[nfm]

At the exec level, a good 70-80% of your time is probably unable to budge, so 25 hours of discretionary time _is_ a big investment - probably most of your discretionary time for a calendar month. It sounds like it was well worth it though.

[Aeolun]

Uh, why would your time not budge? As I’ve become more senior I’ve also been left more and more alone to determine what is important to be doing at any given time.

[oldprogrammer2]

As an executive, your calendar will fill up fast with meetings, planned and unplanned. 1:1’s with direct reports, 1:1 with your boss, your staff meeting, your boss’ staff meeting. Meetings to manage down, meetings to manage up. Meetings with product, meetings with sales, meetings with operations. Various steering committee meetings to move larger initiatives forward. Meetings with customers and prospective customers. Meetings that need your decision, your expertise, or need to bring you up to speed on evolving issues.

And many of these meetings need preparation in advance to be productive. So your time is quickly depleted. Many executives do their deep thinking in the early morning or on the weekends since their day is a day of interruptions.

At least that has been my experience in my last 3 roles.

[brnt]

I once worked with an exec who had an interesting solution to this: he accepted meetings of 30minutes max. Hard limit (which is a good idea regardless of length ofc).

He was quite senior, so most people wanted to meet him rather than vice versa, so he could 'afford it', which someone in a more junior position probably couldn't pull off.

These meeting were the most effective I've ever experienced. No smalltalk no beating around bushes, there's no time! Regularly I need to discuss 4 to 6 issues with him, which meant my prep needed to be perfect and laser focused. He would read your preparatory docs fortunately, I can't work without unprepared meetings either.

[tehjoker]

That works sometimes, but only if it makes sense for one side of the meeting spending the necessary time to make such a presentation. If the meeting takes 2x as long unprepared, but it took you longer to make materials it can be more of a toss up. I wouldn't look at such prep as the hallmark of a good meeting, but more as an adaptation to a particular constraint.

Of course, difficult to communicate ideas (such as in science) require preparation or they are unintelligible and the meetings are a waste of time.

[brnt]

No prep often means two things:

1) the meeting will be as fast as the slowest reader/understander. Personally I dislike having to wait until the meeting to learn about its content in depth. 2) No recall. Many people do not remember things that weren't written down. Good minutes may help, but given the effort investment I prefer good prep docs. More succinct.

Making good materials usually means you can reuse them, so in my experience that pays for itself.

[watwut]

"Preparation for meeting" and "presentation" are two different things. Preparation means you know what you want, you know what to say and that you dont use time during meeting to figure it out. It means we are all not waiting while you are struggling with words or go to tangents or are going through jira figuring out which issues are relevant.

It does nor have to be polished presentation.

[rubidium]

Senior IC or senior manager side? IC you usually are left alone. Senior manager side and your times fills fast.

That said, the 1-1’s in the article are totally worth the time.