How to get ahead quickly with small actions
5 simple actions to boost your career and your life.
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By the end of this post, you'll be thinking: "I already knew everything".
I didn’t invent anything new. This is common sense, but not common practice. The small details can make a difference in your career and your life.
You may think I’m crazy for using a calendar in my daily life. That’s fine, I would have thought the same a couple of years ago.
Pick what seems like a low-hanging fruit for you. Ignore what seems overkill.
Not everyone has the same needs. Like software systems, you have to make decisions to balance system characteristics with complexity.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” - Heraclitus
Prepare your interventions in meetings and phone calls
In an ideal world, you don’t join 30-minute meetings where you participate 2 minutes.
But the world is not ideal, life is complicated. This post is about the actions you control, not about changing the world.
I have seen people splitting their attention between the meeting and multitasking, doing a poor intervention as they were distracted. I was doing this myself.
Instead, I write down my interventions and what I want to take away from meetings. An example is the standup meeting. I write my updates on what I did yesterday, my plans for today, any blockers, and any discussion topics.
When my time comes, I can bring my update without being completely lost. Even if I am focused on another task. I just have to read.
Do the same in review meetings, write down what you want to get an answer for and when the time comes, ask for it. If the meeting goes in another direction, ask for it at the end of the meeting.
Make templates of your repeated communication
Only programmers would spend 10 hours automating a task that takes 10 minutes and it’s not very frequent.
Yet, we don’t automate things that require much less time: Communications. Creating a template is just writing in plain English. Instead of writing with the concrete information of your current instance of the problem, write it a bit more generic, remarking which sections to fill.
You may feel uneasy if you created a bot to respond and people thought they were talking to the real you. We could debate that, but not today because it’s not the case. With a template, it’s you the one writing. You are just filling in 20 words each time instead of 200.
I trigger these templates with a shortcut using Alfred in MacOS. Here are some communications I made a template for:
Typical emails: A review meeting, an online testing session, launching a project.
Writing updates in tickets when I’m on-call. This is especially important when getting paged. These situations are stressful and you won't dedicate any cognitive resources to thinking about the structure of your message.
Code review descriptions and commit messages.
Predefined communications with customers. For example, I'm part of a design review group. We do a pretty standard communication before and after the review. With a template, I just have to fill in meeting notes of that particular review.
Interviews: Questions I'll ask, space to write the candidate's response, and a rubric for each question.
Be the most active user of your calendar
You call it your calendar but most of the entries are created by other people.
Calendars have a line indicating what time it is. This divides your time into the past and the future.
Your calendar of the future is a visual representation of the planning of your day. You want to define which time to dedicate to which tasks.
Focus on planning bigger blocks instead of diverse small blocks. Context switching generates attention residue. Part of your attention is left in the previous task. It’s better a 1-hour block than x4 15 15-minute blocks scattered through your day.
Your calendar of the past is a visual representation of where your time went. None of us managed to dedicate exactly the time as we planned. Put new blocks as you are working to reflect reality.
This is not a millisecond-accurate system. My granularity is 15-minute blocks. And I don’t write exactly each thing I do, I group by type of task.
Here is an example of my calendar last Sunday:
