What would this look like if it was fun?
Welcome to the 3rd edition of the Coltino EngMan newsletter! I’ve been sick for more than 7+ days now so life is a bit of a haze of illness, but that’s not going to stop the newsletter! I hope you enjoy this edition, and I’ve also been working on a few one off articles that go deeper into topics. The first one will be my take on “no meeting days!” and it has been a lot of fun to write. Looking forward to publishing it! Let me know if you have anything you’d like me to write more about :)
📚 Read This Week
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham
This article is from 2009, and it’s still relevant today. The premise is that meetings for engineers (makers, individual contributors, etc) costs so much more than for managers. As an engineer my experience was never as dramatic as the one described in Paul’s essay, where a single meeting could throw off the rest of my day, it’s still an important reminder about the cost. Meeting with a direct report for 30 minutes is more than 30 minutes of lost productivity for them, even if it’s just another 30 minutes of meetings for me.
Productive Compliments: Giving, Receiving, Connecting by
The legendary programmer Kent Beck! I have to admit I’ve never thought much about compliments in any respect. The morale is to make compliments from your perspective. It isn’t “great newsletter” it’s “I think your newsletter is great”. If the difference doesn’t stand out, read Kents article!
Super Specific Feedback: How to give actionable feedback on work output by
One of my primary focuses this year is to improve my feedback skills. Primarily on giving good actionable feedback, but also my skills at receiving feedback. Luckily for me Wes Kao covers a narrow sliver she calls “Super Specific Feedback”.
🎧 Listened or Watched This Week
The Secrets of Supercommunicators [49 minutes] from Art of Manliness
This was a fun episode from Art of Manliness with Charles Duhigg. I felt like I learned a lot about myself and areas I could grow my communication skills. In particular, thinking about what “type” of conversation I’m having more consciously. In particular I enjoyed the conversation about emotional conversations which may help me improve my approach! Charles wrote a book on the subject, and I may end up adding it to my to-read list.
Three Practices for Thriving in Negotiations, with William Ury [39 minutes] from Coaching for Leaders
William Ury argues here that we need more conflict in our lives, and it’s a good thing. More conflict leads to shared solutions and working together. A chance to share information and get on the same page. There are a lot of really good points here, especially if you think negotiation is a dirty word. This was a very enjoyable episode from Coaching for Leaders.
Reduce friction & create better alignment between product & engineering w/ Hubert Palan [46 minutes] from
I have so much to unravel from listening to this, and will probably give it another listen when I am no longer sick. The link summarizes it better than I will at this point, but I would recommend a listen if you are looking to improve alignment between engineering and product.
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
What would this look like if it was fun?
This is the premise of Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal. Ali writes that this question is the guiding principle for his life, because even if your dream job is to be a YouTuber, it’s still going to be full of tedious things you may not enjoy. Instead of trying to power through, try asking what it would look like if it was fun!
This weekend (even though I’m still a bit sick) I helped my brother in law put posts in for a new fence. A lot of this was new to me, and so it was very enjoyable. I love gaining new skills! It was also a great workout. However, we had about 60~ bags of cement to mix, and it became very routine. Particularly one part where I was spraying the inside of the mixer after every set of 3 bags. This was to clean it so the cement wouldn’t dry to it, but also to add water before the first bag of cement went in. This got very very boring, very quickly.
So I made it fun.
Instead of just filling it with water and shutting it off at the right time, I tried cleaning the inside in patterns. I tried to take the biggest chunks off with a spray before cleaning the rest. I tried making patterns in the dirt before finish cleaning it. There was nothing grand here, but it helped pass the minutes and it ended up being enjoyable.
At Yelp we call this being “Unboring” and its one of our companies 5 values. As a company value I have found it empowering to have more fun and enjoy work, and not just hyper focus on being productive all the time. I try really hard to not be the awkward manager forcing his team to have fun (GOTTA MAXIMIZE THAT SYNERGY!), so this is more of an inward focus. I will sometimes spend a 1:1 with an engineer or another engineering manager mostly talking shop about 3D Printers, or Starcraft 2, parenting, books, or some cool side project someone is working on. We’ll also chat about career growth and Q2 plans, but there’s room for fun and work. I firmly believe that this makes work more enjoyable and more productive. Relationship building really benefits from non-work talk. When mistakes happen we can more easily empathize with someone and not assume the worst.
