Introducing: Office hours!

What are office hours?

Office hours have their roots in academia, where professors would publish certain hours at specific days of the week where students could simply come in and ask questions. It’s an easy way to meet without the back and forth of finding a date/time that works.

Why office hours?

For those attending office hours, the value is clear: easy access to someone who can help you out on some topic, answer questions or that you just want to meet.

For people offering office hours, the value is time protection: offering office hours lets you funnel all those spontaneous, random, informal meeting requests into date/time slots that you control, protecting your calendar and those valuable, long, productive chunks of time from turning into swiss cheese due to too many small requests.

Office hours are a win/win: they allow for easy meetings, while defragmenting calendars for those who offer them.

While I was still working at AWS, I learned from Tim Whalin how to run office hours, the easy way: Set up a shared document with free slots, let people sign up, then talk!

I ran similar office hours for my colleagues for several years—one or two hours weekly, open to anyone across the organization. Over time, I met close to a hundred people from different teams, roles, and backgrounds. Some came with specific questions, others just wanted to chat. Occasionally, these conversations led to new collaborations, mentoring relationships, or simply helped someone work through a professional challenge. The format worked beautifully because it was low-pressure and accessible.

An experiment

So I want to create something similar now, only it’s not limited to my (then) colleagues. Now, everybody in the whole world can book time with me!

How? Just check out my contact page, it has all the instructions!

It’s basically a Google Calendar sign-up page with pre-determined slots. If you book a slot, we both receive a calendar invite, complete with a Google Meet videoconferencing link. That’s it. Slots are limited (as is my time), so they’re first-come-first-served, bookable up to 14 days in advance.

All the details are explained on the contact page. Maybe I’ll put this into a dedicated page someday, or make it more fancy. But for now, let’s see what happens.

This is an experiment: It might be successful and I may meet wonderful people and we could have a great time together. Or it might fail miserably and this might become a waste of time. Or maybe nobody cares. Who knows?

Being an experiment (or in Amazon lingo a “two-way door”), all outcomes are ok. If it works, great, I might keep or expand it. If it doesn’t, then no harm was done, and I’ll just shut it down.

The first set of office hours are tomorrow afternoon (CET time). I’m excited to see what will come out of this!