By Chris Saly

This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters.

A few months ago, I came to a startling realization: My job is meetings.

Maybe you can relate. From morning to night, I spend my time jumping from Zoom call to Zoom call. I race to grab a snack in the two minutes I’m afforded in-between calls, and I’m mentally exhausted by the end of the day. It’s a struggle to decompress before spending time with friends and family.

And, equally challenging, the amount of meetings I have takes away from my ability to get my work done.

I’m Chris Saly — an Engineering Lead at HubSpot.

As an engineer, my day job was code. Sure, we needed meetings to discuss things and stay updated as a team, but the main mechanism and value of my job was the quality and reliability of the code I produced.

Now, the primary value of my job is talking to others. Whether it’s as a mentor, being involved in tactical decisions, or helping set a strategic vision, most of these goals are communicated through meetings.

However, there are some very real consequences to my role as an EL. Among other things, my meeting-heavy life was taking its toll on my mental health, relationships, and workplace productivity.

I knew something had to change. Here, I’ll show you how I incorporated a framework into my calendar planning to reduce meetings, and take back control of my time.

My Job is Meetings

As an engineering lead, I manage the 12 engineers in my group and provide a strategic vision for the pillar in collaboration with my project management, business system analysts, and design peers.

We build internal tools and systems that support the HubSpot Sales, Success, Support, Marketing, and Operations teams to do their jobs day-to-day.

As a result, in additional to the typical duties of an EL at HubSpot, there is also a healthy dose of stakeholder management thrown in, as well.

The nature of my role means that meetings cover a wide range of topics. I might go from one meeting talking about the three year vision for HubSpot’s Sales team, to a systems design discussion on something we’re building right now, to a mentoring conversation with a Tech Lead and then into a critsit retrospective.

What I’ve realized is that my job is now meetings.

What prompted this?

I noticed a a number of days over the last several months where despite finishing work at 5 or 6, closing the laptop and entirely disconnecting from work, I was still amped up and my brain was in ‘work mode’ at 9 PM.

I was struggling to decompress. And considering nearly half of professionals report a high degree of exhaustion after numerous daily video calls, I’m willing to bet most of you understand this frustration.

My calendar on Oct 28th last year is a fair example …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron