For people who manage hundreds of employees and dozens of projects, having a foolproof way to plan the day is crucial to performance.
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By Alina Dizik
24 August 2017
If you want a job interview with Li Fan, head of engineering at Pinterest, you’ll need to wait until Friday.
Fan categorises the types of meetings she takes by days of the week. Mondays are for large group meetings and Tuesdays are for speaking with people one-on-one. Wednesdays and Thursdays are for ad hoc requests or various monthly meetings.
The reason? She’s eager to cut down the time it takes to readjust to working on a new task. “This enables me to spend less time context switching as I go from meeting to meeting,” she says.
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For Fan, the strategy is crucial. With pressing deadlines for a site filled with billions of images, Fan works hard to be approachable to a team of more than 450 software engineers at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. She’s constantly pulled into progress updates on dozens of projects, so she schedules blocks of uninterrupted time each day, along with a monthly “ask me anything” session for her staff. “I never want to appear too busy to have conversations about the product, business or professional development.”
