Too Many Meetings? How Engineering Teams Can Take Back Their Time

Thank you, uh, thank you everybody for coming today. Um, my name is, is Glenn Barnett. I, I work for, for Jellyfish, um, and I'm joined today by Matt Martin from, from Clockwise. Um, and we are here to talk about, um, calendars and meetings and, and especially sort of how that affect the world of engineering and R&D teams. We're gonna be talking, I think, a lot about how things have changed recently. Certainly the past 2.5 years, everybody's felt it, right? It's a very different world that's so easy to schedule remote meetings and just grab time from people. And, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. And so maybe we'll start, Matt, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Clockwise and where you guys are coming at this problem from?

Yeah, happy to. So, uh, I'm Matt Martin. I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of Clockwise, and we are a company that helps get meetings out of your way so you can get on with your day. Um, and what the founding story of Clockwise actually relates pretty closely to what we're talking about, Glenn. So I'm an engineer, engineering manager, and I was struggling with getting enough time in my day to be proactive for the team. It's easy to get in that flow where you're reactive, you're just processing information, you feel like you're a triage machine. And it was frustrating. I mean, at first I didn't quite catch it, but then over time I felt like, oh, I'm not actually putting my best time into helping coach my team, helping to get ahead, helping to create a great work environment. And one of, I think, the core realizations that led us to found Clockwise is that all of our toolset for managing meetings is really kind of individual-centric. Your calendar is your own view of your calendar. Your to-do list is your own view of your to-do list. And so a lot of the advice relates to how do you better manage your time. But inside of any modern work environment, to your point, we are constantly collaborating. People are pinging me for a meeting. They're pinging me in Slack. They're pinging me in a Google Doc, in a in a code review request in Slack. And time has really become a shared asset. And so if you have to fix that shared asset, if you actually have to make better use of it, you have to coordinate across everybody instead of just focusing on your individual best practices. And so that's what Clockwise seeks to do. I mean, we connect to calendar systems and we help optimize for everybody so that people can actually get the time for what they need.

Yeah, that's a good point. Like the data structures, the tooling, the all the apps that you use to interact with calendars is all about you and your time. And there isn't necessarily, or there hasn't historically been that consideration of, you know, what's, what's an optimal thing for everybody, for the shared asset.

Cool, cool.

So I'll introduce myself too. So, so my name is Glen Barnett. I've been with Jellyfish since the beginning. I lead our strategic initiatives team now and You know, I— Jellyfish has kind of always been about time, right? When we started, we knew that there was like all this really useful information locked up in Jira, locked up on GitHub and GitLab and so on. And there were already a lot of people in the space that are like really experts at Jira and counting story points or really experts in the Git world and measuring your PR cycle time. But I feel like we saw our opportunity at doing a really good job connecting those two worlds. And then sort of the next opportunity was considering what's going on those worlds on that axis of time, right? And there's so many interesting things that come out when you have this sort of evidence-based way of knowing what people are spending their precious focus time and attention on. And so from early days, I think it's been like I've had a time-centric view of the world sort of as an engineer, as an architect of Jellyfish. And there's still so much to learn. There's still so much that's changing. When I step back a bit and think about it. Like, we're certainly not competitors, right? One way that I might think about it is Clockwise sort of gets you in position to do focused engineering work, to get in the flow state, right? Whatever your chosen metaphor is. And then Jellyfish, on the other hand, could show the efficacy of that or the outcomes of having done that or not. Does that reflect for you? Does that line up for you?

Yeah, I mean, so as an engineer, one of the things that I think about a lot is the cost of context switching. So you get that meeting in the middle of an afternoon where you otherwise have this meaty block of time. And to be able to— I mean, not only do you have to get up or switch over to Zoom, switch your task, switch your focus, but there's kind of a blast radius around that too, where before the meeting you're thinking about that meeting upcoming. And so you kind of scope your work to that. And then after the meeting, it's like, well, maybe it's 4 o'clock, maybe I'll just knock out some smaller stuff. And so Clockwise at its core is really about making sure that engineers have time to go heads down and focus. And so we'll take that, we'll take that meeting in the middle of the afternoon and we'll nudge it to maybe like right before lunch, right after lunch, in a way that works for all attendees. So we're about opening up the time. And yeah, jellyfish, I think, is a great way to be able to understand how that time is being used. And, and one of the things too, I think, Glenn, that relates to the topic today that's really important is, again, the concept that We all have a responsibility as teammates, as managers of teams, to think about not just our own time, but to think about the team's time holistically. And I think that's what both products enable, because if you don't do that, uh, you're really abdicating a responsibility on behalf of your team to make sure that everybody can have the time they need to get their work done.

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