Productivity Q&A and Videos

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.

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 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!

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.

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'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?

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!

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.

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?

Hi All,

I'm Gary, Chief Opportunist (CO) at Yoga Plus Tech Inc. (I don't prefer calling myself CEO or Founder because I believe all of us are opportunitsts, and I'm no different) I recently got inducted into , which btw is a giant leap forward in laser-focused discussions like they used to happen on reddit. Huge thanks to @Rahul Pandey and @AlexChiou.

I like to bring candour in conversations, but it's hard to do it without any sound, so the hearing sense for you right now is unused as you read forward. In fact if you memorise our business idea, you would be able to envision it just as I see it, by even [trying to temporarily] losing your sense of sight, you control your sense of vision. In a similar fashion we are delivering Control of all the Six Senses of the body though our Tech Solution.

Due to the stealth nature and a 15 minute onboarding time for the user to enjoy the product we are starting the pilot of our product demo to schedule at your convenience! Sign up for a slot here: and one of the members from the realms of Yoga Plus Tech would be virtually connected to "Equanimously" get you started. T&Cs Apply.

Free for a limited time! Looking forward to connecting over a virtual coffee The meeting agenda is expected to be :

• [15min] BrainOSv1.0 : Initiation and Onboarding
• [10min] Two-way Communication for Setup & ACK
• [5 min] Feedback and Tips for the 2-Week SPRINT Challenge !

Sincerely,

Garimendra Verma
Opportunist @YogaPlusTech
Yellow Jacket @GeorgiaTech

We are raising capital if you're interested in investment opportunities express by shooting an email to our inbox: and we would be happy to send a copy of our Pitch Deck.

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.

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?

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!

I work on 2 week sprint cycle. Tasks are assigned and expected to be finished within those 2 weeks but we do have a generous leeway.

Since I am the lead Android engineer, the bugs/crashes are reported to me to fix. Solving these takes time because sometimes I am not the one who worked on it. This leads to my current tasks getting deprioritized.

I usually identify the ones that will affect the next release and get on those, but then there are also crucial bugs that affect key flows. I am wondering if I should also try to fix a bug as soon as they come in or discuss each one before fixing it.