This is the challenge of the modern manager, especially in remote jobs. You turn on the computer with a plan, and then 345 Slack messages and 10 Zoom meetings later, you consider working on it. As an EM, I really miss that state of flow and productivity.
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
Heavily guard your morning time, and don't even open your email/chat programs until closer to lunch. At least for me (maybe it's the caffeine rush), but that morning block is the most valuable/productive time of my day and going down a rabbit hole early can kill the rest of my day's accomplishments.
In my previous role, I worked with a primarily West Coast team (being East Cost, myself), and it was wonderful having that first 3 hours of uninterrupted time to do deep work before the 'other' stuff crept in. The downside, of course, was then needing to be on-point in meetings where everyone else was caffeinated/ready-to-go and my brain was losing steam.
I used to work like this with email, to the point that I’d intentionally not sync emails for a few hours. But in my company, everything is done through “SlackOps”. Incidents (including alerts) line management duties, deployments, getting access to environments. Plus lots of information I need is in Slack.
Maybe some combo of Zapier, extracting into local text, and strict observance of non-slack time and I could make it work.
I used Slack at that prior role, and I know I had a bunch of notifications rules and schedules to mute channels that didn't require immediate action. As often written about, Slack can be a productivity killer with the constant chatter on various channels. I also aggressively pruned my channel memberships to ensure I actually needed to see all the chatter contained in them.
I look at my mail when I get up and normally at three other fixed times.
Sometimes there's something complicated going on via mail and I have to be more responsive. Today I'm trying to debug something with a prospective partner who is in Japan (normally in NYC) so I check for messages from them between tasks. But otherwise it's systolic.
I also run a lot of automation over my mail most of which causes me not to see as much.
For slack, we have a culture that it's either transient (doesn't matter what someone wrote yesterday) or, depending on channel, archival ("here's the documents from partner P") which means you search for it but don't otherwise follow in real time. We're relatively hardcore about channels so that you can ignore ones that aren't germane to you. So I skim them in the same times I check mail.
Zoom meetings...I have the luxury of mostly only attending meetings with agenda and objectives published ahead of time. We try to do as much as possible asynchronously though we have one outside partner who doesn't do any homework and tries to use meetings to get work done rather than just use them for things that can't be handled asynchronously.
And also: certain topics are only handled on certain days, e.g. patent (bletch) related stuff I only work on tuesdays and fridays. Otherwise it will just sit in my inbox or wherever.
I’m whinging because I see other managers that have nailed this so much better than me and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.