The typical work week in OneNote Test

• One of my friends was asking me about Microsoft over the weekend and wanted to know what it was "really like" working here. I suggested he read my blog since that is ostensibly the purpose behind it: to show what life is like as a tester here. He did not want to read it, and started asking questions instead (and to be fair, it's hard to read a blog while standing in a parking lot talking). One of the questions he asked me was how many meetings do I go to in a week. That's a question which always seems answerable with "About three more than I need to attend," but this week I decided to look it up and actually see. Here's a snapshot of my schedule:

• I got this listing from Outlook 2007. If you right click your calendar in the folder list, you will see a menu item for "Send via email…" Choose it and you get a simple dialog which lets you insert your calendar in an email and show just free/busy status (like this), and lets you add details if you want.

• By my count, I have 23 hours and 45 minutes per week free. That means as I enter my office on Monday morning, about 40% of my week is already booked for meetings, and if experience is any indication, I can expect one or two more to arrive in my inbox as the week progresses.

• And looking through the details, this seems about right a lead on a team. The 60/40 split also seems to reflect my anecdotal and informal guess at my week.

• On the plus side, some of these meetings get cut short, and very few go over. We have a dearth of meeting rooms in our building, which means if you book a room for an hour long meeting, about 1 minute before it is scheduled to be over the next attendees will start to gather outside the door. This serves as a forcing function to conclude the meeting. And on a personal level, I'm not afraid to walk out of non-productive meetings - there is always "the next highest priority task" on my plate which needs to be done.

• Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

• John

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2008
  I still get a meeting reminder about vModel... Is there anyway you could make that vanish? :-) Nice to see these blogs John - keep going!!!

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2008
  Last week I mentioned that about 40% of my time was taken by meetings. That's probably normal for a manager

• Anonymous
  June 12, 2008
  Even testers need to have meetings now and then, and during my 40% of the week last week, we had two