Are you losing precious time trapped in meeting misery? Lack of time to get real work done or simply think contributes to unhappy employees and follow-on poor performance. A look at four key metrics can help. In this talk, Dominica shares an experiment to help you get buy-in to optimize your calendar.

1. The Balanced Calendar
How to optimize your time
Dominica DeGrandis

2. @dominicad

3. Agenda
§ Address the too-many-meetings complaint
§ Provide some ways for you to optimize your time
§ How to get buy in from the boss to do so
@dominicad

4. @dominicad

5. The all day cram
The 30 minute jam
The triple booked wham

6. The 30 minute jam
10 meetings a day - perpetual stop and go - exacerbates context switching
@dominicad

7. Back-to-back 7am to 7pm meetings leave zero flexible time
§ no room for unexpected important urgent work
§ disappointed people
§ cancelled meetings (how often cancelled?)
§ How much time is wasted rescheduling meetings?
The all day cram

8. A canceled meeting creates rework – which has a cost
The triple booked wham

9. 3 Calendar solutions
1. Maker calendar: Creative people (developers, designers, writers)
2. Manager calendar: Decision makers
3. Combo calendar: People who do both
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Each type of schedule serves its purpose - except when they collide
One reason developers dislike meetings so much is because they're on a different schedule.

10. Ultradium cycles: brain naturally gets lull in concentration every 90 – 120 min when awake b/c brain wave frequencies rise, then sink.
https://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/science/rhythms/
Maker calendar

11. Unstructured
time after
dept meetings
Manager calendar
Upper mgt is in a position to make everyone meet at their frequency.
But if they know ppl working for them need long chunks of time, they can arrange calendar to accommodate prime maker time
mgrs meet w/
other mgrs
during prime
maker time

12. Combo calendar - before

13. @dominicad
Combo calendar - after
D1 D1
D1
D1

14. 3 Interruption busters to help you optimize time
1. Pomodoros
2. Do Not Disturb hours
3. Office hours

15. @dominicad
Pomodoros
Break down work into time-
boxed intervals separated by
short breaks.
Set timer for 25 or 30 min and
work to finish your task until
timer rings.
Pomodoros provide intense focus
time.
a time saving technique introduced by Francesco Cirillo, author of The Pomodoro Technique

16. @dominicad
Do-not-disturb hours
Set a regular cadence to let
people know when you are
available and when you are
not available.

17. @dominicad
Office hours
A regular cadence of office
hours signals times when
people can schedule time on
your calendar, or drop by for
important discussions.

18. @dominicad
“But that won’t work here.”

19. “The difference
between successful
people and very
successful people is
that very successful
people say “no” to
almost everything.”
~Warren Buffett
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/756.Warren_Buffett

20. @dominicad

21. How to get buy-in from the boss
Measure at least one metric trend in 4 different areas.
§ How fast
§ How productive
§ How good
§ How predictable
Troy Magennis team dashboard - http://focusedobjective.com/team-metrics-right/ based on work by Larry Maccherone
“It’s relatively easy to game a single metric. It’s important to measure the
impact of change in one metric by showing the other metrics.” ~ Troy Magennis

22. @dominicad
Look at Flow time
Balanced Flow chart exercise – How Fast?
www.ddegrandis.com

23. @dominicad
Look at Throughput
Balanced Flow chart exercise – How productive?
www.ddegrandis.com

24. Balanced Flow chart exercise – How good?
www.ddegrandis.com
Look at Quality
change failure rate (CFR)
% of done FD items
total # of done items

25. Consider the
90th percentile
to discuss the
probability of
finishing work
within so
many days.
90th percentile filtered
for business requests
Balanced Flow chart exercise – How predictable?
90th percentile: value for which 90% of the data points are smaller & 10% are bigger

26. If your end-to-end workflow network
isn’t connected, is there any point in
optimizing one particular area?
It’s hard to discover bottlenecks with
sparse visibility on work across
disconnected systems.

27. @dominicad
DevOps Workshops
Location: Imperial Ballroom A
Mon: 4:10 - 5:10 pm
Tue: 1:40 - 2:40 pm
Max capacity 100 (FIFS)

28. 1. Try the interruption busters: Pomodoros, Office hours, DND hours.
2. Consider the balanced Flow chart experiment to improve.
Call to action – Experiment for a balanced calendar

29. Connect with me!
Subject: DOES17 FLOW
Email: dominica@tasktop.com
Website: ddegrandis.com
@dominicad
therealdominicad
/in/dominicadegrandis