Productivity Q&A and Videos

In lot of meetings I am feeling I am less knowledgeable than others and unable to add value a lot. All my peers are very smart.

When analyzing critically I feel maybe I am spending a lot of time learning and lesser doing.

What works for me is => having focus blocks. Catch is that I am getting too comfortable sometimes not having meetings. This leads to missing lot of context sometimes.

What tips does community have to to handle this pressure?

We have a sprint planning session every two weeks where epic owners create tickets and they are presented to people. Whoever is interested in whatever tickets, they assign it to themselves.

Everyone has 10 story points worth of tasks where 1 story point is one day’s work. When these tickets are created, the creator assigns an estimated story point value based on their judgement of the complexity of the ticket.

But sometimes, the task can be more complex than estimated and it might spill over.

I tend to take 10 points worth of tasks but definitely 1/2 points get spilled over to the next sprint because of unplanned delays while finishing them and my own inefficiency/ procrastination.

I have been given the feedback that I tend to overcommit and it would be better if I brought it up earlier in daily stand ups in case some tasks are taking more time than usual. This will enable others to pick up some other task on my board in case they are done with theirs.

I do see my inability to complete the 10 points as a personal failure even if no one explicitly points it out or cares about it. Most of my team mates tend to get them done though. I am 6 months in the team and the rest have been there for 2-3 years at least. I want to get better at planning and completing my sprint tasks. How do I approach this problem?

I'm still navigating a career switch to SWE, and I tend to get pretty overwhelmed when looking at code. I already ask a lot of questions, and I want to be more self-sufficient because my full-stack team members are pretty busy. (They are all kind and would all be willing to to take some time out of their day.)

How can I get faster at reading code on my own while balancing a team transition? I'm at the point where I understand the high-level purpose of parts of our codebase but little as to how the moving pieces all fit together.

While I understand that there is likely no magic threshold to determine the point at one needs to ask for codebase navigation guidance, a good rule of thumb would be helpful when possible.

I have been working from home since 2020. From 2020-2021, I used to work in a healthcare startup with lots of responsibility, tons of work, crazy deadlines and needed to firefight incidents on a daily basis. The managers used to keep us on our toes and everyone was expected to put in more hours than the standard 40 hours/week. I was pretty much working most of my waking hours so productivity was not my concern. I did learn a lot but eventually burnt out.

I took a year off to do my masters and joined my present company in June 2022. It's a much bigger company with amazing culture, clear processes and I have very supportive and brilliant teammates. No one micromanages me. There is still good amount of responsibility and tons of work. In this environment I also want to give my best. While my productivity is great when in office, I do feel I am at 70-80% productivity level when working from home. We follow a hybrid model where we go to office twice a week.

Being in rent crazy Singapore, I do not have the luxury of having a separate office space at home. I do have a proper desk setup and enough things going on to be productive.

I want to be more productive in days I am WFH.

Have tried keeping up a schedule, wearing noise cancelling headphones, listening to binaural beats.

But nevertheless I do find myself on my bed after a couple of hours of work and it becomes difficult to resume work again. Also I tend to be hard on myself for taking that rest and the day just spirals from there.

I have tried working from cafes and even going to office every day. But along with going to gym, commutting and cooking healthy food I am too tired at the end of the day.

I really want to be more productive when WFH so that I can also manage the other parts of my life well. My team doesn't care where I work as long as the work is done.

Would like some tips on how to be a better remote worker and manage the entire day better.

I think most people will default to how many hours you put into work. But at what point do we say someone is working hard? Is it working 40hours/week? 50hours/week? or 80-100hours/week?

And how do these hours vary by geography?

I'm on-call this week and I'm met once again with a strong sense of not having a clue what I'm doing. I know the majority of the job of engineering is trying to work within a legacy system but I feel like I'm missing tactics to help me make any progress at all. That and having to switch contexts to address alarms and queries has meant that I actually made no progress today whatsoever so this is part rant and part question - any tips on confronting a wall of overwhelm and making progress towards the most impactful bugs?

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

When I look at my life, there's a lot of social media and technology services I use:

• At work - Outlook and Teams
• Keeping up with Tech Content - LinkedIn, YouTube, and Newsletters
• Personal - Whatsapp, Facebook, SMS, Spotify
• General - Phone and Gmail

I'm trying to develop healthy habits around technology use to facilitate deep work. This involves limiting my exposure to technology.

One strategy I think is a good one is batching checking these things. So only check content sites weekly. A more extreme strategy and one I'm not yet prepared to make is getting rid of my smartphone so I can't check content as often.

Do people have other strategies/habits which work for them or can describe their relationships with these services?

I am a Backend Engineer at a Platform Team.

Our team currently owns 9 micro services which serve as a platform which other teams use through the company.

5/9 of these services are actively being worked on and the rest are just running without any changes/ enhancements.

I have been working for the past 8 months on one of the services but haven’t had much exposure to others.

I want to learn about the others, how the data flows between them and how the overall system design is. I am just going through tons of design RFCs and reading code but with little understanding.

My primary motivation is to

1. Understand more of our scope and work on them.
2. Move out of my comfort zone.
3. Handle On Call tasks better where understanding code is needed more than just following runbook.

How can I better understand at the service level?