You own your time. This is a principle that we keep coming back to on this show. And in today's episode, I'm going to give you some tactical ways to own more of your time. Some ways of looking at how you're spending your weeks, how you're spending your days, your minutes, your hours, and how to reduce your meeting load, how to reduce the number of obligations. And it doesn't just have to be meetings, by the way. You can look at tasks through a very similar lens, the model that we're going to use today. But I want to reinforce this idea that time, why is it so critical that we take ownership over our time? Time is the kind of single unifying factor. Not only is it something that you can't create more of, it's not a renewable resource, it's not even a resource that you can hoard, but it's also an unknown amount that you will have. And we're not going to spend the entire time talking about mortality on today's episode, don't worry. But instead, I want to kind of reiterate the importance of owning yourself. Your calendar, owning your time, owning your tasks, what you choose to do. This is one of the first steps, especially if you are feeling burnt out. If you are feeling tired, if you're feeling dragged through the mud, if you're feeling worn out, if you have no energy. One of the first steps is to evaluate whether or not you feel agency over your time. And if you don't, some of the steps that we're going to see in this episode are going to be to talk about today, this kind of model that we're going to use to help reduce some of that load could absolutely help you. So the model that we're going to use today, it is not the Eisenhower matrix, although I certainly recommend you go check that out. That might be helpful. Today, we're actually going to use a simple two-part model. All right. The two-part model to evaluate the flexibility. Flexibility in your schedule. All right. So what this means, it kind of relies on another principle. And the principle that we're talking about here is that not all time is equal. Not all time is equal. And I can explain this in a couple of ways. One of the simplest ways is to go back a few years to when my children were born. And I had the opportunity to. Be there for both of their births. Now, the amount of time that I spent in the hospital during their births was probably a day or two, maybe three days per child. This is not an incredibly long amount of time, but it's some of the most sacred and most important time that I've ever spent away from work. And we all have different kinds of sacred time in our lives. It's useful. In fact, this is probably a good first step. It is important for you to draw lines around the time that is sacred to you. That might be certain holidays. It might be a certain hour of the week, a certain time. Maybe you have Friday night game nights with your friends. Whatever that time is, it is not equal. Think about, you know, the hour of 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. It's a very different kind of time than 2 to 3 in the afternoon. And 2 to 3 in the afternoon is very different than, you know, the hour that you spend with your friends at game night. And so we shouldn't treat time equally. Similarly, and this is kind of. Relies on the same principle, but a little bit more on the psychology side of things. Our time is not equal during the day at work. We might kind of account for our time very similarly. But imagine if you had three straight hours of focus and then two or three hours of meetings, mostly back to back, or if you had meetings spread throughout the day. Which one is going to be more productive? Which one is going to allow you to focus the best? What are you going to be able to optimize for? Now, importantly, there may be a world, let's say you're a manager, for example, where meetings throughout the day might actually work okay. And part of the reason for this is because a lot of your job is likely summarizing and taking down action items from a meeting that you just had. And so not having meetings back to back. May actually be an optimal strategy for you. The important thing here isn't necessarily what that shape looks like, but instead. To make it intentional for most engineers listening to this show, it's likely that you're going to get the most out of eliminating and consolidating meetings. Right. Getting rid of meetings that shouldn't be on your task list. Right. Getting rid of tasks that shouldn't be on your task list. Not. Spending time doing things that are not useful. And with the meetings that are remaining, trying to consolidate those. And what this allows for is longer blocks of focus time, which allows you to deal with complexity without losing the context needed to stay focused and actually do that complex work to a high degree of quality. So if we're starting by owning our time and starting by understanding the context, we're going to be able to do a lot of things. So if we're starting by understanding when our sacred time is and reinforcing the fact that not all time is equal. The next thing we need to do is very tactical in nature. We're going to look at two. Kind of characteristics of each of your obligations. Okay. So what you're going to do is you're going to look at each of your meetings. You're going to look at each of your tasks as things that are going to take up your time and determine on a scale from one to 10. At the same time, you may want to consider bringing your evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution adjust it. Usually, usually one-on-ones are a reasonably pliable meeting. Now, I will reinforce that if you are a manager and you are changing your schedule for your one-on-ones often, that is going to have a negative effect on your relationship with your reports. It sends a signal to that report that they