At one time I was involved with 4 major programs of work and saw my whole week disappear in a patchwork of weekly scheduled meetings.

My solution was to get really pushy with meeting organisers to (a) cut the default time from an hour to 30 minutes; (b) schedule them back-to-back (if not, I'd decline and ask them to be rescheduled); (c) merge similar meetings; (d) tell each program manager I'd attend max 1 weekly meeting and one monthly steering committee, and everything else would be async; (e) drop off any call that didn't have a clear agenda and deliverables.

Before doing this, I told each of the programs' execs and dev leads what I was doing, making it clear it was the only way I could balance my roles as team lead, workstream lead and individual contributor.

The other thing is to drop any feeling of guilt for dropping off calls that aren't productive.

Agree with you on this. Advice, coming from any billionaire, millionaire or otherwise top percentile person, should be taken with a grain of salt. Main reason in my opinion is that it's ingrained into their personality. A lot of them are not "normal". I don't want to label people, but their brains function differently than mine at least. I remember Nietszche's argument, probably from "Beyon Good and Evil", that philosophy cannot be separated from the philosopher. Stoics were stoics, because their personalities were fitted for this kind of philosophy. You can become "successful" only, when your personality is already predispositioned for this kind of life.

While I love Nietszche, and agree that the philisophy cannot be separated from the philosopher. I am not sure that the way you've applied it to the stoics is accurate.

If we take two of the most well known, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca is well known to have been quite hypocritical. He apparently lived quit a hedonistic life. And reading the Meditations, I see Marcus Aurelius constantly admonishing, himslef for his failings to stick to the stoic principles; or reminding himself to do so.[0]

I personally think that those that seek out specific philosophies are often those that need them the most; not those that fit them the best. I'm extremely drawn to stoic philosophy, but am definitely not stoic in character! Personal philosophies especially. It reminds me of this scene in Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson goes meditating with Chris Treger, and says the following afterwards: "All told we were in there about 6 hour, and no I was not meditating. I just stood there quietly breathing. There were no thougths in my head whatsoever. My mind was blank. I don’t know what the hell these other crack pots are doing". The irony being that he's so good at meditation that he sees no value in the practice.

[0] Nietszche might well say that this means the stoic life was too unnatural to be followed without failure; if it's most well known proponents couldn't even stick to it. I certainly disagree there.

Top percentile persons tend to have more assistants, sometimes inducing quite a leverage quantitatively (amount of work) and also qualitatively (not having to arrange or even think about logistics/schedule/... may be let one focus on "his" field).

To your point, we can't be certain these tools are why Mr A has been so successful. There's no control group. It's possible only one is cause, and the rest correlation.

On top of that, your or my results may vary. What if his "tools" made you, your family and/or manager miserable? Is that "success."

I'm an older white male and even I'm troubled by the old white male paradigm of success. That system works well for some. But it's less and less so for the rest of us. I'm not saying it's wrong per se. Only that we'd all be wise to think outside that paradigm. To consider optimizing for things other than the usual suspects.

You’re gonna hate me, but I have the answer: get up at 5am.

I know, I know, I sound like a douche already. I used to hate early mornings. Then I met my partner, and she’d get up early, and slowly it just happened. Now it’s me that sets the alarm.

Here’s the schedule: 5am wake up. Take a full hour to drink tea and read the news and eat some cereal or whatever. Go slow. Don’t go to the gym, that’s barbaric.

6am. Stretch a bit. 6:30am, sit down, start work. Ideally already have an idea of what you want to do – plan it the night before. DO NOT JUST OPEN YOUR EMAIL. By the time everyone else has settled in at 9:30am, you’ve already done all of the productive stuff.

It helps if you can block out your calendar until 11am, which I do, and it’s mostly respected. So I get from ~6am until 11am to myself. Magic.

On the topic of planning your day the day before, I can thoroughly recommend that as well. Check out the app Sorted3 (that’s a superscript for ‘cubed’) for iOS, that’s changed my life.

Oh, and of course if you’re up at 5am you need to be in bed early too. It’s 20:39 here in Canberra and I’m already tucked in. Night night. x

I used to hate early mornings. Then I met my partner, and she’d get up early, and slowly it just happened. She now sleeps in to 6:30.

This might work for you, but from my outside perspective that seems incredibly dystopian and depressing.

When do you see friends? When do you exercise? When do you go out to eat? Watch a film? Play video games?

Seems like that entire routine is about maximising your time working.

I'd rather be somewhat inefficient at work if it means I can have a balance which means I enjoy my life.

From one POV:

I wake at 430a and work-out first thing. I start working around 730a. I'm usually in bed around 9. If I'm in a creative mode, I can shorten the workout a bit and grab an extra hour in the mornings to write, etc.

I am usually done with job-work around 4p. My family and I, if we go out go out early. We joke we have an "early empty restaurant" habit. We usually watch a show or two each night (or Youtube playlists, movies). Our family things are running, hiking, working out, dog outings.

