What's your workday like, and how do you manage your time?

I usually try to start my day 30 mins before our daily standup so I can review my schedule and identify what is my main goal for the day. Mondays I work with the team and Product to kick off the week, share as much context as possible and to discuss priorities. Tuesday, I have only a couple meetings which is great because it means I can get some focus time that I’ll use for initiatives like career development, hiring and other longer term initiatives. The rest of the week I have a lot of meetings: 1-on-1s and team syncs. Throughout the day, I’m available in Slack but because I don’t want to be a blocker or distracted at meetings, I’ll…

I always ended up getting into work earlier than everyone. After my workout, I’m in by 8:30. From 8:30 to 10, it’s pretty much my time to prepare for the day. I sync up with my counterparts in Asia, because of the time difference, answer any emails, review my schedule, and write objectives that I need to accomplish for the rest of the day. Once 10 o’clock hits, everyone’s in the office and things kind of happen randomly. I felt like at least if I’ve dedicated this morning time, I’m very much prepared to hit my objectives for the rest of the day. That’s how I manage these very fluid and atypical days.

My days vary. Sometime I have meetings from 8:30am onward, with no time to do anything except answer quick emails and check in with people on IM. I don’t use email as a to-do list; email is asynchronous communication by design (it’s the modern version of the interoffice memo), and I’m content to let emails sit for a bit while I get other work done. I typically look at IM when I wake up in the morning to see if there are any issues I need to tackle from our location in Tel Aviv, where I have a designer. I use our chat program quite a lot, to monitor different channels devoted to aspects of design work. I review any work under discussion (my…

I start my day at 7:00 AM with a cup of coffee and a reading ritual of Adrian Colyer’s Morning Paper, Lobsters, and my tech-centered Twitter list. (Tech-centered because who needs to be enraged first thing in the morning?) I work remotely, so this is a vitally-important emulated commute to help me transition from home to work, mentally. I end my day similarly, only trading reading for a couple rounds of Rocket League.

On a macro level, I always try to talk to my peers as much as possible. Through constant communication, I can diagnose when something in the process isn’t going right. If a project is taking more time than it should, it’s time to step back and look at the objectives and organization to identify what isn’t working. This communication also helps me to manage how we as a team are tracking toward the overall product roadmap and plan.

More tactically, I make sure to respond to all emails within 24 hours. I also employ color coded calendars, and do my best to strike a balance between internal and external meetings.

I usually get to the office around 9 am and get caught up on my inbox on Asana and map out my day and top priorities. I eat breakfast (we have an amazing in-house culinary team!) and might have a few 1:1s in the mornings. The remainder of my day is spent working with teams, interviewing candidates and making sure everything within my Area of Responsibility is running smoothly. I usually don’t sit at my desk, but I’ll keep an eye on my inbox on mobile between meetings. You also might find me eating lunch with Gigabyte, our employee resource group for women and gender minorities in engineering, which meets every few weeks. I would also add, my…

On Sunday evening or Monday morning, I look at my calendar and my todo list and try to plan out what I want to focus on in the next week. Each morning during my commute to the office I pick the tasks I want to work on during that day and mentally prepare for them.

I’ve been using OmniFocus (a todo app for Mac/iOS) for a few months to help me keep track of tasks. It allows me to track todos for different categories, e.g. “hiring”, “processes”, etc. and pull the tasks I want to focus on into a single cross-category view.

I’m a fan of the Brendon Burchard daily planner. At the beginning of each day, I write down what I need to accomplish that day. Those are my priorities, my focus. I put each one on a post-it and place them at the bottom of my monitor. Every time I come back to my desk I see those reminders. It’s a constant, subtle nagging. It also helps that other people also see what I’m trying to get done and don’t bother me. Or better yet, offer to help.

There are very few typical days. A work week is a combination of customer meetings, architecture reviews, product demos, escalations, drop-in conversations and a few contextual, ad hoc topics that pop up. At an organizational level, we have regular product alignment discussions, KPI reviews, partner meetings and broader initiatives that keep me busy with travel and evangelization.

