The easy road to become a TOP performer software engineer: Simplifying productivity
Overwhelmed by endless to-do lists? Learn how the "Big Three" method helps software engineers focus on high-impact tasks for maximum productivity.
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Every software engineer knows the feeling: Starting the week with ambitious goals, only to watch the hours slip away as tasks come and go.
Long to-do lists create a false sense of productivity, moving us away from meaningful progress. We increase our busyness instead of our business impact.
There’s a better way. Instead of juggling a dozen tasks, focus on just three: the three most impactful tasks of the day. This shift aligns your daily efforts with your career growth and team success.
I know this sounds like the typical advice from a random productivity book. But it has benefits you may not have expected.
In this post you’ll learn
How to ensure you make progress by doing fewer things.
The importance of using your hours based on your energy level instead of treating all hours as equal
Strategies to track and measure outcomes, like sprint points or PRs merged, to ensure you are always meeting expectations.
The "Big Three" Method for Daily Prioritization
Step 1: Define Your Big Three
Each morning, ask yourself: What three tasks will create the most value today?
Here’s what this could look like:
Review the PR from your teammate who is blocked pending your input
Finish the technical design document for a feature
Prepare for a presentation that will showcase your team’s achievements.
The Big Three shouldn’t just be reactive. Mix tasks that drive immediate results with those that advance long-term goals. For example, while fixing a bug helps today, writing a tech design focusing on maintainability and extensibility will save days in the future.
Two weeks ago I was deep into some implementation and my priorities were 100% around it. The next week, some of my peers had important documents that were going to drive our next few weeks, and I prioritized reviewing and discussing them.
No two weeks are created equal. Then how can you become productive and satisfied with your work? No matter what you measure, some weeks you won’t achieve those metrics.
My answer to this problem is that I am satisfied with my work if I do what I plan to do after reflecting on the team’s priorities. Some day you can be satisfied just by having a coffee chat with someone. if that’s what you identified as the most important task, then feel good about it
Step 2: Use systems to help prioritize
The important piece isn’t doing it next Monday after you read this article. What matters is setting up a system that allows you to do this on a Monday with a hangover from partying all the weekend.
Some examples:
Have a template with questions you just have to answer
Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT to quickly summarize big chunks of information finding action items on them
Schedule time to review your backlog of items and process them.
These systems help reduce decision fatigue.
Remember: The most effective productivity system is not the one you dedicated the most time to in the past. It’s the one you actually use.
Step 3: Commit to the process
Treat your Big Three as sacred. Once you’ve chosen them, focus on completing them before diving into the rest of your backlog. The only exception is when something outside your plans comes with high urgency.
I sometimes decide to swap some of the big priorities if this happens, but at most 2 of them. And I take a note to reflect if this was inevitable or a lack of planning from my side.
This discipline ensures that high-impact work gets done, no matter how chaotic the day becomes.