I see "friends" maybe once/month. That's all I need (should be said -- most people have a cancellation rate on "plans" -- so I'll make plans, but only have to show up periodically because people end up with conflicts; don't know how other people manage this, but it does make me reluctant to increase the "planning" requests from other people).

I do stuff with my son most days (gym, disc golf, pickle/raquetball, tennis), but he also goes to his mother's half-time. My partner goes out of her way to see her friends a few times/month (book club, girls group, happy hours).

Thing is, we don't drink. Not never-ever, but almost-never. One night out.. a few drinks.. upends our flow for a few days. I don't wake up wanting to get at things. Weekends we tend to do MORE of the list above (gym workout in the morning, disc golf in the afternoon, pickle ball in the evening, etc).

Video games? I've never played them. My son plays Minecraft/KSP 60-90 minutes/night, before bed.

And yes, I'm old enough to have a teenage son and I WFH.

Hey! Yeah this sounds familiar. We’re definitely in at the early restaurant sitting!

We do drink (weekends, a nice cocktail on the front porch), we don’t play video games (I used to when I was younger, but have no desire now), and we typically watch one episode of something with dinner. That’s all the TV I need. I have plenty of time that I could be watching more TV, we just choose not to.

Like, I have a ton of time to read and do my hobby projects. A ton.

I do those things after 4pm when I knock off work, which is at home in the small city that I live in (which happens to be the capital of Australia), so at 4pm I’m done. No commuting.

I also do them through the day, because I work flexibly and can do things like cycle to the shops for the groceries at 11am just because I want to.

See my sibling comment here about fitness, and also not working Monday.

If it seems depressing I failed in my description. I apologise. It’s actually incredibly relaxing. My partner and I often joke that it feels like we’re already retired. I’m 44 and I work 36-40 hours/week for a large IT integrator!

Edit: I just realised another thing. No kids. We don’t want them. My god I don’t know how you people fit kids in. So, that helps a lot.

Absolutely no.

Sleep deprivation is the worst thing you can do to increase productivity, long-term.

Actually, let me give this single, most important piece of advice: try to sleep 8 hours a day.

Dude I sleep at least 7.5 hours a night. I just go to bed early: see the last sentence in my post. (Edit: just checked AutoSleep. Average is 7h:58m. Edit edit: And that’s 90% weeknight sleep as I don’t usually wear the watch on the weekend. So my actual weekly average must be closer to 9h.)

Think about it this way: instead of getting up at 7am and going to bed at 11pm – a perfectly socially acceptable schedule – I shift it forward 2 hours.

It really isn’t that radical of an idea.

Also a Canberran! There once was a time in my life when I woke up at 5am every day for two weeks straight. It was magic.

You've prompted me to try again. Cheers mate!

If I may ask, at what time do you exercise?

Throughout the day, whenever it fits in.

Yesterday (I don’t work Mondays - getting up at 5am means I fit 36-40 hours in to Tue-Fri) we cycled to then walked up the hill after breakfast. That plus a couple of walks to town and back did me right.

Today it’ll probably be walks and perhaps a cycle to the shops which are a bit further away. I’m not a gym type, never have been. My physiology lets me get away with it.

Top tip for keeping fit: don’t own a car. :-)

Sounds like a neat routine. Thanks for sharing. It has definitely motivated me to be an early riser.

Thanks, but no.

Protip: Start observing a No-meeting day. Even better if the whole team buys into it.

For a few weeks, send out reminders to other teams you collaborate with that "X is no meeting day for the team, we'd appreciate your understanding". If anyone schedules something on X day, politely ask for it to be rescheduled to a different day.

For the first few weeks it'll be hard, esp. because there'll be a lot of last minute meetings, or planned meetings with members from different teams but after the initial hiccups you more or less have an entire day every week to focus on what you want to focus on and that is a crazy productivity multiplier. A nice side-effect is that it has led to better asynchronous processes as well (eg. people write much more instead of making decisions during a meeting with the whole team etc.)

In my team, we initially started it off with "No team meetings on Wednesdays", but pretty soon team members realized how freeing it is to have no meetings at all for an entire day, so we started avoiding even personal meetings on Wednesday. Fairly soon, other teams saw the productivity gains we were getting and also started observing the same on Wednesdays.

Slowly, we're considering to having no meetings on 2 days a week (Wednesday was an easy choice because of it's location in the week, finding the second day is harder), esp now that other teams also adopted Wednesday.

With Covid, specifically for people working at companies like mine which thrived in a non-remote environment, the need for everything to be done/decided in meetings and an unsubstantiated FOMO has crept into most of our lives. And we really need to start trying to fix that through process rather than pushing everyone into a trench of non-productive but up-to-speed.

I would recommend changing your mind instead of your behavior. In particular, stop making your employer's problems your problems. You have enough to worry about. If your employer is keeping you cooped up in meetings all day, let them. That's their problem, not yours. If you want to be really generous, you could politely advise them that you could be more productive if you weren't in meetings all day. But that's sort of "management consulting" level advice, and there's a good chance you don't make "management consulting" money.

