Software engineer time management

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The how to leverage asynchronous communication for team success. Agile vs. How to ace hybrid Zoom meetings. Are you ready for the future of work? Hybrid work demystified. Tips for awesome Slack project management and team collaboration. How to create and share a Google calendar with your team. For this, you need a calendar application. I use Google Calendar, but there are many other options out there. In any calendar application you can set recurring events, and colour-code these events so you can categorise them in different ways — different types of jobs have different colours, or each client has a different colour, for example.

Most people use their calendar to put in meetings or other events where they need to meet others. For example:. By scheduling tasks in this way, you always have an accurate view of exactly how much of your time is already allotted in a month, so you can then fit new work and commitments around it. Engineers can be perfectionists, especially when it comes to projects they will have their names against. Unfortunately, this desire for control can result in you becoming an overbearing micromanager.

Not only does this slow down the process and cost both you and your team precious time, but it creates a culture of mistrust. If you need to keep apprised of progress, you can do that via an online job management system like WorkflowMax.

Or schedule in a slot of time to receive updates. But outside of that, step back and focus on your own tasks. You hired this team because they are educated, talented, and keen to prove themselves. So let them prove their worth to you. Before you commit to a new client — often, even before the quoting stage — pull up your schedule and see how much time is actually available for that job in the coming months.

When workloads are heavy, hours long, and employees stressed, mistakes happen. As an engineer, you work on large, complex projects involving many different departments, tools, contractors, and components. Jobs can run over months or even years, and it takes a certain kind of mind to be able to visualise a schedule over that period of time. Milestones enable you to break a job down into smaller sections.

This helps everyone on your team focus on ticking off the tasks for each stage and moving a job through its different stages of progression. Upon reaching each milestone, you can bill the client for work completed thus far. This helps you to manage cashflow and ensure your business continues to operate with peak efficiency. Engineering projects can be mind-blowing in their complexity and intricacy.

The way you approach a project and organise all the different facets has a significant impact both on the amount of time it takes to arrive at the finished result and on its overall success. In the early days of engineering, it would be up to the leading engineer to set out this approach the methodology. However, in the s large companies began to develop standardised methodologies to streamline the project management process.

An established methodology takes much of the thinking process out of your hands, freeing up brainspace for the actual engineering work.

As a senior software engineer, I mentored dozens of software engineers, helping people level up faster. However, I still did not have a single book to recommend, which would recap the type of advice I found myself repeating.

Growing and becoming better takes time, effort, dedication, and discipline, as well as reframing into a growth mindset. You can pre-order the book here: The Prime Guide.

Stay awesome, Cheers! Creator of CLF. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. There are some forms of engineering work that are inherently interrupt-driven. When interrupt-driven work creeps up outside of these clearly designated boundaries, if it cannot be eliminated it should be added to an existing rotation or staffed with a new one.

Another behavior exhibited by engineers who are good at managing their time is the ability to successfully identify, and clearly designate, low-leverage work. There will always be tasks that need to get done, but which do not represent a high return on investment. The correct approach toward these tasks is to complete them in a time-boxed manner and accept a lower bar for quality other tasks.

Taking this approach ensures that these engineers can spend more of their time and energy on activities having an outsized impact. The best engineers communicate candidly. Among those benefits is improved time management, since engineers who communicate candidly are—by virtue of being direct—less likely to waste the time of others. Of course, this is difficult to do in isolation. The other behaviors can help build toward ruthless prioritization. Ultimately, though, a maker can perfectly defend your time—maintaining pure blocks of focus time—and still fail at their work if they are not prioritizing the right things.

Determining the right priorities can be a challenge in its own right, but once determined a maker must be quite wary of changing them. There will always be short-term demands seeking to distract them from their priorities, and for the most part, they should try to ignore them entirely.

When the distractions cannot be ignored, the other behaviors listed above can provide the tools needed to minimize every deviation from what the maker knows is most important.

Hi, I'm David. I've been playing with computers for almost two decades; it started with silly websites and hacks and has ballooned into much more. I spent many years in much smaller startups before joining Stripe as an engineer.