⭐ How to get ahead quickly with small actions

5 simple actions to boost your career and your life.

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

🤩 #1 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.

🗂️ #2 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.

📅 #3 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:

Yep, I don’t have breakfast 😁

🎨 #4 Define your task/notes management system

Most information you capture is either a note or a task.

I’m talking about personal knowledge management. At work, you’ll have your project backlog, sprints, and wikis. Even with that, at an individual level, you need to take some notes for yourself, smaller action items, and reminders.

Tasks are actions to execute. Once completed, you forget about them. I try projects/tasks in my personal life, but at work besides the team processes, I go with a small daily to-do list.

Notes are knowledge to preserve. Once written the knowledge, you revisit it when it’s needed. I don’t capture too much work-specific knowledge, just some markdown notes. Most of the knowledge goes to shared docs and wikis. In my personal life, I have a Zettelkasten setup.

There are a lot of systems you could implement: GTD (Getting Things Done), PPV (Pillars, Pipelines, Vaults), or PARA (Projects/Areas/Resources/Archive).

Remember, there is no right or wrong. It depends on your needs.

🔊 #5 Default opt-out from notifications. Temporary opt-in

We live our lives on autopilot. Very little time we are being intentional.

Better to be intentional in what we want to be notified about than receive a bunch by default. Don't you think so?

I don't have social media on my phone. Now that I write online, I started being active on LinkedIn. But I have ended up removing it from my phone. I have to say I’m amazed by how frequently they put a red circle in the notifications to avoid granting me the accomplishment feeling of reaching inbox zero.

For those apps, you can disable notifications in the app or your phone settings. With web browsers, use some browser extensions to hide notifications. I use Minimal Theme Twitter, Minimal Theme LinkedIn, Unhook YouTube, and Unhook Twitch.

Email should be fully async. Stop notifications on them, especially when you are receiving a bunch of automated emails you don’t even read.

In an ideal world, messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp are also async. You check periodically depending on your needs. For example, check Slack every hour and a half.

But sometimes you are waiting on a response or need to be available by messaging without jumping into a meeting. Then decide to turn on notifications during that time. When things go back to normal you go back to your default state of no notifications.

Earlier this year we had our two sister teams working on the same project in a rush to finish a few code changes by the end of the day. We had a war-room slack channel and 15 people talking on it.

I was writing some UI tests and trying to support the team as much as I could. But I couldn't keep up with the Slack notification sound every minute. I decided to turn off notifications and put a timer on my computer every 15 minutes.

This was an extreme situation. But it showed me that even in extreme situations, it was better to be intentionally opting-in to notifications than being opted-in by default.

🎯 Take action

I’ll reiterate it. I didn’t invent anything new. I’m sure you know many of these tips. But common sense is not common practice.

Pick one and apply it right now. Tomorrow you’ll forget about it.

Let me know your pain points when you try to be productive in your work and your life. I plan to share more about my systems. But I don’t know what’s interesting to you.

I have already received many weird faces about time tracking my personal life or doing multi-scale planning with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews. I don’t want to write for the sake of writing but write for someone to get value.

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👏 Weekly applause

Here are some great pieces of content I have consumed this week:

• How to write good runbooks -

  Techlead Mentor

  • Takeaway: Runbooks are the go-to document for any production incident. Very interesting article to make your on-call life easier.

• The most valuable trait of top software engineers -

  Engineer’s Codex

  • Takeaway: I discovered the concept of product engineer here. Being close to users and product managers. Getting the big picture of the problem.

• How to develop a great tech strategy -

  Engineering Leadership

  • Takeaway: Align tech and business. If you are like me, even if you are not defining the strategy of the company, you can get a better understanding by reading from those who define it.

• 7 types of difficult coworkers and how to deal with them -

  High Growth Engineer

  • Takeaway: Working with engineers is working with people. Seek first to understand, then you can position yourself to help. This article will help understand people's motives so you can apply pressure on the right levers.

• From Microsoft Intern to Meta Staff Engineer: Raviraj Achar -

  The Developing Dev

  • Learn from a Staff engineer’s journey. Takeaway: From entry-level at Microsoft to Senior at Meta it took Raviraj 6 years. The important part is not landing promotions every 2 years, but putting yourself on the right path.

• This Book Made Me Quit My Job (as a Doctor) - Ali Abdaal

  • Takeaway: I always thought of the default path as the right one and the rest as way too risky. Especially dangerous if I plan my career based on prestige.

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That’s all for this week. I hope you found value in my words. See you next week! 👋

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