The One Where We Write One Title at a Time

Lead Kindly enters edition 6. Thank you for everyone who reached out, my health (and that of my household) has greatly improved! Well people are still throwing up, but we’re recovering and I am hopeful that next week will be more of a regular cadence. Maybe… Anyway, this week we try to not dive as deep into our productivity tip or quote, but we still have some good stuff. I hope you enjoy and find something valuable!

📚 Read This Week

Seven Steps to Monday Ramp by Michael Lopp

A very short but fantastic read on how to make your Monday, and the rest of your week, effective. If you don’t already have a defined game plan when you get into work on Monday, or maybe you’re looking for some tips, Michael has you covered. I’ve been doing a lot of this already, in particular “clear your workspace”. I will even clear the floor of my office and vacuum (takes 2 minutes) and it gives me a lot of clarity throughout the week. The idea of having a drink and taking a sip to help reset between tasks is great, I love it.

11 ways to get better feedback from your manager by Wes Kao

Many areas of your career get better if you take charge, and getting feedback might be the most unintuitive, but it really is an area that you are responsible for. This is a tricky coaching space if you have direct reports, especially if your reports want more feedback from you, but the advice in this article can be a real game changer. Even if you want more feedback from your romantic partner I think the advice here is solid. For example, Wes says “Give them permission to rip your work apart.” It’s critical to ask whether you make it psychologically safe for people to give you feedback, and understand how they feel (not to be confused with how you think about how they feel).

Navigating through failure by Kelly Vaughn

Kelly walks us through not only how to fail and make it a growth opportunity, but how to create a psychologically safe environment for your team to fail and grow from it and not point fingers. At Yelp we practice “blameless post mortems”. These are documents and often meetings where we highlight the root cause of a problem, like bringing down the website, and go over what we can learn from it. This only works because we have an engineering culture of embracing failure.

I wish I had this mindset when I was playing competitively at Starcraft 2! It was so hard to hop on the ladder and compete because I was so afraid to lose. But those losses are a lesson on how to improve! If I did different things, I could have won. Being on a team where you celebrate losses and champion learning is huge and I love it.

Why Every Software Project Needs a Clean-Up Phase by Jimmy Ho

This article is making me re-think how I manage projects, thanks Jimmy! I’ll very likely share this with my team and see what they think. We currently have a very structured process for each quarter broken up between project work and support work, with an unhack week at the end, which Jimmy calls out as not the best way to operate. It’s provocative! I’ll need to think more about this. Should we spend more time on clean up? And if so, when?

🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week

One thing at a time.

At any given time I could list more than 200 different things that are pulling my attention. My work “todo” list in Notion is over 150 items, not to mention I have my own personal things I want to do (read articles, books, listen to podcasts, write, do some 3d printing, go to the gym, spend time with each of my 5 kids, plan things for holidays, reach out to my friends, my family, check up on my socials, spend time with my partners, write apology letters for putting them second last on this list, etc etc etc etc). It can be overwhelming to list it all, let alone think that each one takes energy and time and in some cases, a ton of patience. This is compounded during times of great stress or illness (which has been a lot lately!).

My way to handle this without having my heart give out, is to remind myself that I can only ever do 1 thing at a time. Multitasking is not a real thing, it’s myth! A facade! I don’t believe in it. Not when it comes to accomplishing tasks. If I watch a show while I write this post, I’m going to get less than 50% cognition on each one. I can switch between them, but even then there is a switching cost. This is well understood in software engineering, where context switching is very expensive.

To truly be good at something that requires thinking, I must give it my full thinking. I’ve heard of this also referred to as “single tasking” (to contrast multi-tasking). For me this also pervades listening to music while I work. If one of my favorite artists comes out with a new album, I will not listen to it while I work. I’m going to want to think about the lyrics and the beat, I won’t really be productive on my task. It’s fine to listen to music I’m familiar with and not being thoughtful with, but that’s it for me.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t switch between tasks. I’m about to stop writing this newsletter to go make the kids lunch, and hopefully I will come back to work on this so you inevitably get to read it. But I’m still only going to be working on each in its own time.

The times where I try to write while I’m making lunch are where I burn the grilled cheese or forget the taco bake in the oven. Who knows how that impacts my writing ;)

💡 Quote of the Week

You do not rise to your goals, you fall to your systems.

- James Clear

This is straight from Atomic Habits. Either way it’s a James Clear quote and I love it. James writes that he drew it from the Greek poet Archilochus who wrote: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

The primary idea is that you can set all the goals in the world, you can even make a detailed plan to get there, but it’s your habits (your systems) that will determine what you achieve.

If you have a goal to get fit, develop a system that helps you get fit. Don’t set goals of losing a certain amount of weight by a certain date, or being able to lift some amount. You don’t know what life will throw in your way, those obstacles will demoralize you. You might be able to force yourself to work towards your goal at first, but once motivation falters, and it always does after a few weeks, you’ll find yourself with one more goal you didn’t achieve. New Years resolutions rarely make it to February.

Goals can work, but systems thinking is better. You want to get fit? Set aside time each week to exercise, and you’re going to go regardless of how you feel, you don’t need to feel like exercising it’s just time to go do your workout. Your water bottle is always clean and in the same spot so you don’t need to search for it when it’s time to go. Same with your gym clothes, when they get cleaned you throw them in your gym bag which stays in your car or by the door. Etc etc. You have the system which makes it as easy as possible for you to go and put in some hard work.

You can apply this type of thinking to anything you want to achieve. It’s not about not having goals, but ensuring you have a system that will bring you to success.

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📖 What I'm reading

No affiliate links!

I’m still reading Predictably Irrational. My reading habit has taken a hit with being sick, but I’m back to reading daily now that I’m better!

📈 State of the Newsletter

We’re at 39 subscribers as of writing, which blows my mind! Thank you all for reading, I hope it’s been valuable for you. Please share it with anyone who might like it.