Meeting Time
- Andrew Haley
Why should I measure Meeting Time?
In today’s fast-paced software development lifecycle (SDLC), effective time management is critical for engineering teams to achieve their goals. However, meetings can quickly consume valuable development time, leaving teams with less focus on coding, problem-solving, and delivering features.
The Meeting Time feature in Allstacks leverages data from your team’s Google Calendar to provide insights into how much time is being spent in meetings and which specific meetings are taking up the most time. With easy-to-interpret bar charts and time series visualizations, this feature helps engineering managers identify patterns, assess the impact of meetings on productivity, and strike the right balance between collaboration and focus time.
By measuring meeting time, you gain actionable insights to foster better time management, reduce unnecessary overhead, and empower your team to spend more time driving results.
Prerequisites for connecting
A Google Workspace account in your organization.
Allstacks will inherit the permissions and access to calendars and events of the account that is connected.
Contact your Allstacks representative for access to this feature if you do not see it in the “Add Tools” menu on your workspace.
If you are part of an organization that uses an Allow or Exclude List to restrict installations of Google Apps, have your Google Workspace Admin follow the directions on this page to allow the installation of Allstacks Google Integration. You may need to enable Unconfigured Third Party Apps temporarily while we go through Google’s app approval process.
Connecting Google Calendar
Go to the Tools page under the toolbar in the top right of Allstacks.
Click “Add Tools,” and locate Google Calendar in the left hand panel. If you do not see this option, contact your Allstacks Representative.
Click Through the Google OAuth flow.
When connected, your screen should look like this:
If you have issues installing, you likely have restrictions set by your organization, and can see bullet point 4 under “Prerequisites for Connecting”
Where to find Meeting Hours in Allstacks?
Click “Configure” in the lefthand sidebar and select “Metrics” in the pop-out menu, like below:
On the “Metrics” page, scroll down until you see “Work Patterns” at the bottom of the page. There, you’ll see the “Meeting Time” metric group, with two different views beneath it.
How Metrics are Generated
Calendar Data is downloaded from the Google Calendar API each night. Allstacks will download all calendars and events for enabled contributors, so long as the user who connected Google Calendar to Allstacks has permissions to view their calendars and events.
Right now, only personal calendars are available. Group calendars are coming soon.
Total Meeting Hours by Contributor
Total Meeting Hours by Contributor sums the hours that each contributor spent in meetings in the timeframe selected in the date picker at the top left. Allstacks will automatically group together overlapping meetings so as to not double count meeting times. So, for example, if a contributor has a 15 minute customer call in the midst of a two hour refinement, Allstacks will only count the two hour refinement towards that contributor’s Meeting Hours.
Use advanced filters to find only meetings containing certain contributors.
To gain insights into which meetings are taking the longest, you can change the series from “Invitees” to “Event Name.” You can also restrict the result to only accepted meetings by selecting “Attendees” as the series.
Meeting Hours by Contributor Over Time
Track changes over time with Meeting Hours by Contributor Over Time. This shows the same data as above, but allows you to see how your time in meetings has changed over time.
As above, use advanced filters to filter down to only meetings attended by certain contributors, and change the series to group meetings by “Event Name” or see only accepted meetings with the “Attendees” attribute.
Coming Soon:
Currently, only personal calendars are supported. Team and Group calendars are coming soon.
Currently, the people picker filters the creator of the meeting. We will be changing this functionality to target instead the attendees of meetings, making it easier to find relevant meetings for your team.