I work 9am – 6pm on weekdays. Outside those hours, I rarely check email or Slack. When I vacation, I make it clear that I won’t pay attention to work stuff. I’m explicit and broadcast that these are my rules of engagement with work. I’ve never gotten pushback that, by setting these boundaries, I’m working too little. I’m trying to model (I hope) that’s it’s OK to not work all the time.

I carve out an hour on Fridays to plan my calendar and to-do items for the next week.

I try to run or exercise in the morning and start my work day around 11 am (one of the many benefits of working remotely from a nice time zone.) A big part of my week goes to 1:1s and other meetings with my direct reports, my boss or other directors. Then, a lot of my time goes to recruiting efforts (doing outreach, interviewing people, discussing applicants with the team, etc.) On the blocks where I don’t have meetings I execute on some of the work I need to do around the strategic goals of my org.

Like all working professionals with kids, work days are packed. I try to take some time early in the morning for work out, to get ready for the day! Typically, I have many meetings on a given day with engineering teams as well as cross-functional teams and leaders. I look for opportunities to interact directly with our clients and product users to hear their feedback and to learn how we can do better. I block time my calendar for focused work without distractions. I also set aside time for 1:1 discussions which are critical for effective connection and alignment.

I definitely spend a lot of energy iterating and improving on time management. It can be very overwhelming when you start out as a manager or when you increase your scope and, suddenly, you’ve moved from a frontline manager to a senior manager or from a senior manager to an executive. It can feel totally overwhelming. Just the number of meetings that need to be attended or managed, and the amount of email; here do you find time to actually do the work that needs to be done? This was something I struggled with quite a bit early on.

Paul Graham has a great definition “Manager Time” versus “Maker Time”. As an organization we try as much as possible to optimize everyone’s schedule, even managers, to have long blocks of uninterrupted time.

I have a typical manager schedule, although I do always have an engineering project I’m actively contributing to. My schedule is now filled with meetings like one-on-ones, coordination meetings, and project check-ins. As an organization we all use Slack, so I have only one tool I need to watch. I’ve tuned my notifications to prioritize my team’s questions in real-time. Everyone else can wait for gaps in my schedule.

Before arriving at work, I check my calendar to prepare for the day and finish any pre-reads needed for meeting context so I am able to contribute meaningfully to those discussions. To the best of my ability, I try to block out a few 30 minute slots of time throughout the day to check email and Slack and do my best to adhere those timeframes. I’m an ardent note-taker and at the end of the day like to summarize my thoughts and action items written down in a journal or by using Google Keep.

Being an effective manager you have to come up with some techniques which you use, otherwise you will have no sleep. Three hours of sleep at night will not go far. Again, as a manager, I have a lot of meetings. My calendar has a lot of meetings. That’s why I use inbox and calendar as my tools. I use the Zero inbox technique, which I studied in one of the management schools, and I really like it

Besides blocking time on your calendar? I’m actually the only one that I’ve seen so far from the people that work with me, but I’m an inbox zero kind of guy. What that means is if you look at my inbox at the end of the day there’s zero email, not even zero emails that haven’t been read, zero emails even if I’ve read it or not, it will be empty every day at the end of the day. And for me that’s important because that’s one way for me to never lose focus of what’s important, what’s not. If something’s important, it will stay on my inbox for no longer than a week and then by Friday it’s my job to clear it out. Either be with an action item or…

A typical workday starts with arriving at the office around 9:00 am after dropping off my daughter at school. I start the day by reading and responding to emails, checking my schedule for the day, and coming up with 2-3 small concrete goals for the day. Then I join the daily standup with the rest of the team and I’m ready to take on the day.

With a cup of coffee or tea and a small breakfast, I begin one of my more productive periods of the day. This includes being able to focus on working with the team in the current sprint, thinking through the next releases, or tackling high-priority tasks.

I am an early riser, so I am usually one of the first ones in the office – this gives me a quiet environment to go through all my emails, and quickly get as many of them out of the way as possible. If they are quick things to do, I usually just do them on the spot and archive them. I thrive to have inbox zero.

