For engineering managers: your calendar is part of your output.

If you manage engineers, you are on the manager’s schedule. Your calendar is built around one-hour blocks, and scheduling a meeting between 10am and 11am is weightless to you. Most of your team is on the maker’s schedule: a 10am meeting destroys the whole morning, because the 90 minutes before it are too short for deep work and the 90 minutes after it are spent recovering context. Paul Graham wrote this in 2009 (“Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”) and it has not become less true since.

01. The 23-minute tax

Gloria Mark’s group at UC Irvine has been measuring how people work for twenty years. Their CHI 2005 paper (Mark, Gonzalez & Harris) found the average time to resume a task after an interruption is 23 minutes and 15 seconds. Four interruptions in a day cost an engineer roughly an hour and a half in context recovery alone — separate from the time spent in the interruptions themselves.

A 30-minute meeting that lands at 10:30am on a maker’s schedule is, from the engineer’s point of view, not a 30-minute meeting. It’s a morning.

02. Standups that don’t cost more than they produce

The original Scrum standup is 15 minutes, standing, same three questions. In practice, most standups become 25-minute seated meetings where each person reads their status out loud. At that shape, for a team of eight engineers on $150/hour fully-loaded, you’re spending ~$500 every weekday — roughly $125,000 a year. For a status meeting.

The fix is rarely to improve the standup. It’s to split it in two: an async written update in a channel at 9am (no live read-out), and a short live sync (10 minutes, twice a week) for actual blockers. GitLab publishes a version of this in their handbook (GitLab · Meetings). It works.

03. Code review syncs

Some code reviews genuinely need a live conversation — architectural changes, junior engineers learning, security-sensitive code. Most don’t. The sign that a recurring code-review sync has outlived its usefulness is the one everyone recognises: the meeting starts with people reading a PR nobody looked at in advance.

Make the pre-read mandatory — the PR goes out 24 hours ahead, with written comments expected — and the live sync becomes optional for most items. The meetings that remain are shorter and more productive, because everyone arrived having already read the code.

04. Sprint planning math

Sprint planning is a meeting that genuinely benefits from real-time discussion — people negotiating scope, engineers pushing back on estimates. But it shouldn’t be a three-hour meeting with eight people. Shopify’s internal calculator, which they publish numbers for (Fortune · CFO Hoffmeister, 2023), reports that a 30-minute meeting with 3 employees costs between $700 and $1,600 at their rates. Scale to an eight-person three-hour sprint planning: $8,000–$16,000. Per sprint. Six times a quarter.

That’s real money. Structure the agenda so the first half is a written draft circulated the day before, and the live session exists only to negotiate the contested items.

05. Cross-functional syncs

Engineering gets invited to a lot of meetings where engineering is expected to listen and occasionally nod. Product strategy reviews, customer advisory boards, marketing planning. If your engineers don’t own a decision in the room, they don’t need to be there. Send the doc, ask for written comments, show up for the decisions.

The cost of saying no to these invites is almost entirely political. The cost of saying yes, multiplied across your team across a year, is a headcount you didn’t know you were spending.

06. How to run the audit

Export your team’s recurring calendar. Run each meeting through the calculatorat a realistic builder multiplier (2.0×). Sort descending. The top five meetings on that list will tell you most of what you need to know about where your team’s deep-work time is going.

The calculator on the front page is how I do it with clients. It takes ten minutes per team. The conversation that follows usually takes longer — and produces more — than the meetings it cancels.