Productivity Q&A and Videos

For example: I have been assigned a task that is estimated to be done in 3 days, let's assume it was well estimated.

Because of my skills, I can only finish it in one day.

But if I finish it, the team leader will assign me more tasks.

So my reward for being productive is more work.

So why should I be more productive if I'm just going to have more work to do with no bonus?

Remember, this scenario is as an individual software engineer, not as a company.

What do you think? should I change my mindset? if yes, what are the reasons?

If there is nothing I could do as individual, what do you suggest to handle this with my manager? if they don't want to give bonuses or incentives, should I leave?

I'm going through In the lesson on , Alex talks about the value of long uninterrupted periods. Notably, he says that a focus block should be minimum 4 hours.

This got me thinking, what do these 4 hours (or longer) look like? Is it 4 hours sitting down uninterrupted at your desk? Is it 4 hours broken up by getting up every 30-60 minutes to grab a snack or chat with a colleague at the office? Do short walks outside () fit in them?

I'm not trying to be annoying or nerd-snipe, I just want to know what the nitty-gritty behaviour of the world's most productive software engineers looks like :)

For me, I feel like I have a mild case of ADD, so if I score a victory, minor or major, in my code, I get up and do a quick meditation, use the washroom, and/or stretch after ~30 minutes, but my hunch is more productive people sit uninterrupted for longer.

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!

It’s been 5 weeks since I’ve started my internship and it’s been pretty overwhelming trying to juggle many responsibilities. I tried balancing school research, my startup and interview prep along with my internship, but I’ve underestimated how much time my internship has been taking.

I’ll start off with the good news first. I’ve been doing well in my internship and my manager is happy with my progress. I managed to implement a pretty critical part of their system that they’ll need in the future. I’ve also set up infrastructure for them to scale their codebase. I need to integrate my work into prod and implement some basic logging.

The bad news is that my internship has been taking much more out of me than I expected. I find myself spending 9-11 hours working daily and as a result, I haven’t been able to do leetcode, research or my startup. As a result here are the consequences:

1. Leetcode: I’ve started applying for full-time jobs and I bombed my first OA. Having looked at the questions, I feel that I might as well have not applied at all as I can’t even get through them
2. Research: My advisor hasn’t said too much about my research progress but my gut feel is that he thinks it’s slow. I’m in conversation with a big tech company about doing research with them in the fall with the potential for a FT return offer, and my advisor has a say in whether I can do the collaboration/internship. So I definitely need to do well in research.
3. Startup: My cofounders and I have been working hard on sales but feature implementation has been slow. The feature requests are pretty critical in getting paying clients, so one day of waiting may mean a customer can churn.

The worst part is that every time I come back, my body feels so drained and I don’t want to do work any more, but I also kinda have to. I still have another 4 weeks to go for my internship and I’m wondering how to allocate my time.

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?

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours?

Here's what I see this deviation looking like:

• taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3
• within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is
• cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it.
• working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day

These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint.

In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question.

I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site.

Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context.

Thanks!