For the rest of the emails, I prioritize them against my week or let people know if I won’t have the time to deal with it.

Lately, I’ve been using Clockwise. It’s a great tool for rescheduling meetings so you have the most focus time to get things done.

It’s a mix of side projects, 1:1’s, planning meetings, lunches, code reviewing, resume reviewing, meditation, more planning meetings, some documentation… all in a different mix depending on the day. I tend to try and use slack for everything, and I run everything I do very ‘event driven’. That is, I tend to focus on what needs to be focused on today or this week or this month. Part of my job is to smooth out the workflow of other people, to make sure that they have clear deliverables and know the plan. And, what that trades is that my time is a lot more unpredictable, as I try and use my time as the resource that can get reallocated to what…

I am a mum, so I have a lot on my plate but I have a pretty good work-life balance. I wrote about the art of work life balance as a working mum before. (Ha, it seems I have an article for every question you ask. We should collaborate more.) My typical work day looks like this: my husband and I drop our daughter at school, we go to work (different companies, different industries – thanks god for that, haha), pick up our daughter after work is finished, go home, eat dinner, do other routines like bath, homework, etc and when my daughter goes to bed, I either do chores or work on my computer or just relax. At work, my first priority is my team…

A large chunk of my week is meeting people, mostly my immediate team, in one-on-ones. I then organize the rest of the day by choosing a couple of the most important goals to accomplish in the day. Once that is done, or in the breaks between them, I deal with any urgent and smaller issues that may crop up. Every couple of hours, I check emails, but don’t have push notifications turned on for both my phone and laptop to limit distractions. I do have Slack notifications turned on, but tweak notification settings when they get too noisy.

My workday starts with half an hour just sitting there with my laptop closed and really thinking about what’s important today that I can do for my team. I’m looking for the highest leverage activities for me to do that nobody else on the team is in a position to do, or wants to do. That will give me a clarity as to what is truly important for the team. I try to avoid starting my day looking at emails or calendars because those are things I don’t have much control over. It’s very easy to get going in those routines, and not step back and look at the bigger picture. I think on a daily basis there are always continuous new ideas. I always look…

I desire less than two hours per day of email but if I’m not careful, it’ll creep to four hours. One of the techniques to exert discipline to stop it at two hours is to first consider how long the reply will be. If my reply is going to take more than two paragraphs, I will use voice communication to cover the topic. This approach usually avoids the creation of long email chains.

Cool, yes. Time management is a thing. My calendar changes about every three months. I refactor. I do refactor my calendar. And I try to do it … sorry, I try to organize my time in themes. At the moment, all my teams run iterations at the same time. They’re all synchronized. They didn’t use to be, but now they are. We’ve got to this stage as a company where I didn’t know when my teams were doing what. So, it became hard for me, and hard for the organization, to understand this. We chose to synchronize and we did that at the beginning of the year. It made my organization a lot more observable for example.

Every day looks very different for me as I try to adapt and shift my time and energy to meet the needs of the team.

A typical day will usually include attending each team’s morning standup, and a couple 1:1s. The rest varies drastically day by day. For example, tomorrow I have 6 1:1s, 3 stand-ups, an all team meeting, a weekly touch base on a cross-org initiative, a monthly touch base with other leaders in my area, and an overview of key business metrics that our apps impact.

I do not have a typical workday, but I do design the meeting cadence for our department. What that means is, I think about what group meetings, leadership meetings, and technical decision-making sessions need to occur and all of that is designed and documented in advance. A lot of my schedule follows the different parts of this cadence.

Yeah, so this was actually… if I think of Monday to Friday. You start on a Monday? It’s pretty much because I have a family with, I have two kids, I have to drop them to school, and my husband helps me here. The day starts at actually 07:00, 06:45, or 06:30. You get up; you pack the lunch for kids. My husband drops the kids to school, he goes to his work, and I end up at work at about 08:30 ish or 09:00 and the first thing to do is to check the emails, check the latest instant messages that you have.

