[cagenut]

"I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda."

Wow, five meetings a week not even counting project or departmental recurring status meetings or random crop up ones? That would totally annihilate any hope of the uninterrupted 3+ hour stretch it takes to do any real work.

[jvns]

I think managing calendar fragmentation is important! Added a "calendar management" section to the post to address this :)

here are the strategies I use to keep my calendar under control:

- try to cluster meetings together (have a 1.5 hour meeting block so I only get interrupted once)

- block off 4-hour chunks of “focus time” in my calendar. People are good at respecting that.

- add an “end of day” block on my calendar at 5:30pm EST every day. This means that people know not to schedule things with me after I’m done for the day. Sometimes it’s unavoidable because 5:30 EST is 2:30 in the home office, but people always ask if it’s okay to schedule something after my end of day.

[vanderZwan]

She's not counting those meetings because she doesn't have them. Nor a whole lot of other types of meetings, for that matter:

> on the remote teams I’ve been on, the the whole team has adopted a working style where all important team communication happens over Slack / video calls / email.

In other words, you're thinking of the wrong context, which is impressive since the entire article explains that different context. The part you quote is in response to:

> How do you have idle/watercooler discussions?

We are already talking about a situation without chats at the watercooler. And when she says 1:1, she refers to her earlier explanation:

> One pattern that has been incredibly valuable [to learn from my colleagues remotely] is – meet with $person (on my team) 1:1 every week for months/years and get advice from them about whatever I’m currently working on. One important thing to me in this kind of relationship is that the person be continuously invested/engaged in my work – it’s way more useful to get advice from someone who’s familiar with everything I’ve been doing for the last year than from someone just swooping in with their thoughts.

While she explains this in the context of learning from colleagues, it is also a coping mechanism for staying in the loop despite not having normal meetings.

Also, maybe it's me, but a 1:1 meeting is usually one where "real work" gets done. Ignoring that, she clearly has more than enough time for long, uninterrupted stretches of work.