How to effectively manage your time as an Engineer
We are all given the same 24 hours each day. So why do some people seem to achieve more with their time than others? Day after day, week after week goes by, we feel like we're working the most we can, and yet we can't seem to progress on our goals.
Despite our best intentions, it's very hard to be able to spend quality time on our priorities and progress on our top goals. We waste time answering others' requests and working on many different things. We shift focus and end up postponing the most relevant work. This all results in bad use of the time we do have.
I've personally struggled with these issues and have coached several engineers on solving them, so I have good and bad news for you. The good news is: A few time management principles and tips can help us get the best out of our time and improve our lives. And the bad news is: it won't be easy. So let's jump right in.
First principle: Time Management is about Goals and Prioritization
It is rightly said, “Time and Tide wait for none.” Time will pass for us regardless of what we do. We want to reflect on that past time and say we achieved as much as possible. That we're progressing toward our goals in life.
This implies learning to master the art of time management, which has several definitions, but we can simplify it by saying that time management is what we do to move from point A to point B.
Everyone has many goals at a single time. Be it short, medium, or long-term. At this point, our goal right now is to get to Point B, which could be “deliver a task,” “drink more water,” or “read one book a month.” To accomplish that, we must follow a plan and use some system that may help us execute and protect our plan. In other words, to manage our time effectively, we need to consider the following:
- Mindset — What you want
- Plans — How to achieve what you want
- System — Execute and protect your plan
A good time management plan ensures less stress and fatigue and leads you to more opportunities since you may have time to do more and think outside de box by seeing things from new perspectives. But, as efficient as your plan might be, if it doesn't come from a strong mindset and clarity on goals, it's just leading your faster somewhere you don't want to be. The most efficient time-management skill is not about being more efficient but rather about prioritizing the right things.
First Tip: "Have clarity on your goals and a clear Top Goal that you want to achieve. Be mindful of reserving and protecting the time to work and advance on your top goal."
Considering our change mindset is already established, let’s understand a bit more about planning and tools, but first, let’s reflect on what makes us have a productive day.
Second Principle: What's important, not what's urgent, should be mandating how you spend your time
When we plan our day, we tend to look for "urgent" matters, and requests usually feel urgent. When we plan our week, it's easier to identify and work on important things, even if they're not urgent.
Second Tip: Plan your week, not your day. Focus on working on important matters and treat urgency as a sign that you should have worked on this before it became urgent.
A great tool to frame our plan in these terms and know how to act on each activity is The Eisenhower Matrix, a tool named after former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of its enthusiasts It became better known when it was introduced by Stephen Covey in his famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
How to use Eisenhower Matrix:
- List all your activities for the week and classify them by urgency levels — Urgent activities demand immediate attention and must be done ASAP;
- Now, classify them into importance levels — Important activities have meaning because they contribute to achieving your goals. Important also means that it is important that you individually take point on it. Remember, you don't work alone, and many of your goals are shared with others. So delegating, sharing, and using the organization around you is key.
- Do the tasks in quadrant 1 (Urgent/Important): These are the items that are both urgent and important and, therefore, demand your immediate action, so you want to work on them at the beginning of your week;
- Plan and work on tasks in quadrant 2 (Not Urgent/Important): These are essential issues but are not urgent and therefore don’t require immediate action. But if you don't plan and work on them, you'll either fail to progress on a goal, or they'll become urgent and important simultaneously.
- Delegate or Ignore the tasks in quadrant 3 (Urgent/Not Important): These urgent items pop up and demand immediate attention. But since your action is unnecessary, they shouldn’t take over your time. Therefore, you can assign them to someone else or ignore them completely;
- Delete the items in quadrant 4 (Not Urgent/Not Important): These items are neither essential nor urgent, so you can, in most cases, cross them out of your list.
Third Principle: Always strive for “good days” filled with deep, focused work
GitHub Good Day Project was an internal investigation into what helps developers have good days. This study reinforces that productivity is personal and shares tips that developers can use today to improve theirs.
It’s important to remember that all the key findings and takeaways are aimed at people who follow a maker’s schedule (software engineers, for example), not a management one.
Key findings:
- Interruptions are more disruptive than we think and affect more than just our work. With minimal or no interruptions, software engineers had an 82% chance of having a good day, but when they were interrupted most of the day, their chances of having a good day dropped to just 7%.
- Meetings can help us connect, but too many can get in the way of our progress. In our study, going from two to three meetings per day lowered the chances of software engineers making progress toward their goals from 74% to just 14%.
- There’s more to development work than writing code. Software engineers who pushed more code and created more pull requests had a greater chance of feeling like they had a good day, but that didn’t tell the whole story. Developers who created the most pull requests didn’t have the best days — this could be because creating pull requests took them out of their flow and interrupted their days.
Analyzing these key findings, we can conclude that we should pay more attention to:
- Managing interruptions: Try blocking focus time on your calendar and make it visible to others;
- Taking a minute to reflect: At the end of the day, take a pause and reflect on your days and work;
- Looking beyond simply counting activities or time to measure a day’s productivity: productivity is complex and nuanced, and it’s a personal perception.
Third Tip: Reflect on your day at the end of each day. Take note of your learnings, what worked and what didn’t. This will increase your overall satisfaction and accelerate your learning.
Focus Time
Once you know what has to be done, now It’s time to get the most from your focus time:
- Plan time slots for each activity;
- You are probably more productive at a specific period of the day (morning or afternoon), so schedule your most crucial tasks for this period;
- Share your schedule details with your team;
Remember that focus time is about having uninterrupted work time for your most important tasks. Several pieces of research show that most people get their best work done in one-to-three-hour chunks of uninterrupted focus time.
After a certain number of hours, worker productivity levels drop, as Labor economics research shows. So, have a break.
Fourth Tip: Try to batch similar tasks and block focus time for deep work. Always strive for 1–3 uninterrupted hours on each focus time. But remember to take breaks. Your mind gets tired as well.
Tools
There are a lot of productivity tools that help us create and follow a better time-management system. Here are some of them
Google Calendar: Google Calendar now has several productivity tools that we once needed other tools to use: Focus Time blocks, Task Management, and Time Labelling, all on top of natively merging with your schedule.
Clockwise: Clockwise is an intelligent calendar assistant that frees up your time so you can focus on what matters. It has an integration for Slack that enables you to effortlessly let your team know when you’re in a meeting (or focus time) and avoid distracting messages when you want to focus.
Clockfy: Allows time tracking of tasks and performance and productivity tracking.
Todoist: Creation of to-do lists. You can mark activities as completed or categorize them by color according to priority.
RescueTime: Generate reports that show time wasted on specific apps or websites, so you can identify habits that harm your productivity.
Always remember that tools are useless if you don't have a clear mindset about what you want or your plans.
To Sum it Up
To summarize, we have three principles:
- First principle: Time Management is about Goals and Prioritization
- Second Principle: What’s important, not what’s urgent, should be mandating how you spend your time
- Third Principle: Always strive for “good days” filled with deep, focused work
Follow them and the four associated tips, and regardless of the tools you use, you'll feel you have a lot more time than you currently do.
What now?
I brought in this article some ways to help you better use your time. But everyone is different, and the systems that work for me might not work for you. Over time, you will know the best way to manage your day. At the end of the day, productivity is personal.
The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
