User deleted post
Second that.
Yeah the weekends are tough, last week was from 7am to 9am. I’m usually expected to deliver items on Sunday as well which means I spend some time working Saturday.
I would stop doing that. You can’t work every day.
yikes
Not normal
Is this a US company? Bizarre.
If for some reason you have to deliver/deploy or whatever on the weekend, organize to take another day off.
Usually teams will organize themselves to not have to deploy on weekends. Nothing ever seemed so urgent that I had to deliver something on the weekend as a PM.
You definitely need to push back on that
Unless they are paying a looot of money extra for working on Sunday (still not a good reason), I wouldn’t do it.
You don’t wanna end up texting about burnout on LinkedIn in some months.
Unless you have significant equity in this company, STOP.
Unless you have equity in the company I'd be saying no to that.
how often is this happening? maybe before a big product launch, it makes sense but if this is the norm, how sustainable is this job?
It’s becoming the norm. Other team members “for whatever reason” are okay with it and he’ll usually ask if we can all jump on Sunday last minute during a meeting. Feels weird being the only one that says no.
I genuinely don't mean this to come off as rude: you need to start saying "no", or to find a new job.
What the heck???!! Please start so set boundaries NOW! As long it isn't payed VERY good, it's not normal.
it isn't paid VERY good,
FTFY.
Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.
Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
Beep, boop, I'm a bot
Do you have an ownership stake in the company?
2%
The number of meetings feel less than normal. The weekend meetings are absolutely abnormal.
That would be an incredibly light week for me! When I need time to do something, I block off my own calendar. For your own sanity you should block out your lunch hour or else someone will spot it as an opportunity for a recurring 12 pm meeting.
When I found out that this kind of schedule was light for a PM, that's when I bounced and went back to being a data analyst. The volume and quantity of meetings for a PM is not for the feint of heart.
Just imagine as you move into management. Most weeks my calendar is booked solid and I'm double or triple booked. I have to be very conscious of which meetings to attend but I've built out a great team under me which I can delegate quire a lot to.
Agreed. If I had the time to screenshot and redact I’d share. Lucky to have a 2 hour break 1-2 times a week to do actual work
I am routinely double or triple booked. Then I am attending one while answering questions in another and then often calming down an employee in another chat.
Big part of why I don't want to be in management too. I hate meetings.
Exactly why I’m trying to get out of management.
Agree that it seems quite light for a PM role. I like some of the recommendations to block off focus time though - I’ll have to try that
Was about the day the same thing.
I’ve had my schedule so packed the last few months that I’m getting 1 or 2 half hourly slots the whole day and then end up working well into the night to get all my focus work done.
Sadly the current senior leadership in my department are speed running burn out for all their staff and my suspicion is that they’re making use of the poor state of the tech market right now because if they’d tried this on 18 months ago there would be no product or engineering org left as we would have all fled to better working conditions.
Good point! Yeah I usually find myself rushing to eat or even eating during my meetings.
That may still happen occasionally but blocking your lunch greatly cuts it down. It forces people to reach out to you to ask for an opening instead of just booking over your lunch.
First thing I always recommend to everyone is block lunch (even if just half an hour) and also block at least 1-2 hours of focus time every day so you can actually get some of your own work done
Block time to prep for meetings and blocks to do your actual work.
The number of meetings is normal but the expectation to attend meetings on the weekend is not
Yeah tends to become a bit much. My boss also likes to treat many national holidays as “luxuries” and we’re expected to work on all except Christmas and thanksgiving.
Your employer sucks. Do you get paid any extra for all this or are you just volunteering your time?
Yeah...I'd run out of there
"Here, we work as a family"
Time to look for a new role 🏃♂️
American corporate culture is a treat
Oh, this is not that bad - this actually leaves a lot of time for you to get deep work done. Block off focus time and enjoy it while you can!
This. Read a book called Deep Work.
