symphony flow - the effective engineer
TRANSCRIPT
The Effective Engineer
Are we effective?
How can we perform better?
Time
The most limited resource
Cannot be stored, extended or replaced
Inescapable, regardless of our goals
Impact
Increasing impact
Getting things done
Producing more value & have better results
Efficiency
Get more things done
without increasing number of working hours
Leverage
Use leverage to measure your engineering effectiveness
Focus on what generates the highest return on investment for your time spent.
Leverage
Impact producedTime investedLeverage =
Leverage
Systematically increase the leverage of your time
Find ways to get an activity done more quickly, to increase the impact of an activity, or to shift to
activities with higher leverage.
Prioritizing
80 - 20
80% impact comes from 20% of work
Prioritizing
Write TODOs
Brain can actively hold 7 +/- 2 items (in working memory)
Let it do more important stuff
Prioritizing
Do what matters - firstWhat matters - produces value
Focus on important, not urgent
Prioritizing
Urgent Not Urgent
Important CrisesDeadlines
PlanningBuilding relationshipsNew opportunitiesPersonal development
Not Important
InterruptionsMost meetingsMost emails & calls
Surfing WebTime wasters
1 2
3 4
Learning
Grow by 1% daily
Dedicate Time on and out of the Job to Develop New Skills
Yearly: 37x better (not 365% → 3.65x)
Learning
Facebook:MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
Move fast to learn fast
Maker’s Schedule
Productivity increases when we can maintain periods of what (Hungarian) psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls:
The Flow
Maker’s Schedule
The Flow
...is a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their
problems.
Maker’s Schedule
Makers (programmers, writers,..) should use time in units of half a day at least.
A program can’t be written in 30min units
Maker’s Schedule
Microsoft Research:
Employee needs at least 15 minutes to recover/ return to focused activity after handling email or other IM
interruption
Maker’s Schedule
Protect your Maker’s Schedule
Preserve large blocks of focused time
Schedule meetings and other interruptions at the beginning or end of the work day
Multitasking
“Your Brain at Work” (by David Rock):
Brain’s prefrontal cortex handles our planning, decision-making, and goal setting has limited space for 7 +/- 2
items.
In order to make decision, brain must simultaneously bring up and process all items - wastes mental energy
Multitasking
Avoid doing multitasking
Reduce context switching
Time - Saving Tools
If you have to do something manually more than twice - write a tool to do it third time
30 minutes of investment might return in days or weeks within a year
Track Progress
Choose a metric to track your progress
If you can’t measure it - you can’t improve it
Track Progress
Hours worked vs
productivity per week
Track Progress
Google Search Metric:Click-through
vsLong click-through
Track Progress
Bugs fixed (Adobe)vs
Bugs outstanding
Track Progress
Total number of registered usersvs
Weekly growth of registered users
Improve
Establish a sustainable Code Review Process
Manage Complexity through Abstraction and Libraries
Automate Testing
Code Review
Catching bugs or bad design early
Increasing accountability for code changes
Sharing working knowledge of the codebase
Invest in your Team’s Growth
Focus on making everyone around you succeed
You get more credit than you deserve just for being part of a successful company, and less
than you deserve for being part of unsuccessful company.
Invest in your Team’s Growth
Hire smart
Ramp up new engineers quickly
Socially integrate new engineers
Invest in your Team’s Growth
Share Ownership of Code
Avoid one-person teams
Present tech talks on software decisions and architecture