My schedule is often very full. If I look at my calendar right now, I have back-to-back meetings five days out of five this week. Next week, I’m going to have more breathing room. I think realistically, it’s the norm to have a lot of meetings in my role. What I try to do though is move meetings around to defragment my time so that I can have larger chunks of the time at the beginning and end of the day. This is when I get time to process things and have some focus time to actually do proactive work, which is very important. It’s not always possible, but as much as I can, I try to push for this.

Since I work from home, I usually sit at my desk with a cup of tea between 8:15 – 9 am. I usually spend the first 5 minutes going over my to-do list for the day; over the years, I’ve developed a day-based, recurring to-do list system that helps me prioritise work easily, and focus on the most important tasks. Afterwards, I spend around 30-60 minutes catching up on Slack, email, and document updates; I usually go over all areas superficially at first, answer or working through anything quickly that takes less than 2-4 minutes, and highlight what I need to look into again, work through, or think about.

Well, that is definitely something that is ongoing. That never ends. New strategies, new ways. So I’ll ask people as well. Probably the biggest piece for me is also knowing yourself, getting comfortable with yourself and understanding what is a sustainable cadence for yourself. For me, I know that heads-down, focused work, I do really well in the morning. So I have blocks of time set aside for that.

At this point in time, I spend most of my time in meetings. I’m not always happy about it because I really miss doing engineering work, but it is what’s important to be successful in my current job. And so I think what I’ve … what I spend most of my time on is obviously one-on-one with the people that report to me, skip levels with people that report into the people that report to me. Skip levels are very important to me. That’s how I learn what’s going on and how the managers are performing and how people feel in general and what are some of the problems that don’t get escalated to me. I spend time in various work groups we’ve put together…

My day can range from taking care of product, marketing, field execution or customer meetings, so every day is different – and this is exciting. Keeping a perspective of those few priorities I need to achieve that day helps me keep the critical issues moving forward. Certainly, I dedicate time in the morning, evening and lunch hour, to working down my emails, and making sure things are moving forward. Most of my core working hours are spent with people, listening to the latest issues and ideas, and making sure we are accomplishing our mission and working effectively. One of my key beliefs is that taking care of the people in the organization…

Most of my work days are full of productive meetings designed to share context, gather context, or both. I have weekly 1:1s with my reports and boss, and 1:1s of different frequencies with business partners, skip-levels, and other peers. I try not to use e-mail filters for fear that something will get hidden, so I skim a few times a day for e-mails that look like they require me to read them. I mark a lot of e-mails as read without having read them (shhh). Likewise, with Slack I tend to ignore conversations that haven’t called me or one of my groups out; I use the Activity Feed constantly.

My work day varies, especially over the past year as I moved from my long term residence to a new house in Napa Valley. There are a wide variety of things to do, and we’re not really settled yet!

But a typical “work day” would likely start by reviewing my calendar first thing, to remind myself of any appointments or meetings I have to plan for during the day. Then reviewing any email/msgs that have come in over the evening/night and responding appropriately.

Despite having a fair amount of organizational responsibility, I routinely remind myself that my job is to support people. I certainly establish key organizational goals and get everyone rallied in their pursuit, but these things require only a sliver of my time. The majority of my time must be focused on ensuring everyone has what they need to pursue their more specific goals, that the design of the organization is working well. To ensure everyone is rowing in the right direction, I vigilantly observe and listen, occasionally asking questions, sometimes nudging folks – often by asking probing questions. Thankfully, the number of true…

My current schedule has me up at 4:00 am. I take the bus into the city at 5:00 and it arrives at 7:30. I head home sometime between 3:00 and 5:00, depending on scheduling conflicts.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I have a to-do list, I’m pretty big on to-do lists. I have a weekly to-do list that’s digital, and then I do written, actually, handwritten daily to-do lists. I remember things better when I write them down, so I tend to use a pencil and actually write things down.

I try to start the day by having three items I want to focus on in the day on the to-do list. Things will definitely come up and I just write them down and then after I finish one, I quickly look at my list to see if anything urgent comes up. But really try to focus on those three items.