Find the time that you are most focused throughout the day and protect those 2-4 hours like your life counts on it! It won’t always work and you’ll bend. But don’t break. Set the precedent and make whoever is scheduling the meeting to ask if you can be flexible.
I label mine as my task instead of a generic “focus time” or “block” so people know that I have plans for that time and it’s not some arbitrary block.
Also since making Director at a scale up within a large org. I still do (and want to do) IC work. I have my Fridays blocked into perpetuity- by far my most productive day even if the first half of the day is booked with sprint demos and design week debriefs.
Do you recommend I choose chunks in my schedule where it says DND? Because a lot of the time I’m jumping around hopping in meetings at a whim which can disrupt flow.
Yes
I create a public meeting called Focus: and then the thing I’m working on. Focus: Mobile PRD, Focus: Q2 onboarding strategy, Focus: user research prep and recruitment…
This way everyone who tries to schedule a meeting during that time knows the tradeoff they’re asking of me and I can easily push for “is this meeeting necessary? Or can we do an async update?”
I also default to 20 or 45 minute meetings instead of 30 or 60 and am annoying about starting and ending on time.
I'd kill to have a calendar like that. I'm frequently double-booked and occasionally triple-booked.
Came here to say this. One or two hours of whitespace on the calendar, I get so excited I almost forget to use the time wisely.
Are you me?!? Lol.
I would die for this schedule lol
Looks like a peaceful calendar to me
Seems like people are confirming this to be the norm, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You’re right in challenging it, but find ways to have constructive discussions around if some can be replaced by something else or combined in some way.
One thing PMs tend to do too much is having multiple meetings with 1–3 people instead of simply gathering everyone and help facilitate the larger needed group work/discussion.
I usually don’t allow for more than ~30% of my week for meetings. However, that doesn’t include collaborative workshops with people; i.e. where we work together on things we have chosen are important right now.
That’s cause group meetings with tons of stakeholders are a snake pit. Gotta divide and conquer.
Yeah, I find that every additional person reduces the likelihood of a clear outcome and broad understanding drops by 20%
It's a 12 person company. If it's already a snake pit to have group meetings . . .
I have had group meetings where there attendees are either switched off, or engage in groupthink (and hence fail to think about something important), or go tangential and drag the meeting out. Divide and conquer has worked better for my sanity, I know it is worse for my time.
This looks like a lot considering you only have 11 other people to talk to.
Things to consider:
every meeting MUST have a purpose and an agenda. Only people that MUST be present are invited. Expected outcome MUST be clearly stated before the meeting starts.
that means saying NO to meeting invites. You are not needed everywhere. Unless your contribution is needed (as a facilitator or because you are the one making the decision or owning the topic), politely decline. People need to understand your time is limited.
I have managed to reduce my time in meetings with a few tweaks in my agenda and ceremonies:
strictly no reoccurring meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays (aside from daily with my cross functional team)
focus time block every morning before the daily (8-11 am)
we used to have planning, retro and grooming meetings at separate times. Articulating them better and grouping them made us save 1,5 hrs per week.
Mondays are for the team. Sprint planning and retro every other week.
Tuesdays are for 1:1s and stakeholders. I try to fit any alignment meetings with my leadership on Tuesdays as well.
Thursdays are for tech checks, refinements and ideation. All the creative stuff. That way I can finalise any missing specs until the planning.
I blocked some 3-hours slots on Monday and Friday afternoon for focused work. My designer and engineering lead know they can talk to me during this time.
ETA: I also grouped my meetings as much as possible to avoid this Gruyère situation where you can’t do anything in between the meetings because your “available” time is made of 30 minutes slots.
Finally a reasonable take on the situation! Can't compare your 20k employee large bank PM meetings schedule to 12 person startup.
So much yes. Job of the only PM at a 12 person pre-PMF org is very different than the job of a large multi-stakeholder multi-objective big company org's PM.
Also: no, you shouldn’t be expected to work on Sundays.
