Productivity Q&A and Videos

• I'm looking for ideas on how to execute more effectively and robustly as an individual and as a team
• How to keep the team members motivated all the time?

For example: I have been assigned a task that is estimated to be done in 3 days, let's assume it was well estimated.

Because of my skills, I can only finish it in one day.

But if I finish it, the team leader will assign me more tasks.

So my reward for being productive is more work.

So why should I be more productive if I'm just going to have more work to do with no bonus?

Remember, this scenario is as an individual software engineer, not as a company.

What do you think? should I change my mindset? if yes, what are the reasons?

If there is nothing I could do as individual, what do you suggest to handle this with my manager? if they don't want to give bonuses or incentives, should I leave?

I feel like I lack clarity I know I should be taking the time to plan my day but I find myself getting pulled into the working context at any point in time. How do more senior engineers approach this? Are there personal rituals and routines that people use on a daily or weekly basis to move the needle?

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours?

Here's what I see this deviation looking like:

• taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3
• within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is
• cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it.
• working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day

These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint.

In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question.

I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site.

Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context.

Thanks!

I know to some this may come as a shock.

But I've just been this way since I was a young'un

I don't have to look at the keyboard (unless it's a password) but I just wanted to get it off my chest.

I have been tasked to port a project of porting a ML project that has been running on someone's laptop to the cloud and make it production ready. It is very difficult for this person to give the full picture of the process.

This could be due to he is not actually remembering very well, given that the project has been actually done 1 year ago, or he doesn't like to lose the single point of failure / control situation.

I actually don't care about the reason and I want to get this project to success.

How may I deal with this situation?

Current blocker is that I am unable to properly estimate the time it may take for this project.

I'm a new people manager - previously I was an IC. I understand that I am now equally responsible for the helping the team deliver business goals and promote people's well being and growth.

How do you balance your time and figure out what's most important to focus your time and energy on? How do you spend your focus time you do have?

Right now I'm in a situation working for a startup that posts a video of a bug with little to no detail at all and sends it off to dev to be fixed. If there is information included, there is no standardization so it can be frustrating having to hunt this information down. I understand in startups I will have to learn to operate in a realm of ambiguity; however, the team is so small that I could potentially fix this with a little buy in.

Somethings that I've seen work in my previous job were having:
-screen shots of current state and future state
-video of current issue
-steps on how to reproduce
-device information
-potential solutions

Im new to the team and don't want to be "that" guy trying to change everything, so I don't want to come to them with any half baked ideas. Do you have an example of a strong story that I could use as a template for our tickets?

I work as a software engineer remotely, and I'm also pursuing a Master's in Computer Science part-time. My days are packed with work responsibilities, attending classes, working on assignments, and maintaining my physical health by going to the gym. On top of that, I have household chores and miscellaneous events that take up additional time. Despite this busy schedule, I want to make the most out of Taro (Premium).

How can I effectively integrate Taro into my daily routine to maximize its benefits without overwhelming myself? Any tips or strategies for balancing learning with such a packed schedule would be greatly appreciated!

I have some courses in mind - Code Quality, Productivity, etc. How should I take out time to watch them?

Some tips for balancing multiple tasks would be nice.

I have a question about doing self-reviews. I'm not talking about doing them in the context of a company's performance review. I'm talking about doing them totally for myself regarding my own personal development, including my job, side-projects, learning, etc. It might even include more personal stuff like health and fitness, relationships, etc.

I recall Rahul mentioning something about setting aside a half hour at the beginning of every week to plan the week and take stock of last week. I also believe he says something about doing a quarterly review.

My questions are:

1. What do these weekly and quarterly reviews looks like, i.e. how should I go about doing them?

2. Is there more than just weekly and quarterly reviews? i.e. daily, monthly, annual?

3. Do these reviews involve planning out the next week/quarter or is that a separate exercise?

4. Is there a difference between doing self-reviews/planning when it comes to work vs. personal career development vs. personal life? Or is the approach/process the same?

I know different people do different stuff and YMMV, I'm looking for good habits I might apply to my own life!

Thanks!

