ScheduledAndUnscheduledTime

It's Friday and I just finished a productive face-to-face meeting with my customer. "How about meeting again with me next week to decide whether to continue or cancel Project X and Y?", I asked. "Sure," says Jason who turns around to open his Outlook calendar. He has a big monitor so I can see his calendar clearly. The weekly view is up and I can see that he is COMPLETELY scheduled all week, including lunch. He studies his calendar, "How about two o'clock on Tuesday?". Tuesday is full of appointments. As I think, "Hmm", I quickly say "That works for me. I'll see you then."

I wonder what the participants of the other event will think when Jason cancels on short notice or just doesn't show up. I think about the preparation that could be lost.

I wonder whether he will cancel our meeting if something more important comes up. I wonder how someone can live with such a full schedule. I wonder whether his schedule just looks completely filled.

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I intentionally leave 40% my scheduled week free so that I can respond to things. Responding is a requirement of my job. Whenever anyone asks me if my Outlook calendar is up to date, I say, "No. Do not ever assume I am free regardless of what my calendar shows. If you want to schedule my time, you need to talk with me first."

What percentage of your week do you schedule? How long in advance are you notified of changes to your schedule? 1 hour? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month?

Is it acceptable in your organization to decline a schedule request so that you can keep free time on your calendar? Is it acceptable to decline at the last second because something more important comes up.

Is scheduling and keeping to the schedule a problem in your organization? What can you or others do to make scheduling better?

SteveSmith 2005.01.23

I used to be invited to lunch meetings (where lunch was not provided) until I set up a repeating appointment in Outlook to prevent that.

KeithRay 2005.01.23

Lots of people have energy about MoreProductiveStatusMeetings so I'm splitting their comments off to a separate thread.

SteveSmith 2005.01.24

I schedule about 10% of my week. Maybe I am not busy enough or something.

I DO schedule my enter and exit times. I schedule nothing after 3:30PM. Since I am in the office at 6:30AM I feel no great need to be there after 3:30PM. I do often work after 3:30PM, but not officially.

DwaynePhillips 25 January 2005

Dwayne,

Do you mean that your maximum amount of scheduled time, at the beginning of each week, is four hours?

SteveSmith 2005.01.26

Steve, yes that is what I mean. I am really busy and work more hours than I should, but that is what is scheduled. Now let me add that one or two weeks a month I travel out of the office to visit contractors. For those weeks, I guess I have 24-32 hours scheduled.

DwaynePhillips 27 January 2005

Dwayne, I'm surprised. Tell me more. Would you share with me a rough break down of how you use the unscheduled time?

SteveSmith 2005.01.27

Steve,

My biggest job is to work on a $100M project with a contractor in California (I'm in Virginia). I have just flown back from California with a list of a few things to do in the next two weeks. When I am sitting in my office I will work on this to do list.

This involves finding people, discussing how they relate to this project, and ensuring that all the tasks are completed.

My next biggest job is to be a systems engineer for about 40 other engineers who are working on projects. I sit in my office (working on my project) and when anyone wants to discuss their project or their system, they come by, I stop working on my project, and we work on their project.

So I guess my main job is to be in my office and ready to work with others when they ask for assistance.

I only have two or three regularly scheduled meetings each week. I suppose I could create four or five other regular meetings that relate to my jobs, but I prefer to just go find the people that I need to talk with. We all work in the same building, so that probably helps me to not have scheduled meetings.

DwaynePhillips 28 January 2005

"So I guess my main job is to be in my office and ready to work with others when they ask for assistance." - That describes me pretty well, except when I'm teaching somewhere or consulting. I would not call this unscheduled time. I would call it time when I've scheduled myself to be unscheduled. Sometimes, we call this "drop-in time." - JerryWeinberg 2005.01.31

Dwayne, I thought there was more to your 4 hours of schedule time than initially met my eye. A manager who behaves like you do is a pleasure to work with or for. I am impressed.

SteveSmith 2005.01.31

I find the amount of my schedule that is full tends to ebb and flow. Some weeks I'll have very little scheduled (other than regular team meetings), other weeks I'll have entire days of back-to-back meetings which as I've remarked to several people seem to suck the life force out of me! (I'm not a fan of meetings, in case that wasn't obvious!).

The biggest issue I find is trying to help my team schedule their own time - and it's the usual twin evils of task switching (I remember reading very recently that either Tim Lister or Tom Demarco mentioning reducing or eliminating task switching as being the one thing they would address) and placating (there are all these demands for my time, all I can do is accept all of them - and I can't ask what the priority is or whether the deadline is real or not).

The other problem that really doesn't help at the moment is that we've recently implemented PlanView (one of those 'enterprise project management' tools) and for some reason it was decided to start with time capture rather than project management tasks. Consequently my team are having to either assign hours on their timesheet to standard activities - which are now showing the true effort on projects - or wait until the project manager is trained to use the tool and gets around to setting the project up properly.

So, to answer the original questions - yes it is a problem, and to make it better we could get people to understand that people can't work 160 hours a week, and working on 10 projects at the same time is not feasible (i.e. task switching) and project managers should feel the pain of not planning properly - not the people doing the work.

PhilStubbington 2005.02.05

Phil Stubbington writes other weeks I'll have entire days of back-to-back meetings which as I've remarked to several people seem to suck the life force out of me! (I'm not a fan of meetings, in case that wasn't obvious!).

Hi Phil, Yes. Back-to-back meetings is a common theme. I wonder why. My observation is that too many people reply accept whenever they are invited to a meeting. And then decide minutes before the meeting whether to actually attend.

What percentage of these back-to-back meetings would fail if you declined the invitation?

What happened for you when I mentioned declining?

SteveSmith 2005.02.07

If you're worried about mentioning declining, just don't show up and see what happens. Or send a note to the meating facilitator (you do have facilitators, don't you?) about a minute before the meeting saying you've been called to another meeting. Try this for the meeting that you think is least useful for you to be there. If nothing happens, scratch that meeting for good and move to the next least important. - JerryWeinberg 2005.02.07

Aha! Jerry mentioned facilitators for the meetings. In my organization facilitators are considered stupid and anyone who uses a facilitator for a meeting must be so stupid that they cannot "run their own meeting."

Any suggestions for overcoming this attitute?

DwaynePhillips 8 Feb 2005

I don't know, Dwayne. "Facilitator" can be just a title, though I know at least one good one who does it as a profession. It seems to me that if you run the meeting, then you are the "facilitator" or should be. "Facilitator" literally means the one who makes things easier. Does your organization think that the person who runs the meeting should make the meeting harder, as a macho kind of thing?

"Hey man, we sure kept that meeting from happening!" "That's right, man. Give me five!"

In answer to your question, maybe you start by calling anyone who runs a meeting, the facilitator. Then later, when everyone's used to that, you can argue that this particular meeting is going to be difficult and we need to bring in a professional Gun, I mean, Facilitator.

(Cue the Sergio Leone.)

MikeMelendez 2005.02.07

Hi Steve,

I suspect my propensity to accept meeting invites is probably in direct proportion to my stress levels - the higher the stress, the more likely I am to just accept the invite. This may be a flavour of placating, or a reflection on a lack of time to go back to the meeting instigator and ask for an agenda with timings.

As far as the failure of these meetings go, very difficult to generalise. Outright failure is pretty unlikely, but there are opportunities for people to head in the wrong direction which may require additional effort to get them back on track.

>>What happened for you when I mentioned declining? An overwhelming sense of "yes, I know I should" - see comment above about agenda and timings.

PhilStubbington 2005.02.17

Updated: Thursday, February 17, 2005