How to prioritize time as a people manager?

For me, this was one of the hardest parts of being a manager -- I had so much less focus time. What helped me was to partition my day into chunks where I was fine being reactive (and I expected to be pulled into random fire), and other chunks (sometimes this would be the evening...) where I had focus time.

In terms of where to focus your time and energy, one way to think about your job as a manager is to minimize surprises and unknowns.

• The high-performing engineer who leaves the team
• The project that get delayed by 2 months
• The XFN partner which is a pain to work with.

Structure your time in meetings or with tools so that you can more easily detect and solve some of these issues. This usually manifests in observing the work your engineers are doing, talking to leads from other teams, and figuring out what high-priority work the team really needs to focus on.

• Here's another perspective about how to allocate your time from David Pan, a former VP of Engineering.
• [Taro Top 10] Software Engineer To Engineering Manager (IC -> M Track)

A concrete example of what Rahul is mentioning is that as a new EM myself I could spend 12 hours a day keeping up with slack messages. The adjustment was being OK with delays getting back to people and focusing on what is important more than just what is urgent.