As a busy executive at Trello, staying on top of work was like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. My calendar was stacked with back-to-back meetings, and I struggled to stay present in them as my Slack flooded with requests for feedback, approvals, and more. Each morning, I wrote down my goals for the day, and like clockwork, these were abandoned by noon in favor of yet another fire to put out.
Not surprisingly, I was feeling burned out (not to mention the compounding effect of my personal responsibilities as a mother of two). After speaking with other professionals, I realized my experiences reflected a broader trend in work culture: “the barely managing manager.” These individuals are not barely managing because they’re ineffective but because multitudes of teammates rely on them for support, so messages with asks are coming in from all directions— all the time.
Collaboration overload
A couple of years later as I was beginning to work on a startup in the productivity space, I happened upon Beyond Collaboration Overload, a book written by organizational researcher Rob Cross. In it, he interviews hundreds of other knowledge workers much like me, and discovers that the reason people are so distracted comes down to an increase in the number of collaborative requests. These include meeting invitations, messages asking for feedback, or pings for input on decisions. Managers receive hundreds of these requests daily, slowing down processes, delaying decision-making, and fostering a culture of “collaboration at all costs.”
The culprits? Tooling that makes it too easy to loop coworkers into everything and a lack of policy on how to prioritize.
Before the rise of the digital workplace, for a meeting to happen, your team had to be in the same place at the same time. There was a cost and clear tradeoffs for organizing a meeting.
Now, organizing a meeting is as simple as adding an email to a Zoom calendar invite. To make matters worse, managers have a hard time declining meeting and feedback requests because they don’t want to be seen as uncooperative.
The result is ineffective teams, burned-out executives, and cultures that lack decisiveness. So what can drowning managers do?
Discuss priorities
The first step to pushing back on all the requests coming your way is identifying your own priorities. You can do this with your managers, so you’re both on the same page about what’s most important for the company, team, and your own career path.
Deciding on your priorities, writing them down, and sharing them, makes it much easier to see the tradeoffs each time you accept an irrelevant meeting request or extra project. After holding an open conversation, it also becomes easier to politely decline these side quests without hard feelings from your coworkers.
Protect your time
The next step is to set boundaries and protect your time. Some managers block calendars for focus time if their jobs involve deep creative focus like writing, design, or coding. Another tactic is to set a Slack status describing your deep work. This could be “On deadline. Deep writing from 3 pm to 5 pm EST. Expect a slower response.” Or, if you decline a meeting, indicate the reason, so people understand the tradeoff you’re making.
This extra context may make others think twice before pinging or adding you to a calendar invite. It also removes the mental burden of monitoring each platform and context switching, which has been shown to impede creative output.
According to a University of California Irvine study, refocus takes over 23 minutes after an interruption. Distractions are expensive. Protecting your creative time as a manager is an investment in your creative output.
So turn off Slack. Decline that meeting request. And don’t feel guilty.
Implement processes
Once you’ve established your priorities and set boundaries, you can use tools and frameworks to maximize your precious time. The key here is to not create more work for yourself by implementing yet another tool to update. You must ensure the processes you set up are efficient and simplify your workflow—not complicate it further.
AI tools can speed up creative processes and eliminate rote work for managers. ChatGPT can serve as a sparring partner for ideation. Granola can create AI-augmented notes from meetings. And my company Hoop has an app that integrates with applications you already use (like email, Slack, and Zoom) to auto-capture tasks on your behalf.
At Trello, I was lucky to have the opportunity to pioneer remote work. Today, the challenge is in making this way of working sustainable long-term. By establishing priorities, setting clear boundaries, and implementing effective processes, the “barely managing manager” can manage better—not just manage more.
