[Jemaclus]

I'm a director at my company. I spend all day, every day in meetings, with the exception of Friday afternoons. I typically spend that time just thinking about everything that happened in the week and writing down thoughts and things to deal with for the next week. I'd say 75% of those are pre-planned a week or more in advance, and the rest just pop up as people want to talk to me. I often just have to reply "If you can find time in my schedule, do so and we'll talk."

I don't have time to code these days. I don't really miss it that much, but it's nice when I do get a chance to write something.

About 1/4 of them are 1:1s, another 1/4 are leadership meetings similar reactions. I'd say another 1/4 are project planning, kickoffs, and checkins. The last 1/4 are just ad-hoc one-off meetings, often to deal with an emergency or personnel issue.

I don't mind it, generally. I actually like the face-to-face interactions with people and enjoy most of the meetings. The problem I have with it is the whole "meeting that could have been an email" thing. Especially status update meetings. Huge waste of time.

The other problem is that I do have a number of direct reports and I'm doing them a disservice by not having time to interact with them more directly. I'm in the process of hiring some more managers to take that load off my back.

[nilkn]

Many companies criminally underhire talented technical PMs and team assistants. The latter in particular are fantastic and you’d be amazed just how much can be handed off to them. You can completely transform how much time you have for people by investing more in these areas.

The phrase “executive assistant” is just one huge mistake. It makes the role sound like a secretary to one person, which makes people think they shouldn’t have one until they’re overburdened to the point of being completely ineffective at their job. In fact, even small- or medium-sized teams can benefit immensely by having a team assistant who can handle tons of logistics and odds and ends for everyone on the team.

[castillar76]

Too right! Having a good XO (2i/c) can make a huge difference, whether it's a PM or an executive assistant. My old boss was able to hand off a lot of the "figure out the budget and manage our spend" tasks to his right-hand PM and it made a HUGE difference. Not only was he a lot more relaxed knowing that was in good hands, we were all suddenly a lot happier knowing the budget was getting someone's regular, undivided attention!

[lazyant]

what tasks would this team assistant do that a team leader/manager is not doing now? I'm a team lead and I consider myself a facilitator/server of my team mostly.

[nilkn]

It's not about doing things that you're not doing. It's about delegating some of what you do so that you can focus on a smaller set of tasks and do them better than you currently do. It's about elevating the quality of everything that's going on from the small to the big and making it easier to grow if that's the trajectory you're on.

Scheduling meetings and aiding in calendar management for everyone. Running meetings and taking notes. Collecting and assembling agenda items in advance for any and all meetings. Setting up and handling logistics for team events. Managing team-related documentation on the company wiki so it's always up-to-date. Helping schedule any phone calls or meetings you need with candidates, partners in industry, customers, etc. Catering food for customer meetings. If someone's going to give a presentation, making sure everything is in order, setting up and running A/V, recording the presentation if desired, etc. Keeping track of annual review, six-month, and quarterly check-in cycles and helping you make sure you're hitting every single checkbox for all of your people. I could keep going but after a certain point many of the duties end up being specific to your team or organization. In general, though, there are probably many things you do that don't necessarily require your specialized expertise and knowledge.

There's some overlap with what PMs do, but generally this person is focused on the team itself instead of specific projects. You might feel that's what you're supposed to do, but once the team is big enough you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have time for the people on the team anymore -- or at least not as much as you feel like you should.

Offloading this stuff frees you up to focus on people, hiring, retention, unexpected urgent things of a variety of natures, and engineering (maybe not writing code but working with folks to make sure everything that's going on makes sense, meshes together, is aligned with broader objectives, etc.). If you run a larger organization and have managers under you, it frees up your managers to do the same. They'll spend more time with their people and less time on logistics.

[dahx4Eev]

Who will be assigning tasks to a team assistant?

[castillar76]

This was what my old boss had to deal with a couple years ago. With 18 direct reports, there simply wasn't enough time for 1:1s with everyone regularly, and he had some entry-level folks that really needed the weekly attention. He finally got management to fund the structure underneath him, divided the org into service groups, and added managers. It was a difficult transition for the people being moved into those groups. My advice: handle your transition sensitively, especially with people who have worked for you for a long time. It's hard not to perceive a move like that as a demotion, so be gentle and receptive, and involve them as much as you can in picking the new managers.

[Jemaclus]

Good feedback. I've already brought it up with my team. So far, most of them appear to be fine with it, whereas two people seem very upset about it. I'm still trying to figure out how to handle them, but it really does have to happen. Frustrating for sure, but will definitely be as sensitive as I possibly can.

[darkerside]

Honest question about those status emails. When do you find time to read them if you're literally in meetings all day?

[Jemaclus]

I think I didn't communicate that part well. I don't get status emails because the people who should be sending the emails are holding meetings instead :) These are "should have been emails" meetings. For example, you don't need to spend 30 minutes in a room when there's a status update. You could send an email instead and I could read it at my leisure. That's 30 minutes I don't need to spend in a meeting. If I have 6 of those a week, that's 3 hours of my week back.

TL;DR people should send status update emails instead of holding meetings whenever possible

[mekane8]

Wow, you just described my world a few years ago. It drove me insane and I quite. Nice to hear that you don't mind it though!

[ivalm]

How many reports do you have?

[Jemaclus]

I have 14 direct reports and am responsible for 25 people in total.