I recently started at my new gig as a remote tech lead. While I am on the West Coast, most of my team is either on the East Coast or in Europe (+11 hrs). Meetings start at around 7 AM PT and go on until 11:30 AM PT!
Here is my challenge: I am a morning person & like to do more deep & undistracted work during the morning hours (Coding / Reading / Writing) . Screen time in the mornings usually drain me out & my productivity dips post multiple zoom / G-meet calls. What are your thoughts on how could I balance my sacred morning hour time between meetings & impactful work?
Thanks!
For both of the above, you'll get more buy-in broadly if you first talk individually to others on the team (especially if there are others on the west coast) and then coordinate the days/weeks which are focus blocks.
Few more suggestion which are "out of the box":
I actually was in a very similar scenario back at Instagram. I was a tech lead working on a big XFN project as part of the Menlo Park office (West Coast) and the primary partner team was in Meta London and we had some collaborators being on the East Coast (Meta NY) as well. It will be difficult for you to shift the meetings given how the time zones work, so my main piece of advice is to reduce the meeting load as much as possible. Here are my tactics/thoughts there:
Wrapping this all up at a high-level:
This is pretty much how we ran all of our projects back at Meta (Meta has a lot of startup culture still within it, which is a big reason why Meta is successful). It worked very well and was very pro-engineer, letting folks have the autonomy they need to really get stuff done.
I agree with what Alex said about written documentation. Maybe you can bring this issue up (constructively) in a 1-1 with your manager. If the meetings are small & recurring, I would also reach out to the individual participants and see if they’re open to moving the meetings.