Hello everyone. I work for a consulting company.

My last project finished 2 months ago and I've not been able to find another project within my employer's clients.

People in charge assigning projects asked me if I have experience in a specific set of technologies but they are mostly related to data engineering or AI/ML and I'm a backend developer.

How can I increase the chances to find a project. I don't want to be laid off.

I enjoyed the productivity course here a lot, but one part felt paradoxical to me. When prioritizing tasks, I understood that the recommendation was to rate lower time-intensity tasks higher. Still, later in the course, it mentioned eating the frog and getting the big tasks done to minimize risk.

Is this a macro vs. micro thing where high-impact, low-time commitment projects should be prioritized, and then, once decomposed, focus on the riskier tasks? Is it based on what can be parallelized? Or, is it something else entirely?

Thanks in advance!

I'm driving a project with ~5 engineers. Even though we're on track to make it now, the initial road was somewhat rocky. We had to go through a lot of conversations to get execution started, spending ~50% of the allotted time on planning and alignment. This led to scope being reduced for v1 and us building less features that we would have liked.

As a startup, I know that we should be moving faster - What's the best way to handle the project from here and how can I improve in this area in the future?

I am struggling to shift some behavior that is getting in the way of my own career growth and I am hoping to get some insight from others.

My previous manager was a micro-manager and to satisfy him, I ensured that I focussed solely on a few projects a majority of the time. However, my current manager wants to give me room to be as independent as I'd like to be. This means that I now have room to influence and help others, which is fundamental for growth. But now, because I don't have someone asking me for details of how I spend every moment of my time, I question whether any task I do is the highest priority task I should be doing, which takes the joy out of helping/mentoring others, because I know that time can be spent focusing on my own deliverables. This second-guessing is causing a great deal of mental load for me. I also feel like if I ask my manager too often whether I am prioritizing correctly, he might feel like I am not behaving like a senior engineer. Any thoughts on how I can get out of my own way here?

In my team, we own a lot of legacy services. It seems like many of our engineers intentionally avoid these legacy services because they have less impact, and I keep getting pulled into these projects. Even worse, the work is mostly SQL or data engineering, and as a SWE, I'm afraid this will impact my career.

How do I get other people into these legacy service project? My manager is making me the only responsible person for this project on a rearchitecture of a legacy system by reducing head count commitment on the project, and I do not want to be the only person responsible for the project for few reasons. I want to stop doing deep dive on legacy systems which has no impact and has high risk. The legacy system just has so much scope that this deep dive is recurring every week that takes up about a day. In addition, I also do not want to be the sole responsible SDE for a project of such a large scope. Because the timeline of the project is long, the headcount may be justifiable, but I do not want to get isolated in a case when something goes wrong, there will be no one to vouch for me.

Ideally, I think we would all share the work as a team somehow, but our team has been very separate with a different products, so I am not sure what the best way to approach this would be.

I'm a L4 at Google, and am TLing a project with 6 other SWEs. I was working on one of the implementation docs, and had to work on a Postmortem incident and its AIs. I sharded off some parts of the implementation to one of the SWEs in the project. I'm back into the project now, and the other SWE is making great progress and I want to let them take it to completion for credits attribution.

I'm confused on whether I should try to do most of the implementation for the designs I write myself or shard it off as other SWEs have a lot less on their plate in December, and early January. Could it be held against me in promo committees that I didn't handle a lot of implementation myself? My org has a high priority on lines of code written, which is causing this confusion.

How can an aspiring senior engineer, who excels at managing their own well-defined tasks, improve their skills in breaking down and delegating tasks effectively to junior team members? Additionally, what strategies can help in writing clear acceptance criteria when fleshing out tasks to ensure clarity and accessibility?

Hi there !

recently joined FAANG and we’re using a lot a dedicated collaborative tool. Think of it like a shared Google docs with text, charts, and tables.

I wasn’t using them so much in my previous company and I would like to bring novelty in how we use them in our team.

Besides the classical 1:1 with manager // meetings minutes for meetings, what use cases you found really impactful and productive in these collaborative tools?

Thanks a lot !

