Pinterest Engineers Designate Meeting-Free Days

by Brian Donohue for MediumAbout 100 days ago, our product engineering team began experimenting with a three-day no-meeting schedule for individual contributors on our teams.It’s not a big revelation that software development requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus. As Pinterest has grown, we’ve noticed the number of meetings also has increased. Having so many meetings can fragment an engineer’s entire day, eliminating the stretches of uninterrupted time required to build software.In the interest of preserving these blocks of uninterrupted time, the product engineering organization at Pinterest experimented with putting 9AM-5PM no-meeting blocks on engineers’ calendars from Tuesday–Thursday.Over the past several months, product engineering managers have gotten very positive feedback about the three-day no-meeting schedule, and we recently sent out a short survey about it. Here's what we heard:Read More →