by spending time with them, knowing them and helping them.
In the screenshot above, meetings which cover the people dimension are coloured in green. I like having 30 mins 1:1s with ICs, 1 hour 1:1s with the manager of the other team and blocking a dedicated slot for going to lunch together. In addition, I myself want to chat with my manager, so there is 1 hour for that too. In total, ~6 scheduled hours.
What do I cover in my 1:1s?
I want to spend my 1:1s knowing what the other person did on the weekend, if they are feeling excited about our new test or if they are worried with their relationship with stakeholders. I want to chat about what could be the next thing for them or if I can find funds for training. I want to chat about their performance ratings and collect feedback for them. In summary, I want to focus on them. Not on the project itself. I don’t want a 1:1 to become a report on what they are doing. I already know that from standup and we have scheduled project deep dives to cover these project details.
Why 30 minutes for ICs but 1 hour for the manager?
I have actually tried lots of different variations in terms of 1:1s length. Ideally, I would love to dedicate 1 hour to every direct report. The reality is that this will eat into my calendar and I will be again in a situation with little flexibility.
By constraining the 1:1 to 30 mins, both the IC and myself, have to focus on the most important thing for the week. Sure, with 1 hour per person, we could cover many more items. And hey, many weeks that is what happens. But, if we do need 1 hour instead of 30 minutes, we cover it with a separate chat in one of my other free agenda slots. For that extra meeting, we come prepared and focus on something very specific. For example, does someone want to brainstorm an idea, need a peer review, or require help putting together a presentation?
Regarding my direct report who is also a manager, I feel that 1 hour is needed. Not only we need to cover everything we cover with an IC (focus on them and their needs), but also, on the other team’s delivery. As I am not in the day to day of the other team, but am still responsible for the area, we need some dedicated time to cover how is everything going project wise. Again, I don’t want this time dedicated to have a report on the specifics of different solutions. What I want is to help the manager with the bigger picture: why are they deciding to focus on that feature for the next iteration? How is that tied with the quarterly plan? Has the team communicated the results more widely? Is the team missing tooling? Are the projects in PoC or MVP phase and when will they dedicate time to securing production systems?
Optional 1:1s
Finally, I have in my agenda ~1 hour for chatting with ICs from other teams. The idea here is check how the individual folks in the hotels team are doing. It is not a formal 1:1; they have their manager for that. It’s more an open chat. I find these skip “level” or “not direct report” sessions super informative to gauge team dynamics where I am not in the day to day. The guys also love to share their ideas with someone more “external”. These tend to be quite fun chats, so I also like having them!
In total, ~20% of the weekly time.
Investing between 6–8 hours per week means that I am dedicating 15% to 20% of my time to the team. And this is the thing that I will not cut back on.
In summary, people focused 1:1s, with a view of covering more specific topics in dedicated sessions where both the individual and myself come prepared and focused.
Projects
As a senior data science manager, delivery is as important as the individual folks in the team. We need to deliver value. And you can’t deliver value if you don’t understand what is happening. This is why I have 3 types of scheduled meetings to cover project specific stuff (you can see them coloured in blue).
The deep dives
Deep dives are the most fun part of the week. Here, the IC(s) who are working on a project and myself, get together for 1 hour and cover delivery against plan, discuss new ideas, have brainstorms and run peer reviews.
We generally start of with a quick view of how are we doing against our “waterfall” planned delivery timeline. For example, below you can see a screenshot of how we break mini-milestones for a project. These are fluid: we can move them around, extend the delivery time or cancel them. In addition, it is super important for us to devote 5 minutes to looking ahead of time and figuring out what needs to happen today to enable work planned for 2 or 3 sprints head.
Once the “admin” side of things is covered, we go into the “fun zone”. This is where we might peer review the XGB being developed, suggest metrics to better communicate the data quality we are facing or look at execution times and orchestration of our ETL Spark job. In other words, the geeky side of the job.
The performance meeting with stakeholders
Weekly catchups with stakeholders are essential. In our projects, stakeholders tend to be a mix of product managers, marketeers and engineers. The idea is to put all of the ICs and leads from different teams and disciplines together for 1 hour. There is always an agenda:
Start with a 5 to 10 minute progress report
Continue with technical discussions. For example, we present some analysis from our bidding algorithm and our marketing colleagues ask questions about possible scenarios or situations. These enquiries help us shape future work, build tracking metrics or consolidate the trust that other teams have in our work.
Finally, there are around 10 minutes dedicated to accountability. Who is going to do what and in what timeframe? Are we all aligned that the next 2 items to focus on are X and Y? Who do we need help from to unblock this work stream?
Do I have to attend all these weekly performance meetings? As long as the individual contributor feels comfortable and has enough context, I actually try to skip these meetings. If you provide the IC with a space to own, they thrive. If you are there, by default, eyes turn on you for Data Science stuff. Therefore, whilst my agenda has around 3 hours blocked for this, I probably use 1 hour per week. This frees my calendar up for other non-scheduled important chats.
