Category Archives: Productivity

How to be a more effective professional engineer

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: _Micropost 🍪, Career, Productivity

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

  1. Stay grounded in my calendar through the day, and keep an awareness of upcoming meetings, end of the day, etc
  2. 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.

3 weeks of GTD

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: _Micropost 🍪, Productivity

I read GTD (Getting Things Done) a few weeks ago and have been applying it since then.

I can say since implementing it: my stress is lower, I feel much more in control & at peace, and I’m happier overall. So I’d say it works — or at least there’s really something to it.

Concretely:

The process of taking a fuzzy/vague/unpleasant idea of a project and progressively making it concrete by 1. Identifying the specific outcome, and 2. The specific next action has been critical for me. I wasn’t aware of this and would often get overwhelmed by these fuzzy ideas and let them linger (which made them worse). I often find that after doing the 2 steps, the idea is much less overwhelming, and often much easier than I thought (or even can be done trivially).

I was using Omnifocus wrong — I now work out of my Forecast view which I believe is the intended way to use OF and actually works well. OF 4 is great, in particular for how much better the iOS app is (specifically implementing Focus mode).

I find that I make more forward progress on things in general. Adding an action to a list gives me extra “credit” for having done it, because now I can check it off. But the big thing is I’m now aware of things that I can take action on (and how small and simple they often are). Often I get stuck on actions that involve other people (Ask person X this, post on Slack asking for help with X), and having an action be made concrete and on a list can help me power through it and simply send the text or make the call. I’m more aware that I have no answer to the question “So what’s you’re excuse for not taking the action to move X forward?”, and just do the thing.

A physical inbox has been useful. I’ve discovered that having my physical environment be clean is very important for me, and a physical inbox facilitates this by creating a designated, controlled place for clutter.

I’m amazed at how much of GTD and being productive is about writing things down in such a way that will trick your future brain into not being overwhelmed, and actually doing them.

The first part is writing specific, exciting, and inspiring project names (i.e. “Host best friend for a great weekend” instead of “Best friend visit”).

But the second and more important part is realizing how not to name actions. For example, I’ve learned that I shouldn’t write tasks like “Decide A”, or “Problem solve B situation”. My brain will immediately get overwhelmed and resist the urge to even consider this. Breaking those down into even smaller steps is a must. Like “List pros/cons of A decision” (Not too hard – just listing bullets, not “making a decision”), or “Brain dump B situation on whiteboard”).

There’s an art to writing the next action.

Even with GTD it’s still possible to overload yourself and put more into your system than you have capacity for. I’m still struggling with how to manage when I have tasks I constantly postpone week after week.

But I am learning. I’m finding that if something continually gets postponed, there are a few things I can consider:

  • Is it even important? Can I simply delete it?
  • Is it a matter of phrasing? Can I re-word this to be more palatable to my subconscious brain?
  • It is a matter of breaking it down even further to a smaller increment? But not so small as to be meaningless — my subconscious brain sees right through that. (i.e. “Make a google doc” isn’t quite enough for me).

It will never be easier than right now

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: _Micropost 🍪, Productivity

This is a mindset I use to help with procrastination. It first came to me in my senior year on university when I needed to do lab reports. At that point, I had been doing lab reports for 8 years — ever since the start of high school. And throughout that whole time, they were always excruciating.

But I realized that they were excruciating partly because I always waited until the days before the deadline to do them, which was about a week after the actual lab. By that point, the details of the lab were much fuzzier, making the lab report way harder.

It occurred to me that even though all I wanted to do after the lab is forget everything about it and push it off to the side, that exact moment — right after the lab — would be the easiest moment to ever do the report. As more time passes, it will strictly get harder as I begin to lose the context of the lab.

So I sucked it up and started to immediately go to the library right after the lab and simply do the report right then. It worked very well and I only wished I had started the habit years earlier.

I try to remember this lesson and apply it to my life now. If there are situations where I need to do something, and no additional information will arrive that will influence how the job gets done, I try to do it as quickly as possible to take advantage of the context fresh in my brain.