I have a bad habit of checking emails as soon as I wake up to see if anything urgent requires my attention. After that, I enjoy having mornings to myself, either by catching up on world news or going to the gym.

At work, a typical day includes one-on-ones with members of my team. The Codecademy engineering team consists of almost 25 people and I try to meet with each person on a bi-weekly basis. I also participate in strategic conversations with the executive team and conduct interviews to expand our growing engineering department.

I do a lot of my work in meetings now via one-on-one, with the people on my teams, interviews, and conversations with people across the company.

My time is managed by my calendar, but I manage my calendar by regularly setting and reviewing goals.

Each month I write up high-level goals in a markdown document.

I have lots of meetings, sometimes more than I would like, but I really try to create like two hours of chunk on my day that I can focus on something. I think it takes me like 15 to 20 minutes to get into a zone to actually think deeply about something. So like 30 minutes block is not very good. I can answer emails, but I can’t think anything deeply. And I think if I have like 90 minutes to two hours, I can actually think deeply about something. And so I try to, it’s really important that I create those times for me. And sometimes there will be weeks where it doesn’t happen as easily, but I try to have like four to five chunks of alone time…

The way I manage time is, I block time for emails and save time for Skype communication, like in a chat communication in a day. I do my emails first thing in the morning, and then in the afternoon right after lunch, and at the end of the day. I’m not the kind of person who keeps on checking my email and then responding. I like to think and respond. And then I try to touch base with my team at least twice a day to check if they need something from me, or if there’s any impediments or constraints. Frequent check ins help to understand how your team is doing physically, emotionally and professionally as well.

I would guess that we’re probably not a whole lot different than a lot of technology focus areas of we live and die in email and by a calendar and meetings. It’s really learning how to delegate and to say no appropriately. I get invited to a lot of meetings where people want a subject matter expert. They know me because I’ve been at the company for a number of years. But that’s an opportunity for me to say, “I don’t need to be the one there. They really need one of my team or even somebody that’s not on my team, that’s a better subject matter expert than me.” That goes all the way back to that first question that we talked about of how can I…

I have a broad and varied schedule given my current set of responsibilities, the large size of my team (over 150 engineers), and being a part of the company leadership team. I split my time across a few areas: supporting my teammates through 1-1s and whatever they may need help with, contributing to product and business strategy through reviews and discussions, developing and hiring for the team, contributing to engineering-org wide initiatives, and working on deep-dive topics that relate to the current company priority areas.

The first thing I do every day is to pour through communications from my team, and prioritize the stuff that will help them get through the day easier. My day really starts when everyone is in the office. I greet them, ask how they’re doing, and get a sense of their worries and problems. I take action based on how my team feels as their biggest obstacles, and if a problem needs to be tackled right away, I schedule the right people to begin tackling that problem.

Emails, phone calls, meetings, reports… all that is important but I fit that in between the important stuff: Your team and solving the pains they’re experiencing.

I like to go out for breakfast most mornings. I don’t get into the office until 9am or 10am. I use this time to have an out of office, casual one to one with someone, to triage or to catch up on emails. When I’m in the office I bunch meetings together. I dedicate one day of the week for one to ones. I try to have a large number of scheduled chunks of focus time. I track my goals religiously from year to year, from quarter to quarter and from cycle to cycle which is on a six-week basis. I limit the amount of goals I have active to a maximum of five at one time so that I’m not swamped. I also have a wonderful admin assistant who helps keep me…

I’ve always been an early-bird since a kid; my first job was a paper route. This required getting up at 5:30 am. I had to fold newspapers, organize them into my shoulder my bags, and ride my bicycle around to toss papers on people’s doorsteps. There was something so tranquil about those slightly-dark hours of the morning. Fewer cars around, fewer people, the sounds of the birds waking everyone up…I grew fond of this time of the day.

Fast-forward ~27 years, I still enjoy the early mornings.