I like this. If you have to have meetings, they should be high value and outcome-oriented.
I also like setting constraints up front about availability. Limiting availability for meeting time is a positive constraint, like limiting the amount of work in progress on a kanban or in a sprint. It helps to reinforce that what is in progress is a real priority.
I doubt OPs calendar would look this way if every meeting required an agenda
I have double this. Help me figure out how to get to this OP, please!
Haha valid, gonna try and be grateful
Haha all jokes aside, you probably have somewhat of an ideal schedule. 18 hours of meetings sounds reasonable. I’m usually going 6 am to 12 pm back to backs due to being virtual and time zone flexing. But then again, I’m also a product director, a people leader, and have 4 products in my portfolio remit.
One of the suggestions was to block off focus time, and that is perfect - that’s what I usually do in the afternoon. I don’t think it’s ever realistic to expect to work 40 hours in my role, but yeah, I can probably get away with 50 if I can really focus and get it down. But that’s hard for me, so I just do my best.
Since you said you were new to the role, I’ll give you some unsolicited thoughts: PM roles are high visibility, high interaction with others, thankless, but pivotal and immensely satisfying if you like the kind of work you are doing.
Good luck and drop me a DM if you ever need anything.
From what I can read from the comments, I'd have to say: Y'all have waaay too many meetings. I get that product managers are expected to be working in a communicative middler-role, which requires a lot of talking and listening. But following the notion, that any good product manager also holds the title of product owner (in a scrum framework, or some other equivalent function in different organisational models) I'd be sceptical that you can get anything done. Remembering some years ago, where I walked form meeting to meeting, where I noted things down I have to do, which never were worked on ... it was just crazy.
Everybody needs focus times, at least half of the day, if you are not a manager who can delegate all the "actual" work.
Maybe controversial, but
Everyone is saying that it's normal amount, but for a 12 person startup that seems quite extensive to me tbh. You have 11 persons in the business besides you, half of them are engineers I suppose? Who are you even talking to that much. To me this calendar with 12 people would make sense if the company is fully remote or you got a bunch of external meetings in there with customers etc (or its the 1 to 1 week with your team assuming you don't have 1 to 1s every week with everyone).
I'm currently in a 20 person startup, we have PMF and are just scaling the whole thing right now. I have the same amount of meetings, but half of them are internal, the rest are customers calls/sales calls I'm listening in to etc. I have put a lot of effort into making my team as self sufficient as possible, in order to spend as much time with our customers as possible, so there's that.
7 YOE, all of it from startups in the range of 20-800 ppl, roles from PM to HOP.
This would be a DREAM compared to my calendar. I'm at least double booked and often triple booked at all hours of the day except maybe 4-5pm.
I have to ask myself which meeting I'll ghost and who I'll upset every single day I wake up.
Is that Sunday meeting an actual "in-person" meeting, or is that just blocking off IC time? if it's the former then gross, you need to make it clear that weekend meetings are unacceptable.
Otherwise, a big part of a PM's job is "meeting" with customers and stakeholder management, so if your time & these meetings are going to that then probably fine. And no doubt some of these are for project/engineering coordination, which is also expected. But if the majority of these meetings are just for you to be informed on random/others' priorities (vs meetings where you're responsible or assignee) then you can/should probably skip & focus on how you deliver towards your own goals.
How long have you been there? The first couple months are typically quite meeting heavy as people try to get you onboard. If anything, you should set meetings with others with your own agenda.
It's not about the volume of meetings, but what the outcomes are. Figure out what each party needs / wants from you, then figure out if there's a better way to handle it than a meeting. Don't forget, you'll also need things from them too. Building relationships is critical, and if you're remote, meetings are the only way to go.
Why are you having meetings on weekends?
Some of the team is abroad and he likes us to have extra time to meet.
And there is no overlapping weekday time? Are you US-based? My company and team is international as well and we do not do this.
That looks delightful. Look at all that white space!
