If you're leading a team, however many managerial responsibilities you have, you're expected to remain hands-on as an engineer nowadays more than ever. When leading a team across timezones, it can be especially hard to carve out your own focus time. It's a huge drain to start the day with a series of back-to-back calls.

I once worked with a team that was half located in the east coast, and half in Eastern Europe. To push meetings past 3PM would mean the European half of the team needed to stay past dinnertime for the call. I gave up on having deep and undistracted focus time in the mornings entirely. By no means am I a "morning person," but I find that deep work like reading, writing, let alone coding, needs my head to be fresh and clear.

If you're drained from meetings before getting to deep work like I was, it's helpful to start offloading them or reconfiguring them.

First, I took stock of the back-to-back meetings, and roughly ranked them by the impact and benefit it'd have for the most amount of people joining. Does each person have something to bring to the meeting? Would an important decision or information be missed if they weren't there? The meetings that were most important for my team were stand-ups and retros.

Starting with the last on the ranked list, I did the following, where I could:

1. Offload as much of the discussion to asynchronous communication as possible.
2. Involve only the subset of people to which it would matter most, if they're in the same timezone. This meant I could even reduce the frequency of these meetings or at the very least, move them around.

When leveraging more documentation and asynchronous discussion, I kept a close eye on whether the main decision maker was engaging as much of the team as possible for feedback.

For #2, I had to figure out parallel streams of work so that the team could be grouped per timezone. Of course, if their combined strengths and weaknesses left too glaring of a gap in competencies, this would fail miserably. I was careful to speak to them in 1:1s to see if they felt that they were spending too much time catching someone else up for context or getting feedback.

This can help block out even one or two longer focus times blocks in the week. Just make sure you're not sacrificing your team's effectiveness in the process by listening to their feedback while trying this out.

​