are not very important. And that brings us to volatility. So even though your one-on-ones may be pliable in the sense that it would be fairly easy, logistically speaking, to move the one-on-one around, all you really have to do is talk to one person. And a lot of the time the objective in a one-on-one is something that you could do an hour later or a day later. If you are considering moving a one-on-one, you should also consider the volatility, what does volatility mean? It means what is the risk associated with changing this? Not just the logistics associated with it, but the risk. What are the downsides? What are the negative effects of me not attending this meeting, of me asking to reschedule the meeting? What are the side effects of that shift? So you're looking at those two characteristics, those two metrics. And we kind of did them back and forth. The ordering here is likely volatility first and then pliability. Volatility first, then pliability. Because if something is highly volatile, and here we don't necessarily mean that it's a bad situation. Volatile in this case means changing it has some compound effect. It's going to potentially blow up if you change something about it. It doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. It doesn't mean that it's... You could imagine, for example, that if you had planned a birthday party for someone and you told them that they were going to have a birthday party, and then you're changing it to the following day, the party itself is not volatile. The changing of the party might be. Shifting something around, it might have implications on relationships, it might have implications on project information. You could end up blocking somebody. Think about the volatility. And usually, this is kind of what we would call priority. This is usually the only thing that we would consider. Now, importantly, volatility doesn't necessarily mean that you can't shift the time around. So if you do have high pliability and you have maybe medium volatility, then it's possible that you could shift the time around. You could work on consolidating. That meeting into a single work block or whatever you need to do to protect or optimize for your specific kind of work. For most engineers, again, this is going to be optimizing for focus time. But if something has a high enough volatility, you should be asking yourself, and this isn't a perfect system. You can't say, okay, I'm going to always move everything that has a two and a six. Two on volatility and a six on pliability. That's something that's going to be a little bit more difficult to do. But if you're going to be optimizing for focus time, that you can consider doing. That's kind of the point of this model is if there's a high score on both of them, then probably don't touch it. So it gives you some idea, but you still have to use some intuition. You still have to use some wisdom. Step back from the situation and try to evaluate, okay, what am I risking if I move this thing? Why is this volatile? In what way is this volatile? Is moving it by 20 minutes actually going to trigger the negative downsides that I'm thinking of? Or is it really just that we can't cancel it? We do need to get it done. Maybe there is some specific day that we should get it done by. I'll give you a good example. I have a deadline that's coming up this week, but fulfilling the deadline doesn't really matter whether it happens on Thursday or Friday. So we could delay from Thursday to Friday. Okay. That could happen. But if we were to delay too far, we could delay from Thursday to Friday. So we could delay from Thursday to Friday. Later into next week, then the volatility problems are triggered. So there is some level of flexibility, pliability in this case, right? And there is a certain kind of volatility, but there's a little bit of an asterisk there. Okay. So this is how you can evaluate the ways that you're spending your time, the tasks that are on your board. Look at both of these metrics. If something is not very volatile at all, you don't expect it to become volatile. There's no trigger associated with it. So you can evaluate the way that you're spending your time, the tasks that are on your board. Look at both of these metrics. If something is not very volatile at all, with this thing and it has a high pliability. And it's very likely that you can either move it, you can make it smaller, or you can cancel it altogether with very little downside. Now, the other thing that's important to know is that most of the time, most of the time, the perception that you have of the criticality of your tasks, the criticality of your meetings is going to be inflated. Okay. Why is that? There is a phenomenon happening here where our world seems very important to us. That seems natural, of course. But most of the time, our world is not only not important, but completely unknown to many other people. And so if you were to not make it to a specific meeting, the ramifications versus what you imagine the ramifications might be, usually has a major impact. And so if you were to not make it to a specific meeting, there's a major difference. Usually, the ramifications are much smaller than what we expect them to be. So this goes back to owning your time. You should be ruthless in identifying how you spend your time. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you'll be able to put this method into use, especially if you're feeling burned out, if you're feeling dragged down, if you're feeling tired. This is a very important skill to learn. And I hope you'll be able to put this method into use. And I hope you'll learn. Additionally, you can sign up for the Developer Tea Discord, head over to developertea.com slash discord to join totally free. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.