The 1:1s with senior leadership
One thing that I have discovered which unblocks delivery is having a close relationship with top level senior leadership. Try your best to get 30 mins every 2 weeks with those who call the shots. I know they are busy with a million things, but I feel they actually look forward to getting some insights on what is happening and how can they help.
These 1:1s are not to talk about how you or they are doing. These sessions are straight to the point: “today I have 2 points to talk about”. By being direct and coming prepared, I have unblocked so many issues. For example; we once needed engineering support to build an API, but we didn’t have a relationship with the engineering leads from a new team. The director of the hotels space managed to wipe out 1 engineers agenda for 1 month, and we collaborated to get this live. Result? What would have taken 6 months on our own (ask for help in Q1 and wait for the item to be prioritised for Q2), took only 1 month. Another example: the marketing lead came to us with a set of projects she needed help with. All important by the way. But, we only had 3 Data scientists, and couldn’t cover all. Prioritisation was becoming an issue. What did the senior director of marketing do? Organised an onsite for the leads to get together with the goal of leaving the room with a prioritisation for the next 3 months whilst he would put pressure upwards for more Data Science resource.
The list of issues that senior leadership have unblocked for me goes on and on, and that is because of these regular meetings with them. Sure, they are 3 to 4 levels above me… so what? If you add value to their area of influence, I can guarantee they will make time to chat with you. And by the way, I have yet to meet one of these senior leaders who is not willing to help.
In total, ~15% of the weekly time.
Investing between 3–5 hours per week means that I am dedicating 10% to 15% of my time to the projects. Here I am flexible and can recover some time through delegation.
Process
Finally, we come to third P; process. I describe process as those ceremonies that are not directly tied to any project or person, but which are necessary to make sure we don’t loose sight of the bigger picture. In the screenshot, you can see there are 3 “orange” ceremonies which are regularly scheduled in my agenda.
Team ceremonies
Retros every 2 or 3 weeks. In my case, as senior DS manager, I have my direct squad retros but I also attend the retros of the other squad to have a feel of what is going on.
Squad sharing session. Super important to have a free space to brainstorm, show case what we have done and learn from each other. I think this is one of the meetings that the squad really enjoys having. It’s geeky, it’s banter, it’s fun and we learn a truck load of things from each other.
Discipline ceremonies
By discipline I refer to the data science discipline
We have an all-hands every 2 weeks. The format is simple: 2 presenters to show their latest work in addition to our Director of DS doing a download of what is happening in the company today. It helps to understand what other squads are doing as sometimes there is overlap on technical solutions they are using, tooling they are exploring or data issues they have encountered.
There are other ceremonies that I haven’t added to my calendar for presentation purposes (the screenshot would look super cluttered). For example, we have a ‘ranking guild’, where ICs of different ranking projects (hotels ranking, flights ranking and car hire ranking) get together to discuss ideas and reading papers.
Discipline management
Finally, with my manager peers, we get together once a week to discuss the data science discipline more widely. For example, we discuss hiring needs and the formats of each interview. We discuss people performance and who would be good candidates for internal rotations between different data science squads. We discuss what our productions standards should be at a discipline level and put plans to ensure that we adopt these in a specified timeframe. And the list goes on and on and on…
In total, ~15% of the weekly time.
Investing between 4–5 hours per week means that I am dedicating 12% to 15% of my time to process.
So 50% of your week is “open”….
That’s your starting point on a weekly basis. You check on Sunday how the week looks, and you think: “hey, I can do X, Y and Z on Wednesday and Friday”. Well, there is one thing I can guarantee you:
A free slot in the calendar does not mean focus time for you
What does my 50% open week really look like?
Extra ad-hoc 1:1s.
Sudden issues which need alignment with other leads.
Hiring (when hiring kicks in, you can forget about your open slots)
Kids. Yes, kids. It’s Murphy’s law: if you have saved a day for deep focused work, your kids will make sure that is not the case.
Company town halls.
(My recommendation: if you want to have a deep focus slot, block it in your calendar with a fancy meeting name).
In summary
As I started at the beginning of the post: if you find yourself in a managerial position and you have very little “free” time in your calendar, review your priorities. Try to ensure that you have, at least, 50% of your week “free” to cover unexpected needs.
This is the way I currently lead 1 Data Science squad of 6 data scientists, manage the lead of another 6 person squad and am accountable for 5 to 6 projects. As of today, this time management framework has worked for me. Time will tell if, with bigger responsibilities, I need to shift this way of working.
Further reading
If you are interested in more content, here is an article capturing it and organising it all by topics!
As a manager leading multiple teams, I have found this post extremely helpful. It provides plenty of actionable ideas. The 50:50 split seems like a reasonable goal. I usually block my calendar with focus time slots to achieve a similar aim. 1:1s with senior leadership are a must!
As an IC, this was very informative. Sometimes, we neglect the impact of 1:1s but that could be the difference between enjoying the work and just going by.