Not really. Looks pretty light to me.
For context, my calendar is typically quadruple booked from 7am to 6pm every.single.day.
I have to be selective in what I accept and try and divide and conquer with my PMII for what I can't.
There is an art to calendar management and I would feel incredibly lucky if mine looked like yours.
Why the hell do you need to do so many meetings
Appreciate the insight Lex, gonna be more positive and make sure I don’t take it for granted 🍻
The his seems pretty typical.
Better discuss it in your weekly meeting management meeting. It’s the only way!
We have a daily management meeting 1 on 1 lol. Just feels like micromanagement at this point.
I think what you have is a CEO that likes meetings, maybe they can only productively think when in one
I agree, he is convinced that deep work only arises out of meetings. I'm the opposite, I like to be alone to properly think, write out my plans and come up with creative solutions.
I'm looking at my schedule this week, between 4-7 hours a day. There are some days where I'm double or triple booked. I work with 4 delivery teams and 5 disparate sets of stakeholders. I'm really involved with analytics and user testing for my product so I want to be across the insights.
BUT, most of my meetings are for:
Talking about what we are going to do;
Giving updates on doing it;
Showcasing the completed work;
Having a retro about what didn't work.
My wife says I've never heard anyone talk more about work without actually doing any work.
Wow look at this guy with all that free time
Gut reaction: good Lord batch up some of these meetings. You need to give yourself and developers more big blocks of deep work time.
Longer reaction: Meeting volume I'd say it depends on a lot. Weekend meetings, outside of emergencies or a very specific market driven timing push, are a sign of delusion and incompetence.
Meeting volume... It's all about what's happening in the meetings and what state the product is in. Early days where everyone needs to info share a lot and there's a high amount of ambiguity everywhere sure. You need to talk a lot through. Most people on the team won't know anything about the customer or the product space. If eng is now heads down on existing specs then that's your cue to get heads down starting another cycle. You should feel free to skip meetings that are usually you sitting there while developers talk implementation details. I recommend reading Cal Newport's "A World Without Email" and then thinking about your org's processes and time use. It's also common for people to default to loading up lots of really heavy unnecessary processes and meeting cadences when they just aren't necessary at a lower scale (I thought about this when you talked about your data analysis workload). This happens because people try to follow the textbook of everything they are supposed to be doing instead of only doing the most valuable stuff for your situation. At the 12 people mark everyone should still be ruthlessly 80/20 in their areas, not bloating up on processes and reporting. Reporting and process should look much sloppier than experienced big company leaders are used to seeing because it's straight up not worth the time yet. As much effort as possible needs to go into fast product iterations toward great product market fit. You need to make a product that solves the problem way way better than the next thing, not just a little bit. Analytics is not the way to figure that out (I say that and I'm an ML guy!)
Weekend meetings... Lots of inexperienced startup leaders convince themselves that the grind is what's going to make the difference early on but IMHO (only one startup, joined at pre-seed now Series B) the high level product market fit is all that matters most for the start. Grinding out lots of details with the group is a post product market fit thing and I'm suspicious of it requiring weekend meetings because pre product market fit the space to think and build is more valuable. Smells like CEO the doesn't know how to evaluate good performance across the functions (knowing what good looks like everywhere is rare to be fair) so they are proxying with micromanaging and butt in seat mentality. Creativity and tough problem solving hit diminishing or negative returns pretty quickly in hours.
This 🙏🏾
My CEO insists that weekend meetings are to be expected in startups.
They don't know what they are talking about. It happens but is not the majority work culture. CEO needs to touch grass and talk to lots of founders.
At the end of the day it's their company though so what's normal doesn't really matter. Go somewhere else if you strongly disagree with the company culture.
Edit: to be clear, I worked on a lot on the weekends and still do a bit. Weekend meetings are hard no for me though.
I average 10-12 meetings A DAY. Most days I am in meeting 8:30am-5pm every single day and have to try to multi task during meetings or often work late and weekends.
