Time Management - 1/27/17

My team of five programmers supports a few key areas: animation, cinematics, audio and physics. We support multiple games in production at our studios in Burbank and North Carolina.

We have a short check-in meeting each day. The meeting is often followed by breakout discussions based on things brought up in the meeting. I have a 1:1 with each person every two weeks. A 1:1 with various people in production every two weeks. Mike and I have a 1:1 every week. I have a 1:1 with the other core leads every week. The core department has a group meeting once a week. Then there’s various production related meetings that happen as needed throughout the week.

So we chat quite a lot face to face (in person or through Skype). We try to be conscious of the amount of time we spend in meetings and wrap up within the allotted time (often 30 minutes).

I prioritize my time between interacting with the people on my team, interacting with other people in production, working on miscellaneous follow-up tasks, and then working on my own programming tasks. Time is a precious commodity and I’m looking to improve how I manage it.

In this installment I’m going to touch on three things I currently do to try maximize the use of my time. Some of these are probably very obvious.

1. I try to wrap up all team and follow-up tasks for the day first. Then I can focus without the concern that I’m preventing someone else from being able to move forward. In particular, if I’m working on my tasks, it’s not “guilty time”.
2. At Insomniac we have a number of group rooms - some are large conference rooms with seating for up to thirty people, some are small meeting rooms with seating for three to five people. I find a change of surrounding can help me focus and I often use these spaces to work. In particular if it’s something like scheduling, or task planning, or sketching out how a system might be implemented, or debugging the flow of a system. Sometimes I’ll work on paper, sometimes on a laptop and sometimes through remote-desktop back to my workstation.
3. I have regularly scheduled time booked in my calendar for me to work on my own tasks. This has a few benefits. It prevents other meetings being booked during that time. The Outlook popup serves as a gentle reminder. The meeting itself can be attached to a meeting room to minimize interruptions.

That wraps it up for now, next time I’ll chat about ways I try to minimize distractions.

-- Jonathan Garrettt (Lead Engine Programmer)