Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Build a Personal Operating System
Transcript
- Lucas: So I was on the phone last week with a former colleague who became a manager about six months ago — let's call her Mira. She's running a small engineering team at a mid-size SaaS company. And she told me something that stopped me cold. Luna: I'm listening. Lucas: She said, 'I feel like I'm running a help desk, not leading a team.' And she didn't mean that in a dramatic way. She meant literally — her calendar looked like a ticket queue. Thirty-minute blocks back to back, all day, every day. By 3 PM she was too drained to think about the project roadmap, let alone actually coach anyone. Luna: That's so common. I've talked to new managers who say their calendar fragmentation alone costs them two hours a day just in context switching. Lucas: Right. And Mira's fix wasn't some radical productivity hack. She built what she calls her 'personal operating system.' Three layers: time architecture, decision pre-work, and energy management. And honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Because listener support is what keeps this show ad-free, and it helps us dig into real stories like Mira's. Luna: Yeah, and it's a tiny ask that makes a big difference. So back to Mira — time architecture. What did she actually change? Lucas: She started by color-coding her calendar into four zones. The first zone is deep work — two hours every morning, no meetings, no Slack, no email. She literally blocks it as 'No Touch' and it's the only time she does actual thinking or writing. The second zone is reactive work — emails, quick questions, that sort of thing. She gives it one hour in the late morning and one hour in the mid-afternoon. Luna: And the other two zones? Lucas: Third is team time — her one-on-ones, stand-ups, any collaborative meeting she actually needs to attend. She groups them into two blocks, noon to 1:30 and then 3 to 4. And the fourth zone is buffer — white space. She has an hour every afternoon with no scheduled anything. That's for catching up, handling surprises, or just breathing. Luna: Okay, but I've heard managers say 'I block my calendar' and then their boss moves a meeting into the block anyway. How does she enforce it? Lucas: Great question. She has what she calls a 'boss one-pager.' Every Monday she sends her boss a single-page doc that says: 'Here's what I'm working on this week, here's what I need from you, and here are the times I'm unavailable for meetings because I'm doing deep work.' The key is she frames it as a service to her boss — 'I need these hours to make sure I can deliver X and Y.' Her boss actually started adopting the same system. Luna: That's smart. It's not just protecting her time, it's making her boss look good by protecting their time too. So layer two — decision pre-work. What's that? Lucas: This is the one that surprised me the most. Mira realised that most of the decisions she was making during the day were actually just re-processing things she'd already thought about. So she started a habit she calls 'decide once.' For any recurring decision — like approving a PTO request, or signing off on a pull request — she writes down a simple rule and then she doesn't re-deliberate. She just executes the rule. Luna: Is that the same as a decision tree? Lucas: Similar. But she takes it a step further. For bigger decisions, she does 'pre-work' the day before. If she knows she has a tricky decision to make in a meeting tomorrow, she spends fifteen minutes tonight writing down her initial thoughts, the data she'd need, and the trade-offs. Then when the meeting comes, she's not thinking from scratch. She's refining. Luna: That feels like a huge cognitive load saver. I know I've made terrible decisions when I'm on the spot. Lucas: Exactly. The third layer is energy management — and this is where it gets really personal. Mira tracks her energy levels for a week just by rating her focus every hour on a scale of 1 to 5. She found that her peak energy is from 7 to 10 AM, and her trough is from 2 to 4 PM. So she now puts her hardest cognitive work in that morning block, and she saves her low-energy time for things like processing emails or doing quick syncs. Luna: That's basic chronobiology, but almost nobody actually does it. Lucas: Right. And she also noticed that if she eats a heavy lunch, her afternoon trough gets worse. So she started eating a light lunch — a salad or soup — and that alone gained her about forty-five minutes of productive afternoon time. Luna: Okay, so the system sounds solid, but I have to ask — isn't this just productivity porn for managers? Don't we risk turning management into a series of personal optimization hacks at the expense of actually being present for your team? Lucas: I think that's a fair critique, and Mira would agree. She told me the whole point of the operating system is to buy back time for the human stuff. She says it's like putting on your own oxygen mask first. If you're drowning in calendar Tetris, you can't actually listen to your report when they say they're struggling with a project. You can't sit with a tough question. You can't coach. Luna: So the system is in service of the relationships, not a replacement for them. Lucas: Exactly. In fact, after she implemented her operating system, she realised she had an extra four hours per week that she'd previously spent context-switching. She reinvested that into longer one-on-ones with her team. She started doing what she calls 'walking one-on-ones' — no agenda, just walking around the block and talking about whatever. Luna: And those are often where the real stuff comes out. Lucas: Totally. I think the lesson for new managers listening is: don't wait until you're drowning. Build your own version of this system in your first 30 days. Start with one layer — maybe just the time architecture — and iterate. It doesn't have to be perfect. But the cost of not having any system is that you become reactive by default, and your team feels it. Luna: So what would you say to a new manager who's listening, maybe three months in, and feels like they're already stuck in that reactive mode? Lucas: I'd say: pick one thing this week. Maybe it's blocking your morning for deep work and sending that one-pager to your boss. Don't try to overhaul everything at once. Mira's system took her about six weeks to fully get right. But the first step — just knowing where your time actually goes — that's a revelation on its own. And if you listen back to this episode in a month, you'll be in a different place. Luna: I love that. A small step, not a revolution. Lucas: Exactly. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be back next week with another episode.