A Retrospective on Time
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected. — Dark
2020 was an unusual year. The pandemic brought a tectonic shift in how we go about living our lives. As millions went into the shelter in place, the boundary between professional and personal time blurred. And it sent organizations into a frenzy to figure how they should operate in the new world.
Like many of you, my work life also became much busier. I attempted to tackle it by being more structured in how I managed my time. Back in the day, I used to book dedicated blocks of time on my calendar for thinking and doing deep work. Now, I started putting informal catch-ups on my calendar to keep in touch with my colleagues. But an innocuous work conversation led me to realize that it was not enough.
A few months into the lockdown, I was at a meeting where we were reflecting on how we handled the situation so far and what we should focus on going forward. At some point during the discussion, the topic delved into where we were spending our time. I think this is something a lot of us would have found ourselves wondering.
The question piqued my interest and I spent the next few days trying to analyze where I had spent my time over the previous few months. The findings were eye-opening and embarrassing. There was a stark difference between how I perceived I managed my time viz-a-viz what I actually did. I discovered how my time investment across different themes and teams had changed over time, and how that reflected in the events that unfolded later.
As a Product Manager, I have spent eons doing retrospectives on sprints, product releases, process changes, and many others. And here I was, wondering why I never thought of looking back to understand where I spent my time. Especially when so much of our work is hinged on time and energy management.
A good retrospective uncovers underlying assumptions, sheds light on your blind spots, and surfaces actionable insights. If you decide to go ahead with doing a retrospective on your time, a few questions you can choose to get answers on
- Where are you spending your time?
- How and why is it different from where you expected to spend your time?
- What do you need to do to bridge the gap?
There are different dimensions in which you can choose to look at your time. You can look at it with respect to the goals you have for your quarter. You can look at it in terms of the people or functions you are spending your most time with. Or you can look at it from the lens of the kind of activity it is. Each of these will enlighten you in different ways.
For instance, if you are an Engineering Manager and you find yourself spending most of your time in execution, then it can be diagnostic of your inability to delegate or your report's ability to shoulder more responsibilities. In this scenario, you should budget more time on coaching and growing your team as opposed to staying in the status quo. If you continue to do so, you may soon find yourself and your team in constant fire fighting mode and reacting to things going haywire, things that happen often in fast-growing organizations. Similarly, if you are a Product Manager and see that you are over-indexing your time with the engineering team, then maybe you need to step back and budget time for other stakeholders such as sales and marketing or even more important, your customers to ensure that you ship a successful product.
Now, here we were playing out different hypothetical scenarios. Where and how you should spend your time is going to be very contextual to you. Looking at it in an objective way can help you track if you are on the right path. If you are not, then take proactive steps to course correct.
This brings us to the final question on how and how often one should look back. A weekly view helps me stay on the course of my priorities and a monthly and a quarterly review gives me a more macro perspective. Doing a retrospective on time, however, was not as straightforward as I had anticipated. Both Outlook¹ and Google Work² give you the option to export your calendar events. However, the export files are typically in .ical³ format or worse in the case of Outlook .olm⁴. You will need to set up a python script to convert it into a .csv file so that you can view and manipulate the data on Excel or Google Sheets. Needless to say, while extremely helpful, it was a complex and cumbersome exercise. This inspired us to build Mornin⁵ over the year-end vacation to make retrospective on time a bit easier.
Time is a constantly depleting resource. Choosing to spend time in one place also means choosing to not spend time somewhere else. Where you choose to spend it today will shape the future for you.
Mornin is a Chrome Extension that shows you where you are spending your time and helps you plan your day and week better. It categorizes and color codes the events on your Google Calendar into major buckets such as Planning & Strategy, Execution, Reviews & Updates, and People Management.
We launched Mornin a few weeks back on ProductHunt⁶ and were overwhelmed by the response. If this is something you can relate with, we would love to have you try the product and share your inputs.
Footnotes
[1] Exporting Calendar on Outlook — Ref
[2] Exporting Calendar on Google — Ref
[3] iCal — Ref
[4] .olm — Ref
[5] Mornin — https://mornin.am
[6] Mornin on ProductHunt — Ref