I have consistently been in this many meetings for months.
I will say as you get more experience you can do your work a lot quicker.
I also have bought my own computer to download software my company did not approve of to help me in my job like TL;DV I add to every meeting to take thorough notes and share outs at the end of calls that I can read through and help me when I go to write documentation later on.
Oh, my sweet child!
Those are rookie numbers. Give it time, soon you will be in meetings all day and do your real work in the evenings and weekends like the rest of us.
When your schedule looks like tetris, get back to me.
Not much.
I have meetings which don't even show on the Calendar.
Edit: I am currently in a meeting which started 2 hours ago.
I think the problem here is the fact that you are not in control of the meetings. If all these are “pre scheduled meetings”, led and initiated by someone else it feels a bit much. If like half of it are meetings you lead or initiate, it’s fine.
The weekend stuff sounds a bit shit though. Do people really believe that’s a sustainable approach to building a company?
It's demoralizing and takess a toll for sure.
I am jealous of this calendar. I don’t think it’s healthy, but I truly only get 1-2 hours of desk time per day outside of meetings, unless I work through lunch or overtime. That said, a lot of our work is collaborative and done in meetings. Agree with the others though: I will block off time in my calendar if I need to focus time for writing.
I would LOVE this schedule. I average roughly 9-10 meetings per day and find my cutoff at around 13. This is what my product owners schedules look like. (I'm a Dir. Of Product Management)
That’s easy bra
Looks like you’re a product manager to me! My calendar is similar, with deliberately blocked time I’m not available for meetings.
Having focus blocks of time (or no meetings days) could be useful for deeper work, and less context switching.
Oh… that’s not a lot at all.
You will probably be working a lot at the beginning, but eventually you figure out how to organize tasks and templatize everything
Those are rookie numbers lol
Who are these meetings with? If they're not with customers as well, they may be too much given how small your co is. The fact that you have meetings on Sundays says it's probably too much. The greatest thing for me about going from public companies to a startup has been the massive reduction in standing meetings. I used to have more than what you've pictured here as a matter of course.
I work at a 25 person startup where I am the only PM, and it was 12 when I joined. My weeks only look like this when I am meeting a bunch with customers or joining sales meetings. We're really big on async comms. I'm in Slack all day, we're in huddles as needed (I'm remote from eng and design), I'm making and watching looms all the time, and we're diligent about documenting meetings and decisions (we use Notion).
Kinds of standing meetings I have: - standup twice a week (15m) - weekly leads meeting (45m) - weekly planning and triage with eng lead and design (1hr) - design crit (1hr) - demos (1hr) - biweekly 1:1 with CEO (45min) - biweekly 1:1 w head of customers (30m) - biweekly product review (1hr) - monthly 1:1 w head of marketing (1hr) - monthly all hands (1hr)
Common adhoc meetings - feature kickoffs (1hr) - training sales (30m-1hr) - customer success trainings (30m) - discovery with customers (30m-1hr) - sales calls where they need to bring in product (1hr) - check ins for how development of a larger feature is going (1-2x a wk when needed) (30m) - random issue that needs to be discussed synchronously (30m-1hr) - roadmapping workshops (1-2x a quarter) (1-3hr)
Last week I had 9 hours of meetings which is pretty typical for a week that includes customer and sales calls (there were 4 of them). This leaves me time to do the deep work you're talking about.
Do you have any control over the timing? Can you move them, or ask them to be moved, such that you have a big block of meetings without jumping in for 30 then out for 30, then in for 30? I find that a 30 minute break between meetings isn't v useful and try to have them be more back to back.
Seems like very few meetings, honestly. Get rid of weekend meetings asap - I won’t even hold a Friday meeting after noon.
Normal amount of meetings for me.
The Sunday expectations are a bit concerning though. I get that it's a start-up and people are expected to go above and beyond but if it's not contracted I'd decline them. You need time to switch off, relax and spend time with family/friends etc...
