The Tech Lead's Schedule Kinda Sucks
Makers need long stretches of time so they can concentrate. Managers schedule meetings for most of their day, so they don't care. Leads have to go to additional meetings while also making things. Being a lead can be rough, so here are three strategies to adapt.
When working on a new team, I often share the essay “Makers Schedule, Manager Schedule” by Paul Graham. You should read it, but I’ll give you the tl;dr; in case you don’t.
Makers vs. Managers
Makers and managers have different scheduling preferences. Makers (i.e., developers and designers) need long stretches of time so they can concentrate. A 30-minute meeting in the middle of the afternoon costs you way more than 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, managers schedule meetings for most of their day, so a 30-minute afternoon meeting isn’t any different than any other time slot.
The primary lesson is to schedule your maker attended meetings in clusters (like a sprint review/planning day) or stick meetings to the start of the day or after lunch. This maximizes time blocks, which keeps the makers making things.
But what if you’re in the middle?
This strategy is great until you become a technical leader (lead dev, architect, staff engineer or principal engineer). Leads have a significant meeting load and are also expected to contribute code and/or designs.
While being a lead can be rough, here are three strategies to adapt.
Delegate
If your team has one or more senior engineers, make it a habit to delegate challenging technical implementation to them. It’s hard to let go sometimes, but you don’t have to do every complicated thing in the system. Most developers like a challenge, so you might even be doing them a favor. Let smart people be smart.
Eliminate
Ditch any meetings that don’t serve a purpose. In most corporate projects, you accumulate meeting invites. Some of these meetings outlive their original purpose and are no longer valuable. Other meetings are useful, but you don’t add anything.
If a meeting is no longer useful, see if you can cancel it for everyone. If you don’t add value to a meeting, see if you can get removed from the invite list. Make it a regular habit to audit your calendar and look for things to eliminate.
Schedule
Put blocks of concentration time on your calendar. If you need the time, then schedule the time. Otherwise, people will schedule the time for you.
A less fun version of this is scheduling a work session later at night when no one is around. I know several technical leaders who will hop after the kids have gone to bed to get some work done. I personally avoid late night work sessions, but it works for some folks.
Figure it Out
The leads schedule is one of the more stressful parts of being a technical leader. Even if you delegate, eliminate, and schedule like a champion, you’ll still need to deal with context switching and demands on your attention. The juggling act is real.
The mix of meetings and deep work can be fun if you like variety, but there’s a reason some leads return to senior engineer roles. If you want to be a leader, you’ll need to figure it out.