As a consultant, it’s different. But when as a consultant I take on a VP Engineering role, as I frequently do, my workday looks like it did when I was an employee VPE: I scan my incoming messages (email, Slack, texts, Skype) quickly, for fires, then turn my attention to my organization: my team(s), my peers, and my boss. They come first. And they’re where my real value is.

That’s a great question. So, I actually am…I’m hyper-organized. I would say organization is my superpower and my strength. So, what I do is I, for example, have my calendar booked out at least six weeks in advance. I have color-coded my calendar, Vidal, so I have different color codes for one-on-ones, different color codes for my direct reports for my cross-functional peers, for recruitment activities, for interviews, for outside activities, for board meetings. Everything is color-coded. And, on Sunday evenings I tend to login and I look at my week to make me prepare myself of the upcoming week. So, is it going to be a recruitment driven…

This is very fresh for me because last week in our last management team meeting I gave a talk called “Scaling GSD”. Scaling GSD means as you take on more responsibilities, and you become a manager, and a manager of managers, how do you continue to scale GSD without being bogged down. No matter how much scope I’ve taken on I’ve been able to maintain a certain bar.

A few things that come to mind. First, everyone has a fixed economy of time. No one has more or less time so how you use that time for yourself and also importantly use that time for others is really instrumental in affecting time management.

The skill of “organizing” is a key asset for a good manager. Workday is generally filled with tasks that involve managing multiple priorities and having limited time to fulfill them. I typically plan the day by looking at meetings and priorities. At the end of the day, I review the day’s activities and make notes for the next day’s plan.

I have always managed large teams of 10 or more individuals at any given time and hence I try to make sure I get one day a week where I don’t have 1:1s and less meetings. Other tips that have helped me manage large number of directs is elevating individuals in the team and delegating responsibilities, doing bi-weekly 1:1s depending on individual needs. A manager’s work is done if the team can operate seamlessly while they are on PTO.

I’d like to say it is a fairly standard 9-hour workday, but this can be tough to maintain as I am the final word when it comes to many technical issues. Therefore, I will often be finished for the day, but then need to jump on an issue from the West Coast folks. Also, work will vary daily depending on the tasks required to be completed. My day is generally split between review of ongoing projects, ushering along active projects, general marketing & development for new projects, and supporting the other Directors in the firm on technical issues.

It’s a cliche at this point, but I do believe in http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html and break up my day into manager’s schedule for the first few hours of the day and few hours at night, when I have calls with the other office. Post-lunch, I try to have a maker’s schedule, whether it is doing code reviews, reviewing dev specs, or writing code myself.

I take a very hands-on approach to management and communication. Each day I sync with my team to get updates from each person in a daily stand-up. During these meetings, I take notes and use the next hour of my day to dig into what was talked about. I then share these updates with our VP of Product to keep the entire group on track.

Meetings take up most of my time and I dedicate three hours of each day to recruiting. The rest of my time is spent on 1:1s, future project planning and discussing solutions and designs with the team on major features/projects.

Yeah, so right now my work schedule is too hectic because I’m trying to onboard myself some time to get into the saving and to get into the same speed as others. But yes I believe the three things again that I do prior to the week of that started like on Sunday or Saturday and I will sit down and look at what other meetings that I’ve got for the next week and take out the notes So where I’m looking for some updates or action items for the team or follow up on the issue that may have occurred the last week.

I’m usually in the office around 8:30am and I try to spend an hour reading and writing before the meetings start at 9:30am. My day is usually packed until 5:30 pm with meetings, so I try to find gaps in between to triage Slack messages and email. We have an 18 month old toddler at home, so I always leave the office at 5:30pm to have dinner with my family and put the baby to bed (my spouse and I alternate doing storytime). After bedtime, I’m back online reading and writing until bedtime at 10pm (yes, it’s early… the baby wakes up at 6am every day!).

My morning productivity has significantly increased since my move to the US. Before going to bed I make a list of things that I need to achieve the following day. I wake up to this list, mentally ready for the day’s known challenges. I usually listen to TED talks or audiobooks during my short commute to work.