As others have said block off lunch and focus time. I block usually the first hour 9-10 in the morning so I don’t get early meetings. And then I block 30minutes for lunch at 1-1:30 and the. I try to scatter other focus times throughout. I also set up different colors so I know quickly looking if it’s a meeting or not. But god I wish my calendar looked that light for meetings.
I will add the weekend is unacceptable. Assuming you’re in the US and your salary id push that you work 40hours Monday-Friday and if they can’t make it work between those hours they need to record the Sunday calls and you’ll watch during the week because you have obligations and you can’t get out of them.
I wish my calendar looked like this. Honestly this isn’t much at all
Appreciate all the insight guys 🙏 going to block off some time for lunch as well as deep work.
To provide some additional clarity, none of the meetings are ones I’ve set myself or are ones with customers.
They’re all with my CEO that he’s added me to as a 1 on 1 or with other team members.
As for working on Sunday, I’m going to be more vocal about it because I think that’s where the burnout comes from. Usually means I spend my Saturdays planning for and doing work for Sundays and I don’t get much time to dissociate from work.
Yes to lunch time!
Go back through your calendar for a quarter or half year and tally up all the hours in meetings and categorise as to the purpose of those meetings.
When I did that I quantified that I was in meetings 55% of my working hours then broke down all the other tasks that were must-dos and displayed how I was at a weekly deficit of 12+ hours.
Aside from just the hours - the cognitive switching cost is huge. Honestly - you cannot succeed working like this.
This is how I feel, the context switching is huge being dragged from meeting to meeting. Can’t meet with customers or even think about problems deeply. But my boss doesn’t seem to agree.
Say no! If there are too many then the project is poorly defined or understaffed. Make meetings work sessions, not just status for the spectators.
That depends ... What's the value these meetings deliver? Are there more cost effective ways to accomplish this value?
Meetings tend to be a catch all for poor organization and communication habits. As a product manager you hold the space for value and good tradeoff decisions in the product. Turns out that isn't all that different when it comes to time.
Meeting Litmus test: is there an agenda you can review when the meeting is requested?
If not, YOU have no idea what the expectations are. YOU cannot prepare to maximize the value of the meeting with contributions. So YOU can decline the meeting because it's a waste of your time.
That said, if you are also doing this, get your shit together. Your meeting agenda should set clear expectations for what everyone is going to get out of the meeting. If you can't do that you don't need a meeting.
If the only thing people are going to get is an information broadcast ... Email / slack post / video is going to do a lot better job at that. It takes more time to craft up front but on the whole it's FAR more efficient.
If you are having meetings so people will make time to listen to people tell them shit they could have read... that's a totally different problem.
If you have standing meetings, get in the habit of cancelling them the day before if there is no agenda.
Everyone's time is valuable, including yours, act accordingly and set the example. Communicate your expectations about meetings and stick to them.
Those are rookie numbers
This is a lot for a 12 person startup.
I work in a large org spread across 5 time zones so I do have a much more packed calendar, but in your case this seems excessive
I’ve been out of product for 8 months now. Looking back, I am now convinced the job is just convincing dumber people higher up than you that what you’re team is building is worth doing
I’m 3 yoe and have 50% more meetings. I’m also at a large FI.
That’s a great calendar! lol minus the Sunday meeting. That should be a very rare occasion.
You have a bunch of small gaps between meetings. They should be booked wall to wall. Those little windows can't be productive compared to using that time as larger blocks.
Can the Sunday meetings, you have room for that on the weekdays. Also, due to the 8am start, I would schedule the end of day meetings an hour earlier to make the "normal" state at least a 40-day work week. Excess time can still be used for catching up on non meeting work, but your baseline day already sets you up for burnout if this feels like a lot to you
I used to face the same issue. Some meetings used to overlap.. Lot of work, so I started working on weekends.. soon started to burn out. No time for friends and family.. No extra curricular activities.. when it comes to hike, it’s zero.. reason being, recession, job loss due to AI, etc.
