The manager and maker schedule

All technical leads should write code. If you’re not writing code, you’re a manager. And that’s fine. But stop pretending you’re technical. Many Technical Leads or other senior technical staff have a preferred time split between the admin and technical parts of their job, but I don’t always see that in practice.

Some technical leads double down on the technical part and ignore the leadership part. Those are the people who need mentored. It’s the hardest shift when becoming the leader, to accept that your most valuable time is no longer the conversation you have with the compiler, it’s the conversations you have with and on behalf of your team.

You need the time to have those conversations, to keep the team delivering, and delivering the right thing. But you also need up to date technical knowledge to give you the right context for those conversations.

Managing time can be one of the trickiest skills for a new technical lead to learn. The process I use is simple, but it requires discipline.

If you want a split of 60% coding to 40% admin, then schedule it in advance. Pick 2 admin days and 3 development days. Or if you’re most creative in the mornings, schedule 3 hours at the end of each day. Into the admin days put your 1-2-1 meetings and other line management, and your cross-functional meetings, and the team planning and retrospective meetings. Lay out time for emails and backlog pruning and catching up on your reading list. And then block the remainder off for development, deferring to your task board for detail. And make those events as public as you can so your team and others know when they can schedule your time.

Maybe those times are dictated by others and you end up with regular meetings scheduled in your Zone time.If you can’t move it, work the schedule around it. Turn those into your admin days. The most important thing is to define a split, and stick to it.

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