These are tips I’ve been applying in my professional life as an individual contributor on a software development team.
Better awareness of time
This is a foundational practice which concretely helps me with better standup reports, team retros, and stress management (see below).
I have two time tracking systems, coarse and granular.
The coarse system is designed to help me see at a high level what I’ve been up to over the last days/week/months.
The granular system is designed to provide insights about how much time I’m spending on specific types of work. It also gives me more mindfulness about how much time I actually have to do work.
Concretely, the coarse system is a spreadsheet. Every row is a week. Every workday gets three columns: Morning, Early Afternoon, Later Afternoon. These correspond to natural chunks of time for me, and may differ for you. I fill in roughly what I did during each of these 2-3 hour buckets. The massive benefit of a spreadsheet is how information-dense it is — you can easily view months at a time like this.
Concretely, the granular system is Toggl Track. I don’t use the automatic app-based tracking, and manually track the time. Although this is the “granular” system, it’s still somewhat coarse grained to make the tracking overhead manageable. For me, the main categories are:
- Main Dev Work (i.e. The primary work I do as part of my dev team)
- Pair Programming
- Code Review
- Meetings
- Personal Dev Maintenance (i.e. Maintenance of my dev environment)
- Meta/Reflection (i.e. Time for weekly reviews, GTD, etc)
- Admin
- Misc
Better standup reports
I used to give unfocused and rambly stand-up reports. To improve this, I started taking 1-2 minutes before standup to prepare my report.
I use a standard framework for structuring my report.
- Did: What I did since yesterday’s report
- Doing: What I’m doing today
- Blocked: What I’m blocked on, waiting for, or struggling with (that I could use help from colleagues with)
To help remember what I did (even if it was just yesterday), I rely on my coarse time tracking.
Better team retros
To remember what happend in the last sprint (two weeks), I use my coarse time tracking system. I also keep a virtual notebook with retro thoughts as they come up throughout the sprint.
Better capacity planning
I fill in vacation, holidays, conferences, and other absences in my coarse time tracking system. Since the coarse system is so zoomed-out, it’s very easy to anticipate absences coming up and give my team warning about them. This is especially helpful when the team is doing planning work, so we can adjust work expectations based on capacity.
Better use of small blocks of time
Sometimes I finish a major effort, and have only 20 minutes either before a meeting, lunch, or the end of the day. I used to just start on whatever was top of mind for me, which is often large Main Dev Work — features, stories, or bugs that require longer periods of focus time.
Choosing this type of work for a short time block isn’t always a good choice, since there’s not enough time to properly get into the topic.
To help this, I
- Stay grounded in my calendar through the day, and keep an awareness of upcoming meetings, end of the day, etc
- Maintain lists of things I could do, so I have awareness beyond what happens to be most top of mind
There are certainly smaller tasks of various types that I could do in 20 minutes (admin, dev env maintenance). Much of better time management is choosing tasks that are appropriate for the given time available.
Better focused work
Again, this is time related. I noticed that if I didn’t get a solid focus session in the morning, the next earliest time to start one might be as late as 4/4:30p due to meetings. But by that point, I’m kind of tired and have less time to ask for help or pair if necessary since colleagues start to sign off.
I started really prioritizing my morning flow, and trying as hard as possible to ensure that I can have at least 2.5-3 hours of solid work time in the morning when I’m more fresh.
Better resuming of work
I used to leave my digital workspace a mess when I signed off, with browser tabs, terminal tabs, and IDE windows everywhere. This could help preserve some context, but often just created a mess to start my day. I started doing a daily sign off ritual where I clean up all these tabs, and create a clean workspace for the next day, ideally even with the right tabs and IDE windows open for my next morning flow.
Better ending of work
I used to often overwork, especially when working from home. Now, I explicitly plant an event in my calendar for the last 15 minutes of the work day to wrap up and do my sign off rituals. I also adopted a mindset of being extra aware of time passing throughout the day, and having my calendar simply open on a side monitor.
This mindfulness helps me anticipate the fast-approaching end of the day and helps me not blow past it and overwork.
Better expectations around work
After I finished one task, I used to simply start on whatever was next, regardless of how much time I had left in a day, or how large the task was. (I already mentioned this above). The implicit work model is that as long as I’m at work, I simply grind through the work. This isn’t necessarily the healthiest mindset because you’re never really “done”. The day simply ends, often in the middle of a task.
I adjusted my expectations to be more realistic about energy management. I now focus on making one impactful piece of progress per day, ideally during my morning flow session, ideally on a high impact/importance/leverage task. If I’ve done that by the end of the day, I can take pride in a solid day’s work and sign off guilt-free.
