PMs Who Don't Respect Their Team's Time Usually Break the Project Too

You’ve met this person before. Probably more than once.

The PM who says “just five minutes” and runs the meeting thirty minutes over. The PM who casually schedules calls after hours. The PM who shows up late and acts like it’s a personality trait.

And somehow, they never seem to think anything is wrong. They genuinely believe “I’m busy” is a moral defense.

They Don’t Realize They’re Stealing Time

Project management is the job of “moving people,” which makes it dangerously easy to start thinking you also own their time. You don’t.

This sounds obvious. It needs to be said anyway, because a non-trivial number of PMs have never heard it.

Engineering work in particular requires deep focus, and getting into that state takes time. A single 30-minute meeting dropped into the middle of the day can easily cost one to two hours once you count the context-switching tax on either side.

PMs who don’t get this love to throw around:

• “Quick check”
• “Light sync”
• “Just five minutes”

None of these are ever quick, light, or five minutes. This is not a coincidence.

People Who Are Late to Meetings Are Usually Bad at Planning Too

Watch a PM who’s chronically late, and you’ll almost always find a project that’s organized the same way.

• No agenda
• Unclear goal
• Nobody knows who decides
• Action items vanish into the void
• The same conversation happens four times

Naturally, meetings run long. Which makes them late to the next one. A perfect closed loop.

The PM thinks “I’m just too busy.” From the outside, it looks less like busyness and more like an organizational skills problem wearing a busy costume.

The Real Danger: “It’s Fine to Be Unreasonable With My Own Team”

To be fair, when something is actually on fire, the rules change. Production incidents, release failures, the night before a deadline — sometimes everyone just has to push through.

The problem is the PM who runs that playbook in normal times. In fact, they save their most creative demands for normal times.

• Evening meetings as standard practice
• Spec changes with no plan
• “Can you have this done by EOD?” (sent at 5pm)
• “Could you take a quick look this weekend?” (no)
• “You’re young, you can handle it” (they cannot)

Repeat indefinitely.

And then the best people quietly leave, one by one. What’s left is a burned-out team and a PM who somehow still believes they’re doing a great job.

”Would You Talk to a Client That Way?”

This is the cleanest test.

Would they show up ten minutes late to every client meeting? Suddenly hold a client for two hours after hours? Drop “get all of this done today” on a client without context?

Of course not. They’d lose the account.

So it’s not that they can’t behave professionally. They’re choosing where to spend it.

Team members are safe targets. Internal people don’t get the polished version.

The team picks up on this much faster than the PM thinks.

What PMs Actually Need: Consideration Before Control

PM job descriptions are heavy on progress tracking and deliverables. It’s easy to draw a beautiful Gantt chart and forget there are humans attached to the tasks.

But what actually moves projects forward is more basic:

• Don’t interrupt people’s focus
• Don’t hold them longer than necessary
• Communicate early
• End meetings on time
• Don’t wreck people’s lives outside of work

Written out, this list is almost insulting in how obvious it is. Which is exactly why so many PMs skip it.

In the end, a PM with a sloppy sense of time runs a sloppy project. And somehow, the team is always the one left holding the bill.