A PMs worst nightmare…their calendar

Quick pointers to optimise your calendar

A few weeks back, the Product Designer my team was assessing for hire had asked me, out of sheer curiosity, “what else do PMs do apart from meetings?” 🙃🙃

It’s easy to see how he’d think that. Albeit, there was a stint of ignorance from him, but he was unto something. PMs can borderline look like professional meeting goers.

Fast forward a few days later, I saw this apt LinkedIn post by Andre Albuquerque. Headline: A PM’s calendar sucks. The write up also had great action points on managing one’s calendar better.

I work fully remote. So most of our brainstorming and huddle sessions are over meetings that extend a couple of hours and don’t even show up on my calendar sometimes. Overall, I’m pretty much in one Google meets call or the other throughout the best part of the day. In the end, I’m left with only a few hours after 7 pm to do my other stuff like documentation etc. 😥

So, I have decided to try something new. Taking some points from Andre Albuquerque, our former engineering lead and my experience, here are some steps/pointers to optimise your calendar.

Is it meeting-worthy?

If you’re as frustrated as I am, it’s easy to spot the 1-hr meetings that don’t make sense and should be cut down to just 30 minutes or taken out altogether. Some communications could be quick phone calls, chats (even though I hate to chat), or emails. To decide what should go up on my calendar, I have a mental checklist that I run through (well…I try to).

1. Complexity: Are we meeting to ideate, share feedback, collaborate? And would emails/chats not suffice because there’s a chance of miscommunication? Would we need to display content?
2. Outcome: Would a meeting clarify the next steps to take in a way other media can’t? Would my desired outcome be met?
3. Duration: Would we need more than 10 minutes to discuss this? 10 minutes because anything less than 10 might as well be a phone call.

Of course, there are other factors, but these three are easy to remember and allow me to make decisions quickly. If the item/task I have in mind meets all three above, then a meeting is most likely a go.

“Wait, why are we really here?”

At the start of any meeting, I would always state the order of the day. However, it was (and still is) easy for these meetings to get sidetracked by distractions here and there.

Now, to help with this, it’s best to have a written meeting agenda. Clearly stating the purpose of a meeting and sharing with the team beforehand helps get the participants in the zone and instils the mindset required for that meeting. It allows us to keep everything on track. If these meetings still get sidetracked, appointing a facilitator, someone to own the meeting agenda, could be super helpful.

M is for Monday…and meetings!

Currently, in Lendsqr, the products team regularly communicates with engineering, CS and growth teams. Sometimes our chats and emails don’t fill all the gaps, and it’s good to have touch base sessions to get all the feedback we need.

Rather than have these sessions across the week on different days, my team and I decided to put most key stakeholders’ meetings on…you guessed right…Mondays. I’ll have you know that this one step alone had a significant impact on my calendar! The only price I pay is having breakfast at 9 pm 😪 (JK, my family loves me, so I get breakfast in meetings).

Aside from this, packing your meetings back to back is much better than having 30 minutes gap in between. On some days, I find that I’m free from 2 pm which gives me time to do other tasks.

30 minutes too long

Before his exit, our engineering team lead had done an anonymous survey about our productivity. Nosey me asked to see the results, and it was insightful. 58% of the team said that meetings above 45 minutes were too long. I’ll have you know that by default, most of our meetings are 60 minutes long, and honestly, some of them are 30 minutes longer than they should be.

A couple of things I keep at the back of my mind when setting the duration of the meeting are;

1. If the meeting can be done in an hour, then it probably can be done in 45 minutes. If it can be done in a little over an hour, then 60 minutes it is.
2. “Long meetings” are set to 45 minutes by default. Only cross-functional team meetings might take 1 hr (except with engineering).
3. Meeting with engineers need to be brisk. Engineers and meetings do not go in the same sentence. A maximum of 20 minutes unless we’re actively testing something on a call.
4. Quick updates are 15 minutes long or may just be an email or chat (if the relevant criteria in my first point in this write up aren’t met).

Be disciplined

In the end, none of the pointers I’ve laid matter without discipline. It takes a lot of discipline to structure simple things like meetings. It’s easy to call a meeting for everything or sidetrack meetings and talk about other pressing issues.

However, to overcome this and the ensuing burnout that will follow, one must learn to instil discipline in all activities. We must know when to say no, and always have a written agenda and stick to it, learn to respect others and their time so we all can be super productive.

It’s been quite tricky following these pointers and a bunch of others to help optimise my productivity. Sometimes it’s easy to want to step back into old habits (and I still do from time to time) but of course, improvement is the name of the game.

The chronicles of remote work are a lot, and it’s easy to get caught up and burnt out; let’s avoid that!

As PMs, it’s our responsibility to be very methodical about the things we do – including meetings. And if you have a messed up calendar, you might want to take step back and reassess. You just might be doing something wrong.

It’d be good to get more pointers from you, or you could try these out or not…after all, what do I know, I’ve only been a PM for a year.