Time Management Tips for Engineering Managers and Tech Leaders
The reason that engineering managers and technical leaders never scale up in your role or advance to the next level is because of lack of time.
You constantly feel like you're drowning in work. You can't keep up with everything. You have endless responsibilities. Your company and your boss is putting the thumb down on you to produce more and grow your team and increase your capacity. It almost feels you're at the post office, you're the postmaster general. No matter how hard the post office and the mail delivery people work, they never get caught up. They never get ahead of the mail. 'Cause the mail is always coming. It's not like you can work harder one day and there's less work to do tomorrow.
That's what it's like to be an engineering manager or a technical leader. The work never ends and the second you build capacity and increase capacity, guess what? It just gets eaten up by either more sales or more problems. So you can never really get ahead of it by just putting in more time.
It's a law of diminishing returns, and it's a trap that all engineering managers fall into. Just feeling okay, this is just a, busy period. If I put in, an extra 10 hours a week for a few weeks, I'll be able to work my way out of this. I'll be able to get the team caught up. That's a trap. Don't fall into it if you're probably already in it. If you are an engineering manager or a technical leader, that's a trap because then working 10 hours extra week becomes 15, and then 15 becomes 20, and guess what? You can do that for a week or two, but you can't do that forever. You're not gonna be as productive with that time. You're gonna burn out.
Changing the Way Engineering Managers Look at Time
What I want to do is I wanna change the way you look at time, right? As engineers, we think of time in terms of doing, but I wanna change the way you look at time management.
'Cause engineering, right there is a startup set up cost to everything in manufacturing. To turn a machine on and off, there's some type of lost cost just by turning on and off the machine. Well that's what happens every time you're shifting gears throughout the day.
The first thing I want you to do is I want you to take a look at all the things you're doing on a regular basis. All the tasks you're doing, the project work you're doing, the meetings you're in, the time you're spending training and developing your team, fielding emails and communication with stakeholders and clients and other departments. I want you to just make a list of all those things you're doing on a weekly basis.
Batching Your Time
Then I want you to see if you can bucket those things, so like fielding emails would be an example. And what I mean by bucket those things is, do that work. What are the things you can do in batches together?
If you're responding to emails sporadically for argument's sake, responding to email notifications as they come up, that's distracting you and it's taking you another 15 minutes to pick up where you left off when you take a break to read that email.
Another example would be, if you're doing some intense project work where you are, referencing a code manual, right? Try to do all your code manual work during the same chunk of time in the day so you're not constantly paging through the code book back and forth all day.
Then I want you to figure out how much time do you need to spend on all these tasks per week. Just reasonably, how much time do you need to spend fielding emails every day. Is it 15 minutes? Is it two hours?
The meetings you're in, quantify the time. How much time are you in those meetings each day? For your project work, the actual project work you do, how much time can you realistically or should you be realistically doing on projects? How much time per day should you be spending with your team, developing them, and mentoring 'em? Don't look at your limits. What would be ideal? How much time should you be spending or do you need to be spending in each of these areas?
Time Management Matrix - Critical vs Urgent
Make a list of that and group them into buckets, like I said, with emails, or you could say, mentoring your team as one bucket. Then the next thing we wanna do is we wanna take a look at all those things you wrote, and we want to categorize them. We want to categorize them into four different areas.
The first area is critical and urgent. The next area is urgent, but not critical. Then the next area is critical, but not urgent. Then the next area is non-urgent, non-critical. So I want you to categorize all the bucketed tasks that we just talked about into one of those categories.
From there, the obvious thing we wanna do first is we wanna take a look at that non-urgent, non-critical category. Is there anything in there that should just be deleted from your list?
Now, I'd love to say, oh great. We're gonna find something that just saves you 20 hours a week because half the things you're doing aren't necessary. Probably not the case, but maybe you'll be able to find a way to save 30 minutes or an hour a week just by noticing that there's something you're doing that doesn't need to be done anymore and you've just been doing it out of habit.
Or maybe it's something you're doing for someone else and you don't really think there's value in it anymore. You can have a discussion with that person about, Hey, do we really need to do this anymore? Should we really be spending our time doing this? It's good to level set and look at the things you're doing with your time to see if it really makes sense to still be doing them.
Maybe there's a meeting you're in, a reoccurring meeting that you're in and you don't really provide any value in it. You go to this meeting every time and you don't contribute a thing. Maybe there's someone else on your team that you can send to that meeting instead. Or there's someone else in that meeting that you can meet with afterwards to give you an update on the meeting, and just debrief you on the things.
Think outside the box. As engineers, we forget to think of outside the box and sometimes painfully obvious solutions. We think there's a meeting, I have to be there. But, take a step back and just think, are there creative ways that I can, offload these things from my plate?
How Engineering Managers and Tech Leaders Should Spend Their Time
Getting back to this whole idea of these four quadrants, non-critical non-urgent, critical urgent, non-critical, and critical and urgent. We should be spending about half your day working on things that are critical and urgent. Then you should be spending maybe somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of your day working on things that are urgent but not critical. Then either about that same amount of time or slightly less, about an eighth to a quarter of your time, doing things that are critical but not urgent. That one kind of floats 'cause it depends on where that falls in your priorities.
The idea is, you want 75% of your day spoken for and 25% of your day free and flexible to respond to impromptu things that come up. 'Cause let's be honest, you're always gonna be putting out fires every day. And if you don't, you gain that time back.
So you know, critical and urgent, take a look at everything in your tasks. Are there meetings that you're going to that on a regular basis that aren't critical and aren't urgent? Now that you start putting limits on your time like this, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to go to that meeting anymore. Or maybe you should look at, proposing that the meeting cadence gets spread out to every other week or something like that.
Focus Your Time on Critical and Urgent Matters
I don't know what your specific scenarios are, but the idea is it's good to just get thinking about time in terms of this way, how are you spending your time? Are these things critical and urgent? Because to get the most impact outta your time, you should be focusing your time on the things that are critical and urgent. In many cases what you find is when you spend your time on those areas, then you find that you have a much easier time rationalizing and noticing which things aren't important.
You might think in your first pass at this, that there's a handful of things that belong in that critical. Not urgent category, but then after, doing this cycle of reviewing your time this way for a week or two, then you might notice, oh, actually this isn't critical. So maybe this should go into the non-critical, non-urgent, because by not doing it, it hasn't been hurting anything, or we haven't been missing this.
Start looking at how you're spending your time and just objectively looking at it like, is this adding value or not? It sounds obvious as I'm saying this, but I'll challenge you. Do you do this with your time? Do you think of time this way?
Look for Opportunities to Delegate!
Now the last thing I wanna say, and this is gonna sound painfully obvious before I move on, are there opportunities to delegate anything out? Look at all these areas where you're spending your time and be honest with yourself. Can any of these things be done by someone else? Do all of these things need to be done by you?
If you feel like all these things need to be done by you, why? Is it because you are the only person qualified? Or is it because you don't trust that the people to do it your way? Or is it because you believe it's easier for you to just do it yourself? It's important to distinguish between those three different things. If you are the only person qualified okay, now we can figure out a solution there. Can we train anyone to do this thing for you? Or can we divide this thing you're doing into multiple tasks where maybe you're only doing one part of it, but the other parts are going to someone else. Again, outside the box solutions, that might seem painfully obvious, but I challenge, are you thinking of these things? Are you looking at ways to offload work? Or are you just choosing to keep that work because you're just a perfectionist and you're hesitant to offload that work to someone else?
If you're struggling with delegation, let me know in the comments. I want to put some more episodes out there in the future that help you with delegating.
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