Now I just turn off my phone or won’t attend the calls immediately.. if I do I will say that I am out of town, driving..
we are working in toxic environment, bro. Let’s get out of this together.
Who is gonna tell him
Lol no
Friend, I am jealous of your calendar. I’m usually in meetings 30+ hours a week. (Working at a large bank)
What I would say is, if you have control of your regular meetings it’s always nice to group things together as much as possible. Then you can get some nice chunks of time to settle in and focus.
thats light work!
Guess you don't want to see my calendar 😂
This is every weekday for on a light week.
Oh man that’s pretty light on meetings actually - keep it up, safe guard it and block out HD time if any other ceremony is neededz
Looks like a light week
Believe me meeting madness can escalate way beyond this. Last summer we had a situation where I would have 6-8 hours of meetings on a daily basis.
No focused work could be done in the normal working hours. It took a coordinated effort from leadership to hammer down on this culture.
Since then, absolutely everything I do is in my calendar. I put every deep work item as focus time in my calendar. If for some reason you don’t want others to see it you can always set it private.
This has been essential because if people see a free stop they assume you’re free.
At top of that I started categorizing each meeting using labels and then tracking my time/effort spent at the end of the month.
Can you consolidate your meetings into 2 days?
Oh my sweet summer child
I was doing that ☠️ PTSD
That’s cute.
Oooooo!!!! Look at all that white space! Must be nice.
This looks like the calendar I dream about having
Should we tell him? I don’t think we should tell him.
Looks pretty chill tbh
For who?
Count your blessings my friend
I’ve weeks were have 3 times as many time locks covered and triple booked. This is super light.
Typical for a startup. As you grow you’ll get a Uxer to do prototyping and design thinking sessions.
I wish this was my calendar
Feels like an average week for me
I would give anything if this was my calendar.
Lmao rookie stats
The PM job starts at 5PM :-) You calendar looks fine
i would move your meetings to a block so you have uninterrupted time everyday
Do you have any ownership about planning those? I plan or reschedule meetings such that I have blocks of meetings and blocks of focus time. You don’t seem to have that much meetings, so the half hours in between may make you experience it as a lot of you can’t use those efficiently.
The discord meeting is the only one worth keeping. Kidding! As others have said, this seems light on the surface, judging by the amount of white space.
A lot of the PM ceremonies are fairly standard. Do you want to post your calendar and we could chime in? Of course if you have a meeting titled “Launching a weapon on Wakanda” please change it into “Launching firecrackers in the Shire”
If your week isn’t one solid bar your doing good. I would love your calendar.
What are you doing with all that free time between meetings?
Rookie numbers.
I once pointed out that my rate of meetings had recently gone up to my boss, as a way to commiserate with him, and he told me I still had it easy compared to him
lol, what planet are you all on? You spend this much time taking to other people and not working? God bless corporate America. This looks like my calendar when I turn on birthdays.
Can confirm this is an average-to-quiet week for me lol. These days it can get much worse
I guess the hodgpodge virus has reached USA. In India many companies have fired their Ux/UI teams and have asked PM to double as UX/UI end to end and on top of that they are also asking them to do PMM bs. They don't want collaborators anymore but IC PM. Truth is most PMs seem to be secretaries for their CxOs. As long as you attend all those and more meetings, the CxO can relax else all this is actually the job of CxOs. The only cope for you is to say that because CxOs wanted secretaries, you have a job.
If it’s below 20 hours I consider that’s good week. I would try and group as many meetings together as possible. If you have any 1on1 a try to schedule them on the same day.
This is more of a lighter week I’d say - I think where it feels heavy for me is when it’s back to back to back nonstop. Fun!
I wish my work diary looked that light! I’ve found working as a PM or PO you’ll be in back to back meetings most days
This is light work
This is how heaven looks like
Is worth trying to have meeting mornings, and cullinh a a few of the least important meetings?
