Taking time off at 2i2c

[aprilmj]

What happened

• We have a few reasons to track time off at 2i2c: we want to know if we're taking enough time off and we want to clearly communicate that we're on leave or reduced availability. It should as few steps as possible to do both those things.
• We use a GitHub project board as the main source of truth for time we take off. But that board doesn't tell you that someone won't be at a meeting when you try to schedule it, or that they're away when you try to message them on Slack.
• Each person took their own approach, leaving us with a somewhat confusing mix of ways to communicate time off.
• So we recently settled on one solution for each problem: track in GitHub, block the time on our individual calendars, and share time off events automatically in a team calendar.

Any pull quotes?

Why is it valuable

• We want to know who's out when, so we can plan accordingly.
• Like a lot of teams with unlimited time off, it can be hard to decide what "enough time off" is, so we set a target: 40 days a year, minimum (that includes public holidays and our year-end closure). We use a visualization @choldgraf built using our GitHub time off data to track our progress towards that target.
• There are a lot of commercial off-the-shelf products available for leave tracking, but most of them are based on the premise that team members have a finite amount of leave they can take. Our problem is unique, so those tools don't work as well for us.
• Using the tools we use every day makes it feel like a little less of an interruption - you know someone will be out if you look at their calendar, and you tell people you'll be out by creating an issue in the same system where we keep our code and our docs.

Links to learn more

• Our time off guidance for team members
• is there a link to the People KPIs code that other people could reuse?

Media and images

Acknowledgements