💡 Quote of the Week
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Charlie Munger
You probably don’t realize it, but Charlie stole my chess strategy! I’m not sure how he did it but here’s the story:
When I entered grade 3 I was taught to play chess and my win rate was stupidly high. I’d lose a game now and then, learn a lesson from that, and then back to winning. I really enjoyed chess as a fun mathematical puzzle, but it was also a good ego boost.
Years later I competed at the provincial level, having dominated at local and regionals (queue Glee meme) and was quickly destroyed. I recall one game where every single move this kid made he would SLAM the piece onto the board, breathing heavily, seemingly impatient for me to make my move. He wrote my moves down into a book (it was very intimidating..) and I lost quickly. Of the 5 games I played that day I only won twice, but they were not easy wins.
In the lobby while I waited for the games to start, people sold chess books. FRICKEN’ CHESS BOOKS. Not just 1, but hundreds of different books about Chess. I remember seeing them and thinking “People wrote books about chess!?” It felt like a whole other world. I just…played? There were kids literally sitting around reading chess books and taking notes. It felt like absolute madness. A completely different world than what I knew.
Anyway, over time I realized my only real strategy was to wait for others to screw up, and don’t make mistakes myself. Eventually most people slip up (I guess, until you get to provincials...). They put their queen in a vulnerable spot and I’d take it and lose my rook. They left their bishop in a silly place and I take it for free with a knight. Etc. Once someone got disadvantage, I learned to be even more careful and they would usually become even more likely to make a second mistake. Calmness in calamity is an asset, at least in chess.
I never really saw myself as that good at chess, though my mom would tell everyone she’d meet about her chess boys. I never read the books, I didn’t know the names of openings, I still don’t know any of the “defenses”. My opening looked cool to me so I did it every time and would probably make any chess pro barf. But looking back now? It really set me up for success. It’s not about others, its about the self. Not making choices that would lead me down a bad path, has really been the key to my success in life (besides luck, my copious amounts of privilege, my supportive friends and family…okay I get it I’m over-exaggerating). I’m sure there are more optimal plays, but simply not doing the bad thing has helped me so much (even if it wasn’t enough to go past provincials!)
Question to reflect on, where can you gain advantage in your life by making less bad choices?
📖 What I'm reading
No affiliate links!
I finished reading DRiVE by Daniel H. Pink. I won’t change my review from last weeks edition, it was okay. There was not much new for me here. I did appreciate all the resources in the back, and all the examples. Half the book was actionable things for different areas of life, such as with kids. I’ll probably flip to that over the years and see if it helps.
I am now taking a break from productivity and reading the 4th John Dies at the End called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. I am almost half done, and I looooove it so much. Jason Pargin is such a good author, I hate how good his writing is.
📈 State of the Newsletter
We’re at 33 subscribers as of writing. That’s pretty neat! If you’ve enjoyed the content, please write me a comment or send me a direct message (new feature to Substack!)
In addition to these weekly publications, as per the intro I will be writing longer in depth articles. I am working on my first one about the costs and benefits of having “no meeting days” for engineering teams. It’s a lot of fun. I have 22 other articles with some level of brainstorming or writing started. My writing strategy is to focus on only 1 piece at a time, but often this leads to inspiration about something else so I will write those notes down into my Notion database of ideas, and then back to the article. This allows me to read articles, watch videos, read books, listen to podcasts, have conversations, etc and let them spark ideas or material for any article, but still be able to produce. In 6 months, by the time I get to focus on any particular article, I should have a database full of articles to choose from with tons of source material to draw from.
There will be no particular cadence to these, they will be one offs, and I will release them as they’re done. Also for free.
I was not familiar with Graham’s article, thanks!
I first heard about the concept of ‘what it would look like if it was fun’ from my friend Orel (who writes the IndiPrenuer), loved your examples! I agree that the tough part is to not make it feel forced.