My calendar normally starts the week like this, then gets a bit more packed out.
Working on a Sunday? That should be rare as hen's teeth for a roll out.
not really, you have so much free time
At least you have some light days
Run
Use your gcal focus time ruthlessly and block out whole mornings or afternoon. If you’re anything like me, just 2-3 meetings spread throughout the day can be ruinous. Call me lazy, but without 3 - or more - hours to focus on a specific task and I will get distracted waiting for the next call.
I recommend autodeclining meetings with a nicely worded auto respond asking people to DM you if it’s urgent (it’s almost never urgent).
Yes, we can end up in a lot of meetings, comes with the role and you have to learn to manage it.
But as for the company taking 7 days of your week, unless you are like a founder, are being promised a windfall if the startup takes off, or are a well-compensated upper exec, that would be too much for me (on any kind of regular basis).
These are baby meetings. You padwan have a long way ahead of you 🕺
Seems like a regular product manager’s week
Engineering manager why has been filling in for a product manager vacancy (just filled thank goodness) —- this would be the lightest meeting week I’ve had since I became a a manager by like, a factor of at least 2. I’ve had >40 hours of meetings booked some weeks.
That's a super light week in my books!
Attend important meetings which are on priority, but also make time for other work to get things done efficiently.
I’ve had more…
That would be great light week for me
I think an occurring meeting on a sunday is odd but I generally have more meetings than yourself and in a similar work environment. So think this is the norm (have been like this in my tenure at different firms)
I would just try and group your meetings either all during the morning or afternoon, then block off time to just work so people won't schedule over it. Without seeing what you're meetings are, it's tough to see if you could consolidate some or not. I wouldn't say your calendar looks a whole lot different than mine, outside of friday, which I block off every friday all day
I wish I had that. Mine is at least double
This would be a light week for me, besides the weekend meetings. Today as an example I have a hour from noon - 1pm, otherwise Im back to back from 8:30 until 4:30pm. This is an extreme day, but most days I have a few pockets of 30 minute windows.
Depends who it is with
No way I would ever attend a meeting on the weekend
From my perspective it seems the usual - beside that Sunday meeting which, as pointed by other, very uncommon.
You should find the right balance between accomplish things and making sure everyone is on the same page about your projects. Meetings are good, but pushback when is too much.
Who leaked my schedule?
The weekends are ridiculous but the rest looks notmal imo
I wish mine looked like that.
Look at all that free time!
LOL this is light.
Your calendar looks terrifically spaced out and below average. No double or triple-bookings or early/late-night calls from oversea teams.
That's fair, think it's just the meetings on the weekends that get to me. Out of the 16 Sundays we've had, I've had meetings on 8 of the, which means I'm also working on those Saturdays.
lol that looks like a dream. Mine is just a wall of color.
i wish my calendar looked like this...
"You either surf or fight. That clear?" Back to work.
Whether it's too many depends on:
- Do they all have clear agendas?
- Are the right folks involved?
- Are the agendas covering the most urgent and/or important things?
- Is there a lot of prework for prep or pre-socializing messages?
- Is there a lot of postwork from action items or questions raised?
I wouldn’t say that’s a lot. One thing I do (I’m not a PM, but do head several departments) is I move meetings around to be bundled together. For example, I try to bias to morning meetings (not afternoons) and nudge them towards Monday, Wednesday or Friday. Sure there’s the odd one that can’t fit into that, but doing it this way allows me bigger slots of time to get stuff done.
However, I’m probably a weirdo.
My entire calendar is full of
I'd trade my calendar for that any day of the week. Regularly in meetings 6-8 hours a day.
That is a great setup. I have back to back 12-14 meeting daily.
This is nothing lol
Wow I wish my calendar looked like this
This really isn’t all that much. The weekend meeting thing is unusual though, I’ve only had that happen a couple of times