What would it look like if Coltin got sick a lot
Here we are at the 5th edition of Lead Kindly. Today, besides the many articles, we’ll learn to take a break instead of pushing hard, and a method to help us when every path seems like the wrong one. I hope you find something valuable here this week!
📈 State of the Newsletter
As I’ve mentioned in the last few editions I have been sick, and then on Tuesday/Wednesday I got a very bad stomach bug. This was a lot of downtime where I was not reading, writing, or doing much of anything. Being out sick also means that more pressure falls on the rest of the house, and things like dishes and laundry pile up, which can mean even less time for reading and writing when I did get better. Even though I’m finishing the writing for this Newsletter much later than I would like, almost nothing is going to stop it!
I’m starting to realize that for this Weekly publication I want to spend more time on the curation of articles, podcasts and occasional video, and less time on the quote and productivity tip sections. These were intended to be 1 paragraph “this is how this applies to leadership”, but have evolved into mini-essays. I think instead if I do share them, I may do so in a lighter manner, and focus that writing time on actually writing out deeper articles on leadership subjects.
We’re at 36 subscribers as of writing, dang! It’s nice to see so many people interested. If you have been enjoying the newsletter so far, please let me know!
📚 Read This Week
The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster by
If you want a guide on conducting 1:1s and having good relationships with your individual contributors, this is it. This blog post from 2010 served the foundation for my entrance to engineering management, and still serves me every week. If you haven’t read it, read it.
Broken Window Effect In Software Development by
What you allow will continue. Adam walks us through how ignoring negative signals can lead to a cascade of neglect. If you’ve ever asked “how did things get so bad?” there may be some very useful insights here for you.
Run Meetings Like a Pro - Cheat Sheet by
Raviraj covers 5 different meetings (such as incident reviews, cross-team syncs, leadership roadmap review, etc) and how to knock them out of the park. The most interesting aspect for me here was the breakdown of Before / During / After of each meeting. It’s enough data that I can take this and apply it to my most important meetings to help ensure they are valuable for everyone involved. I hope you also find it valuable!
Zenful Estimates: Ditching Task Estimates to Build a Faster Team by
Zach is here for Dev Interrupted with a bold assertion: “embrace your inner Zen, and don’t do task estimation.” The claim is that estimates are often misused, and you may be better off without them. Estimation isn’t free, it takes time and effort, and is wildly inaccurate. Designing software cannot be done in a vacuum, it requires collaboration and iteration. Zach goes into the pitfalls of providing estimates as well, showing that even when they are well intentioned, often they become guarantees or expectations. Be careful how you communicate estimates to stakeholders.
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
Take a break.
I struggle to take breaks, even though I recognize it’s necessary. I often opt into working through lunch, not putting any pauses between meetings, and if I do have a “blank space” I go straight into tackling my todo list, organizing my notes, or writing in some doc or email. Since this is not the most productive way to work, let’s talk about it.
Firstly, I found this to be an incredibly hard section to write! I kept breaking off into other essays. It turns out I have a lot to say on this and related topics, so I have taken those into other future posts to keep the message here focused.
If you don’t take breaks you will burn out. Period. Breaks take many forms and you should take them all.
You should take breaks during your workday. A completely full back to back meeting schedule might look impressive to some, but it’s going to mean as the day drags on your later meetings suffer. Nobody wants exhausted Coltin at the end of a day full of meetings. But a Coltin that took a 15 minute walk and comes into the 1:1 feeling refreshed? Sign them up, we’re going to have a great time! My rule of thumb here is that it’s not a break if I sit at my laptop, if I can see slack or answer an email. I need to mentally disengage at least a bit for it to help. Thinking about work is fine, but no output.
