On Office Hours

I’ve never seen someone use office hours in the tech industry before.

I assume people do use them, but the practice is not widespread (at least not in Aotearoa New Zealand.) For the past month I’ve been holding office hours twice per week, and the experiment has gone well enough that I’m going to keep it up.

There’s a couple of definitions of office hours I’ve found, but the one I’m going with here is as follows.

The time during the day when a someone is available to meet with others on an ad-hoc basis.

That’s bastardised from the Meriam-Webster online dictionary. In practice what that looks like is some amount of time, regularly scheduled, where one is available to be interrupted for as long or short as is needed.

Office hours seem to be most common in academic scenarios, where a professor or tutor would agree to be in their office to answer course-work related questions at set times, rather than replying to random email queries or making specific appointments for every student (I will admit I rarely used office hours to my advantage as an under-grad. )

I was inspired to start running office hours as a result of two things colliding in my brain at the same time.

1. I work in Auckland, and at the time of writing, we’ve been working from home (WFH) as a result of COVID-19 for about 12 weeks. Given myself and my team typically work from the office, we have a lot of “water cooler chat” (more like table tennis and coffee machine chat) which helps cement our relationships, as well as deal with minor things as they come up. Because we didn’t elect to work from home, we didn’t have a plan in place to keep those things going when we moved to regular WFH. Those minor and ad-hoc communications dropped right now, creating a feeling of misalignment and separation.
2. As a product person, my time is under strong contention, and I get interrupted a lot (this is pretty common for knowledge workers.) The type of interruptions varies, but some examples might include an engineer asking for clarification on the scope of something, a stakeholder asking for the status of another thing, or a customer or vendor wanting to talk. While listening to the Deep Work podcast, Cal Newport mentioned office hours as a nice way to collate those ad-hoc communications. I’d obviously come across the idea many times before, but that particular podcast must have struck me at the right time because it immediately seemed like something I should be doing.

I immediately scheduled two blocks of Office Hours per week — an hour each, on Monday and Thursday afternoons. I’ve used Google Calendar Appointment slots for this, but I can think of a whole handful of other ways to implement it. When I’m in office hours, I also set my Slack status to something appropriate.

When I first set this up, I communicated it to my two immediate teams (engineering team, as well as product cohort) what I was doing and why — as well as explaining that I’m always available to answer questions, but at these specific times, answering those questions is my top priority. I bring it up in other regular communications as well — a short FYI in stand up on some days, as well as reminders in appropriate Slack channels.

Example office hours Slack status

I’m not quite naive or optimistic enough to think I can compress all my ad-hoc communications into two scheduled slots per week, (there’s always time-zone issues, people those times don’t work for, or truly urgent things that can’t wait) but I have found some benefits already.

1. There’s always time in the next day or two for me to meet with someone. My calendar is typically jam packed (see my post about the Productivity Hydra), and having scheduled “interrupt me now” time means I can always speak to someone if it’s important.
2. People feel way more comfortable bringing things to me. When there’s a specific time where I can promise to be available to answer questions — even if they only require a few minutes — people feel much more inclined to actually ask, instead of sort of muddling around for hours or days to get to a similar result.
3. When no-one drops in, I use the time as a regular ol’ admin block and tick a few things off the to-do list.
4. I’ve reconnected with my team a little bit. I don’t think Office Hours are a complete solution for the dearth of ad-hoc interactions, but they’re certainly a partial solution.

My office hours experiment has had positive enough results that I’m going to continue it. I think I’ll keep playing with the implementation — I’m not sure Google Calendar appointments are quite right, and perhaps a morning slot would help with my time-zone issues — but conceptually I like them, I’ve seen benefits in using them so far, and I’d recommend more tech workers give them a try.