An ongoing struggle for me is making time for work that is not urgent, but is important. This includes maintenance tasks that make my job easier, strategy work that help my team maintain our vision, professional development todos (such as writing blog posts like this!) and more.
In this post, I’ll chronicle how I tried (and failed) to make time for these, and how I eventually succeeded by establishing “docs table setting week” aka the time when we do all of these things in one fell swoop. My hope is that this may inspire other managers (and non-managers!) by providing a framework for getting this work done in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming.
Initial approach: calendar balance
The first step of solving any problem is to accurately identify it. I didn’t think about this as a problem to be solved until the bulk of maintenance work started to build up over time.
My initial approach to getting these tasks done was to block off time on our calendars. I created flexible, ad-hoc meetings for information architecture reviews, competitor analysis, professional development, and more. Our calendars were rife with these events, spread out unevenly amidst the rest of our regular calls.
It felt like a good approach – having them spread out over time made so that no one week was too busy, so we would stay on top of all of them.
However, the reality was that we continually had to prioritize our bulk of projects over these lower priority, maintenance blocks. Events were endlessly rescheduled or canceled. We went weeks (and sometimes, months) without doing maintenance work, even as we continually talked about how good it would be for us to finally get it done.
A big reason why this work was hard to fit in is that this kind of work often never has a real deadline. All of our other projects had deadlines, so when we sat down to prioritize, this tasks inevitably fell by the wayside.
Another way in which it affected us is that it made us feel stagnant. We weren’t getting enough opportunities to flex our brains in the high-level, strategic way, or to do meaningful work on our career goals. There was some strategy in our release work, but not the kind we needed to do to make our teamwork better.
Let’s try this again: kickoff week
So, what to do? After thinking it over, I decided to try the opposite approach. Instead of spreading these meetings out, I grouped them all together into the same time frame, nicknamed “table setting week”.
My company operates on a quarterly cadence, where each quarter is 13 weeks long. On the first week of each quarter, we have org-wide kickoff calls to look back on the past quarter, announce priorities and projects for the new quarter, and generally get hyped together. There typically aren’t a lot of releases that week, since we are all busy in the meetings together.
Previously, my team would sketch out all of our project milestones to be completed within the 13-week time frame to maximize the amount of time available for each project. However, I decided to take advantage of the slower release cadence during kickoff week by establishing my own mini docs kickoff week.
To map out the week, I did a lookback on all of our repeating calendar events. Some were on a quarterly, bi-quarterly, or monthly basis. I audited which felt right to add into docs table setting week, and which should be kept on their own cadence (or removed entirely).
I also researched what kickoff weeks looked like across other teams by asking my fellow managers and leads. Through this, I got a lot of good ideas, like the brag sheet meeting listed above, which felt like a good way to make time to chronicle our achievements while they were still fresh on our minds.
Once this list was finalized, I did a massive calendar cleanup by removing the old events and scheduling new, repeating ones to always occur the first week of the quarter. Thus, docs table setting week was born.
Piloting the first docs table setting week
I first piloted docs table setting week in Q2 2023. After shifting all of these calendar blocks into the same week, I spent time reviewing them to decide what would be the best “flow of events” aka the order they should happen in.
I tried to set the calendar blocks up to generally flow in this order:
- High-level vision/strategy work (writing guide, information architecture)
- Closing out the past quarter / clearing out older, lower priority work
- Tasks that tend to generate “new” work (risk analysis, competitor review)
Concessions had to be made for conflicting meetings (all-hands etc.) so it didn’t quite flow perfectly, though it was close enough.
Though it was a busy, meeting-filled week, the pilot was a smashing success. Taking time to fully step back from the endless cycle of quarterly projects to focus on cleaning house, re-align with our vision, and complete meaningful strategic work to help us be more efficient during the rest of the quarter left us feeling rejuvenated and hyped.
An unexpected boon of giving ourselves a break to plan for the new quarter allowed us to better set up our planned projects for success. As anyone who oversees projects knows, gearing up for your next project while you’re still in the midst of closing out your last one can be exhausting and fragment your attention. When we gave ourselves those few days to finalize our vision for next quarter, we came up with ideas to make it even better – recalibrating our success metrics, syncing with colleagues to get their perspectives before we started anything, and more.
Docs table setting, today and beyond
As of the writing of this post, we’ve had one other doc table setting week, which was just as successful. The only changes I made were to reorder things to have more of the closing out the past quarter meetings take place before the high-level vision/strategy work.
In the future, I’m looking towards having some of our table setting meetings be collaborative with other teams, particularly the ones where we work on professional development and celebrate one another’s accomplishments. This help us maintain our positive working relationships, receive direct quotes and examples from peers to boost our professional growth, and just be great for hyping us all up to keep working together.
Any suggestions on how I can make docs table setting week even better? Ideas for meetings I could add / change / remove? Feel free to share them in the comments.