Observations after watching the time management course:

I’ve noticed the focus block really takes a lot of activation energy and then it eventually gets smooth. Hence why I think I get the point why it should take 4 hr minimum.

Are you saying that’s how it should feel and therefore that’s why you need a super long block?

I honestly feel this is correlated with sleeping properly cuz then I have the energy to overcome this activation energy.

Is this usually how most productive engineers view productivity and how the focus block fits in?

Every time I work on a project, the amount of progress increases logarithmically. This means I start off really strong and I end off really weak. I’ve noticed this for a majority of projects that I work on.

I think a big reason why this happens is because when my project is able to get 50-60% of cases (ie it works but don’t touch it), internally my brain feels like it’s done and I don’t want to work on it anymore. When I start off a project I get huge boosts in dopamine when I finish a part and get it to work. Over time there are fewer and fewer things to do and I don’t get as big a dopamine hit when I gradually finish up remaining features. This gets really ****bad when I try to think of edge cases, because it’s not entirely clear what needs to be done, and I don’t even know what edge cases exist.

This has affected the quality of my work and I would like some strategies of keeping high output even towards the later stages of a project which involves less excited parts of work.

I think this somewhat relates to Alex’s video on “”, but I feel that the hard part is that I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t know where edge cases may. On a component level it’s not too bad, but when you’re doing integration testing and when the space of possible inputs is extremely high, it feels like you’re put in the middle of the ocean.

As an example, recently I was tasked with writing a bot to draw an ordered set of lines, curves and arcs on a canvas. The input a vector representation of the drawing and the output is an mp4 recording.

First 3 days went pretty well. In fact, I pretty much built the entire system and integrated everything. The annoying part comes to solving edge cases from integration testing. For the next 7 days I spent days kind of just sitting around, testing my system, and getting bored. I was waiting for my partner to finish his part of the system.

What strategies are there to make my output more consistent? I tried doing a test plan but they tend to be really shallow because I don’t know how the system looks like/what edge cases look like until I’ve actually built the product.

In three months, I'm graduating, and I need to resolve my dilemma now: can I realistically land a job, or am I living in an illusion that I can do anything without understanding the challenges of the real world?

Here's my current daily schedule:

• Sleep: 8 hours (I tried 6 hours, but after a week, my performance dropped significantly, and I became forgetful.)

• Workout: 1.5 hours

• Meal prep & other daily activities: 2 hours

• Miscellaneous tasks: 1.5 hours

This leaves me with about 3 hours per day for study or self-improvement.

I'm at an intermediate level in Python that's all i know for now. I can write logical solutions, though it often takes a few attempts like run it first then fixto get things right. I also find that I need to go deep into a topic to fully grasp it. For instance, when learning SQL, it's not enough for me to know the query “SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME”—I need to understand what's happening behind the scenes, like how each record is being retrieved.

I'm at a crossroads regarding my career. With my OPT starting in February 2025, I don't have much time to waste, and I'm trying to decide the best path forward:

• Option 1: Spend the next 6-8 months preparing intensely in DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) and working on projects.

• Option 2: for now focus on building practical projects, aiming to join a smaller company first. This way, I could gain real-world experience and eventually advance to a better opportunity.

I'm struggling to decide which of these two paths would be better for my future.

I was given the task to scope out some tickets for next year and to assign time estimates to them.

How should I go about doing this? I have 4 tickets to time-estimate.

At a high-level, I'm thinking that I should be working to the tasks down to simpler parts which should also be simpler to estimate. But how granular should I go into decomposition? Looking at my (more experienced) colleagues' work on estimating their tickets, there estimates for their tickets are anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks.

They also jotted down a few bullets on assumptions and some of the decompositions involved.

So decomposition I would guess is step 1.

Before I even do that though, maybe I should be speaking with the stakeholder assigned to the ticket so I can get a better understanding of what's involved.

So I need to a) talk to stakeholders; b) decompose the ticket into chunks; c) come up with an overall time-estimate.

Did I leave anything out?

The fundamental challenge here is that it's hard to predict the future and know how long something will take before doing it.

Thanks!

Thoughts?