Days 35-39: Meetings, meetings, and more meetings
Emotions
The first half of my week felt very busy, lots of meetings about lots of different things. It was more difficult to find time to get my IC work done but I did a little here and there. During the second half of the week, I had a lot more time to get stuff done and felt happy and accomplished! There were a few loose ends I had to tie up on our current release and I managed to complete all of it by the end of the week. I still had some frustrating moments during meetings this week, I expect it’s going to continue but I’m learning through the experiences.
Tasks
As the title implies, I had a lot of meetings this week. Wednesday was my busiest day where I was in back-to-back meetings from 10 AM - 4 PM (I had another meeting from 9 AM - 9:30 AM so not much time in either the morning or afternoon). I had a good variety of different meetings - mentoring, 1:1s, planning discussions, design discussions, leadership team meetings. My “involve me” needs are definitely being met and I was generally happy with how most of the meetings went. After a while, I did get pretty tired of being on the phone and processing all the information so I’ll have to adjust to that.
In addition to the meetings, I was finishing up some IC work. Most of it has some upfront, time intensive setup that took a good amount of time on Thursday and Friday and then I was able to speed through the actual work. By the time I stopped working on Friday, my team looked great from a metrics perspective for the release so I was super happy about that. Since we are starting to move onto our next milestone, I spent some time moving bug/work item queries from my old manager’s folder to mine. The upcoming milestone will be the first one where I’m the lead for the entire team - I’m excited for what’s to come.
Learnings
With the increased number of meetings I had this past week, I had more of a realization that a big part of my job is enabling my team to be as effective as possible. With my time becoming more and more limited in the future to do IC work, I’ll need to effectively delegate and drive others to be productive and deliver on their work. It’ll be difficult to learn how to do this effectively but I’m definitely up for the challenge. As I do more planning, I’m thinking about what experiences each individual on my team needs/wants to learn and grow that will yield good productivity and success.
