Are you a Software Engineer and drowning in meetings? So many meetings interrupting your flow and stopping you from delivering your stories or bug fixes on time? Are you losing a lot of time due to context switching?
You know the situation every day you have meetings, but they are aligned so awkwardly that it leaves your day all fragmented and giving you no chance to get into coding flow.
The most straightforward fix for this problem is that you start to block time in your calendar to get uninterrupted time to work. I would recommend that you try to secure half a day with each block on multiple days of the week. And make the block repeat. So you don’t need to remember to recreate them each week.
If you cannot block half-day blocks, make the blocks smaller having a continuous two-hour block to work is still better than having four half-hour blocks in the morning. I found that the smaller than two hours blocks do not work well for me, but your mileage will vary, so best experiment to find your ideal block size.
An important point to keep in mind is placing the block so that there is still time for your team members to reach and interact with you. That is why I would recommend not blocking more than half of your day each day. And vary a bit with mornings and afternoons.
Now open up your calendar application and search for two days this week, where you can block some time for uninterrupted work. And If you don’t find any time, this blog post about reducing meeting load could also help you: Sitting in multiple meetings each day and never saying anything.
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