Fragmented Workday of a Manager: Meetings and the Hidden Costs

Ding Li -- September 04, 2023 -- subscribe to my newsletter

Earlier this summer my manager took a two-month sabbatical. With several other senior members also on leave, I took on a half-manager half-tech lead role for the duration.

In this post, I want to write down my experience while it's still fresh.

More meetings

I've read how managers have more meetings than individual contributors. But stepping into this role still surprised me some.

I took on additional meetings like:

In a typical week, I had around 20 25-50 minute meetings - up from before but not drastically.

The hidden costs of meeting

Why do I feel like I have a lot more meeting, if the increase is not drastic? The raw number of meetings doesn't fully capture it though. Several factors made this feel like a lot more:

  1. As the senior member, I had to drive most meetings. That meant time prepping agendas, getting others prepared, and following up on action items.
  2. Scheduling multi-person meetings took rounds of back-and-forth as summer calendars filled up.
  3. I spent much more time in impromptu Slack conversations to gather context pre- and post- meetings.
  4. Mentoring the more junior interns also took up more energy.

In the beginning of the summer, at the end of a workday, I felt quite exhausting, both mentally and physically. I also made a podcast episode on this topic.

Build stuff

With so much coordination, I couldn't make progress on larger technical projects. I worry this could hurt my engineering skills long-term. While I didn't check in much code, I did learn more about our systems and team. Meanwhile, I gained valuable experience driving team execution and alignment.

Now with my manager back, I'm returning many duties. I hope to retain some of my new managerial skills.

A while ago I read a blog that the best engineer is one who goes back and forth between a IC and a manager. This pendulum between roles resonates with my summer experience. I gained insight into the broader org and team dynamics as a manager. I look forward to applying this lens in my work going forward.

I will end my post with this quote from The Engineer/Manager Pendulum.

Being an IC is like reverse-engineering how a company works with very little information. A lot of things seem ridiculous, or pointless or inefficient from the perspective of a leaf node.

Being a manager teaches you how the business works. It also teaches you how people work. You will learn to have uncomfortable conversations. You will learn how to still get good work out of people who are irritated, or resentful, or who hate your guts. You will learn how to resolve conflicts, dear god will you ever learn to resolve conflicts. (Actually you’ll learn to YEARN for conflicts because straightforward conflict is usually better than all the other options.) You’ll go home exhausted every day and unable to articulate anything you actually did. But you did stuff.

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