Take a break from your main project, do a side quest. Let’s assume you follow the previous advice, and you’re not spending all your time working. You still need to work on different things occasionally. It is powerful to have a looming deadline and instead of working on nothing but that one thing, to intentionally take the next hour to work on something else. Especially if it involves a different area of your brain. For example, I might spend a few days focused on Quarterly Planning for my team, but even if I take breaks during those days to go for a walk or have a mid-day shower, I will switch tasks. I’ll spend 45 minutes working on a bash/python script to optimize some workflow, or I’ll learn about Slacks workflow helper, or try to get an LLM to perform some task and evaluate its performance. The most important thing for me to accomplish right now might be to finish quarterly planning, but I will make more progress on it by allowing my brain to wander once in awhile to other things.
You should take time off. Don’t hoard your paid time off, use it, and use it well. Take a few Friday’s off in a row, take a week off to do nothing or travel somewhere, take some time off to try out a new hobby or learn a skill (hopefully unrelated to work). Don’t take time off to do work in another form.
Enjoy your recreation time. I’ve done it, and I’ll probably do it again, but don’t sit on your phone or laptop doing work tasks after you’re done for the day. When you’re done for the day, be done. Close everything down, disable notifications and live your life. This isn’t possible if you are on-call, but otherwise don’t make excuses to keep working. As a manager with engineers in many different timezones, it’s tempting to lurk slack and look for fires I can help prevent, but this is a fast path to burning out.
Taking breaks will increase your productivity. You will have more work output over the long term if you keep these suggestions in mind. Try it for a year, you will definitely enjoy your life more, but if you truly measure yourself as less productive, let me know and let’s talk about it, but I guarantee you will only see short-term wins by sacrificing your breaks, and the long term will suffer.
💡 Quote of the Week
When in doubt, let the market decide.
While this quote might apply more to economic theories, I find it helpful when I am faced with hard decisions where the answer isn’t clear. Instead of spending significant time or energy trying to figure out which path I should take, I let the market decide.
I run a Design System team, so we are responsible for building reusable components for other teams to use on Android, iOS, and web. If we were stuck on what design to use for a component, we could release several variants and see what our customers liked. We could even run experiments with each variant to see if these components had any meaningful impacts on metrics like revenue.
If we were faced with multiple projects we felt could have an impact on the organization, rather than trying to pick one, I might take these projects to my executive leadership group, or to other engineering managers or product managers and ask what they would like us to work on most. Their input is our market. While I wouldn’t put the team in a position where other teams make all our decisions, when the solution is unclear this can save a lot of time, or lead to a better outcome.
The caveat here is that the market isn’t always right.
Apples iPhone is a famous example of the market being wrong. The iPhone was heavily criticized on release. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has public rants about how it’s going to be a flop, citing things like a lack of keyboard. Blackberry (formally Research in Motion) thought they had the market cornered, they were not scared of the iPhone because “what serious business professional would want a phone with games on it”.
My favorite example is the “market” wanting flying cars. If you’ve ever had a car stall on you, you can understand why flying cars would not necessarily be a good product. I admit that in a constrained world, flying cars could work, but not how they are envisioned by the general consumer.
Ultimately you need to make the call, but the market can provide invaluable insight into your direction you take.
📖 What I'm reading
I’m only about 1/3 through Predictably Irrational. It’s interesting certainly, but a lot of this is also covered by other books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, but with more of an anecdotal nature. “We did this one study at our university and here is what we found!” I think this will be more of a speed read, now that my health has returned.
🎮 What I'm Playing
Final Fantasy VII Remake! It is incredible. It is not without faults, but I’m not interested in that at this time. It is nice to return to Materia and Limit Breaks, I feel like I get to revisit old stomping grounds but with a completely new system. So far it’s not quite as spooky as I remember FFVII the original being, but I’m only on Chapter 7, we’ll see how it progresses.
Great article! And thanks for mentioning my Broken Window Effect article.
Predictably Irrational was the first book that exposed the world of day to day biases for me. Since then I have noticed how ingrained bias is. Being self aware and openness to other's people viewpoint is really important. A good related book that I recently read - Think Again by Adam Grant. Talks about how (re)thinking can help with getting rid of biases.