How do you think about productivity?
Category: productivity
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Finishing what you intended with minimum wait and high quality.
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- Do one thing at a time, turn off notifications
- Saying no to almost everything, pretend if the ask is for tomorrow, would you say yes?
- Turn off email notifications
- Switch to paper
- Getting outside
- Every meeting tends to fill the time allocation, push to finish early
- Carving out alone time
- Read books to be exposed to different topics
- Opt out selectively on news
Listen here
After Hours: Healthcare Companies We’re Watching, and Productivity Hacks
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/03/healthcare-companies-were-watching-and-productivity-hacks
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(This post is not for you, it’s for me)
It started out as 5% of my time. Just a 4-hour hands-on workshop with new hires once a month. Now it’s the following
- 1 engineer working on developing a hands-on workshop that will track start, finish, and verification. Able to track usage, validate answers and replace getting started guides written on wiki pages.
- the same engineer running 2 hour bootcamp every other week, and 6 hour bootcamp every other week.
- same engineer managing developer compilation farms
- a principal engineer developing deep learning courses, coding styles, prototyping common tools, writing doxygen documentation inline to help hundreds of engineers learn our code base better
- nifty tools used by engineers daily (url shorteners, license key servers, documentation servers, common docker image build)
- Friday tips written for developers to get stuff done
- Weekly tech talks series (ML, Internal)
- Piloting apprenticeship programs to bring non-traditional CS programs
- Managing learning paths
- Managing Saucelabs relationships
- Prototyping tools to learn more about the pull request data
- Managing mentorship programs for women in tech, as well as company wide mentorship, helping with deep and focused mentorship programs
- Running area mentorship programs
- Recording and distributing other deep dive technical talks
- Engaging with Learning and Development to work on learning initiatives for engineers.
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In 2019, I wanted try something a bit different than 2018.
In 2018, I didn’t buy anything that was not a consumable.
In 2019, I wanted to be less extreme and only buy non consumables once every quarter.
In Q1 2019 – I have bought 2 pairs of shoes and that is it.
Something else I am changing, is to not spend money I don’t have. Going to all cash or ATM card. Hopefully this drives the right spending habits since I will both valued more what I paid for in cash and I don’t feel overwhelmed by a large Visa bill at the end of the month. -
I remember my mom tried to teach me this when I was young.
Put things back in it’s place. Of course she said it in Chinese.
She was not very successful in teaching me. I was not a great listener when I was young.
I am still struggling with this at home, everything back in it’s place.
Whenever I get into the mode in tidying up my physical space, I hear my mom’s voice in my head. She never lectured at me to do it, just patiently told me that it is the simplest way to clean as you go.
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If you send an email to me, it’s very likely (95% chance) I will reply
- If you are recruiting me for a position at company X –
- You will get a polite / canned response that “I am extremely happy at Splunk and want to be there for 4 years to help the company grow”.
- If you are selling a product to me, my company or my restaurant –
- You will get a polite / canned response that “I will review your product and get back to you *if* I’m interested”.
- If you are interested in joining San Francisco Badminton –
- You will get a link to read about my group on sfbadminton.org, an internal Google Doc about the group and a link to the Slack channel to try out for the group, which has a canned welcome message as well.
- If you are a not an advanced player, I’ll politely decline.
- If you are asking for a referral to my company –
- If I think really highly of our experience together, I will immediately sent you a glowing review to the job you are interested in to the recruiter and hiring manager.
- If I worked with you before, but I don’t personally know your work, I will ask you to apply directly to the job and tell you that our recruiters do a wonderful job of looking at all candidates. And they really do.
- If you are an email list –
- And I don’t get value from your content, I will unsubscribe you.
- If I actually have clicked on a link to read the content of your email list, then I’ll read something from it and delete after.
- If you are a robot and giving me information about my account –
- I will read and delete you.
- If you are a human and you are responding back to my email –
- You will get a reply, unless the email thread needs no reply.
- If you are someone from work emailing me –
- You will get a response back if a respond is warranted.
- If you get a link in the response, it’s because I’ve written a similar response before for someone else, or I’ve written something new for future folks who will ask similar questions.
- If I think it’s important that I follow up, your email will be flagged
- If I think this is the end of the thread, your email will be archived
- If you are a family member
- I will try very hard to reply back and hopefully give you back more value than your original email.
- If I do not respond to your emailIt is because I’m struggling with the response, please don’t email me again and ask if I saw your previous email.
- Or, it’s very possible that I somehow missed your email *and* I accidentally removed your email without replying. There is a very very slim chance (less than 2% that this is the case)
- *Only* ask me about a missing email, if you are human and you are my co-worker, my friend or my family.Otherwise, don’t ask me “Did you see my previously email”
- If you are recruiting me for a position at company X –
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In this blog post, Tim Ottinger shares his thoughts on what we should measure in the software industry and more importantly on what not to measure.
https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/what-should-we-measure/
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When I was running a scrum team at Splunk focusing on engineering productivity
- Quarterly goals on top
- Swim lanes for Ready, in progress, verify and done
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I’m using one of his tips, which is to create a high priority email address for everyone important in your life and a 2nd email for everything else.
The neuroscientist that brought us bestsellers “This is Your Brain on Music” and “The World in Six Songs” has turned his attention to the problem of organization. Dr. Daniel Levitin’s new nonfiction book, “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,” combines scholarly research and interviews with people like Michael Bloomberg, George Shultz and Sting with practical tips on how to organize our homes, social lives, time and more.
Source: Ten Tips on Organizing Your Mind, from Dr. Daniel Levitin – Speakeasy – WSJ
1. Take breaks.
2. Set up different computer monitors for different activities.
3. Embrace a (modified) paper to-do list.
4. File correspondence in multiple ways.
5. Purge, when needed.
6. Designate time for short tasks and longer projects.
7. Don’t spend more time on a decision than it’s worth.
8. Sleep, and nap on the job.
9. Don’t over-organize.
10. Leave work at work.
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2018 update: Now I have box.com for long term storage, dropbox for daily syncs
update: box.com is not doing any better either after my switch. The box.com sync app hung and I had to kill it.
Recently the dropbox.com sync app on my Mac has been chewing up 100% of my CPU causing my machine to heat up. While I am a technologist and I can take the time to try to figure out the problem, the cost of switching to box.net is pretty much zero.
Also I’m taking this time to move only the files that I really care about over to box.com.
While I did love dropbox.com when they first started, I feel like they’ve taken their eyes off the ball when they started adding all these extra features like Camera Upload, Screenshot upload that they’ve not done a great job with their core product which is just plain file syncing.
Tony Tam 