7 Habits of Effective Time Management for Engineering Managers

Amazing Productivity Habits to keep you sane!

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

Source: Vidal Graupera - Time Management for Engineering Managers

My key takeaways from this book are:

(1) Follow Pareto and Then apply Parkinson’s law by timeboxing with pomodoro

• Work on important stuff only
• Doing a draft or first cut to 50–80% completeness and sending it out, seeking early feedback is better than waiting to finish it.
• Then apply Parkinson’s law by timeboxing each activity

The Myth of Multitasking

People “multitasking” in a meeting by answering emails, looking at documents, even coding, etc. can kill the effectiveness of any meeting.

(2) Inbox Zero and Slack Zero

• Immediately respond to any new messages that can be answered in two minutes or less. It is often best to answer it quickly now, even imperfectly, — We’re trying to process our email inbox in order N (linear) time, not an order N-squared (quadratic) time. We accomplish this by touching each email once and only once. We do not revisit the same email over and over again. Make it your goal to empty your Inbox as quickly as possible and not touch a single email more than once.

(3) Optimize Meetings

Put meetings together — Defrag. So that you can have bigger chunks of free time together

• Have 1:1 early in the week
• Effective Meetings have following features:
• Agenda
• Pre-reads
• Don’t have too many people
• Apply parkinson’s law to meeting
• No screen meetings
• Clear Minutes and Action Items
• Do a survey after meeting — Example

(4) Planning

• Write your next year’s performance review now considering you had a great year. Use this time to block time on your calendar to do something towards those achievements each week.
• Personal Kanban Board (Use tools like Trello) — Visualize your work — work in progress (“WIP”) limit. — Color code the tasks — For example, if it’s something that my manager asked me to do then it’s Red, so those tasks stand out

(5) Focus

• focus and commit to doing that task until it is (at least 80%) done.
• I won’t allow myself to switch to another task.

Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

(6) Build Good Relationships

• Many managers know that if they want something, it is better to ask in person.
• It’s crucial that your team feels like they can approach you at anytime

(7) Produce Content Faster

• start by dictating into your computer.
• Text Expanding & Auto-complete
• create templates for emails, regular documents, etc. This will not only make it easier to create these documents but it will require less thought on your part to fill out a template and less thought on the part of the receiver to parse it
• Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.