If the meetings themselves bother you, and not some imagined "lack of productivity" then start sabotaging your value in meetings. If you keep being useful, you will keep being invited. Only allow yourself to be perceived as "useful" doing the things you want to do.

While I agree with your overall comment, it is dangerous to be seen as "not useful"...

What I do is force the decision on those who are there to make this sort of decision: management.

That is, all my estimates include my honest assessment of all the time I will spend on meetings, etc. Then I can suggest that this could be shortened if I could skip this meeting and that meeting if they are deemed less important.

That way I'm being useful while skipping meetings. In fact, I'm so useful that the time I can spare on meetings is very limited ;)

Now, on the other hand, if the decision is made that the meetings are more important then when the dev. schedule slips it has nothing to do with me.

Question - is the team that you're leading successful at what its primary objective/OKR is?

If yes, then do you consider others individual success as part of your own productivity? If you do consider your team's work as part of your productiveness, why do you feel like you are unproductive? If you don't, you probably need to look at longer time horizons and letting go of being as much of an IC.

If your team doesn't meet its goals, then I agree you are not as 'productive' as one would desire. Generally best to re-prioritize.

Before doing something, define and note down the connection this activity has to specific needs you have.

For example, if I don't need to ride bicycle anywhere, spending my weekend repairing my bicycle will leave me with a sense of having wasted a weekend. So when I was looking through my stale TODO list entries, I had hard time figuring out which need a bicycle repair would contribute to, and this was itself an indication of the problem ("why I never do that despite having thought of it so long ago").

In someone's words, "focus on activities which move the needle of your work".

I believe graph-based task manager is the right tool to address this.

This one is good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22591311

My take on this is: https://github.com/andrey-utkin/taskdb/wiki/Live-demo#task-d... (also i have such graph for all of my personal needs, in Maslow's theory terms).

You'd have to start with what needs to be done. Let it flesh out and develop in the back of your mind throughout the days. Learn how to delegate once you have less than 4 contiguous hours in a day.

I need at least 3 days of continuous uninterrupted immersion to make any progress.

You could try working elsewhere 1 day/week. Shift all meetings.

Executives back in the day had secret offices elsewhere that they'd go to each morning for a few hours before showing up at work. Same hours. Some in silence. Then the rest of the day was wasted.

Some wake up earlier, as though they are still in high school. 6 am. After going to bed at 10 pm. Work from home. Before day begins. Unless they have kids. Then they are just up at 6 am. Heh.

Some plan or prepare for their next day each night. Then they sleep on it, wake up earlier, get it moving a bit (after meditating, repeating their affirmations and what they are grateful for, exercising or yoga posing, and taking their supplements/cocktail/smoothie), and then sit back in the swamp/blackhole.

There is no such thing as a "productivity tip" for humans. Being productive is a very subjective thing. So the first step is to figure out what it means for you to be productive and in what conditions. You should start logging everything you do during the day, with a conclusion remark at the end "I was/was not productive today". Do this for some months, maybe a year, then analyze the data, draw conclusions and adjust your schedule to fix the drawbacks. Then go back to step 1.

You also need to keep a very open mind on what means to be productive. Does your participation in the review meetings, 1:1s, planning sessions help the team(s)/projects move forward? If yes, then you where productive, if not, then not. You need to fully engage in any activity you end up doing, or you won't feel you were productive. Any halfassed thing you do is not going to feel productive (or even be for that matter).

I just said to a colleague at the end of last week:

"If, by the end of the week, it feels as if we've completed what we expected to do in one day, then we should consider it a successful week".

Otherwise... endless frustration.

Take control of the 60%. Block time on calendar for yourself in minimum quantum of time that you need to be productive, say 2 hours or 4 hours. Also, maybe frontload your time for deep work towards the beginning of the week and increase the meetings skew towards the second half of the week. Say no to meetings with poor agenda or request to reschedule if they are scheduled on a time you are not comfortable with.

I like how the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution describes this: they call this the Whirlwind aka the operational, day-to-day stuff that is really important. They say your day should be 80/20 between this operational stuff and strategic stuff or core goals. The 80 keeps the lights on, the 20 improves the state of your art. This translated to 1 day a week which I like to call no-meet-mondays.

What is your job? I almost never look at my calendar. I have maybe 2 meetings per week. I spend maybe 80% of my work hours programming and thinking. I arrived at this situation by actively looking for a job where meetings were despised. I’m very happy with my choice, and highly recommend it to anyone.

You could check out the book 'Essentialism'

I'm sure I get the gist from just the Amazon summary: focus on the essential and throw away everything else.

Except... I need to have 1:1s with team, and I need to attend my manager's staff meeting, and his 1:1, and his weekly status review, and my own reviews, and my director's weekly meeting, and our division's weekly all-hands, and standups.

Holy fucking shit. Maybe it's just time to send my own management a note on how much overhead we're drowning in.