🔝 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.

Dec 08, 2024

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.

#1 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.

#2: Making time for the big three

Choose your time blocks wisely

Not all hours are equal. Identify your most productive times and reserve those blocks for your Big Three. I highly encourage you to read about chronotypes (e.g. the book “The power of when“).

This is a fancy word to say our biological clocks make us more focused and productive in the mornings, at night, or in the middle of the day.

Defer everything else

Choose environments that minimize distractions, whether that means noise-canceling headphones or a dedicated workspace. When you are deep into any of your priorities, you don’t want to be receiving notifications that pop-up to your screen.

Emails, quick questions, and minor tasks can derail your focus. Batch these into dedicated time slots. As long as you don’t block your entire day, making it impossible to get access to you, everyone will be fine.

For smaller items in your backlog, group them together to tackle them efficiently.

#3: The rest of the backlog comes later.

The purpose of picking 3 priorities isn’t to ignore everything else. In fact, I’d pick 3 priorities you can deliver in half a day, ensuring you have time for anything unexpected and time to process the backlog.

This image summarizes very well what I’d aim to have. 3 priorities, and a backlog well groomed to start picking tasks after you finish the 3 priorities.

#4: Create a tight feedback loop

Measure what matters

How do you know your Big Three are working? Track outcomes, not just effort. For example:

Sprint points delivered.
PRs merged, PRs reviewed, PRs approved
Bugs resolved.

Weekly reflections on these metrics help identify what’s working and where adjustments are needed.

I’d warn about being careful with arranging your priorities based on these metrics. You could be doing things for the sake of the metric and not because they are important.

Instead, I like using the metrics as guardrails. Working in your priorities shouldn’t make you underperform in the metrics that measure your performance. If they do, then you may be leaning too hard into future impact and neglecting your present repsonsibilities

Adapt and refine

I’ve found that there’s no single way to become “productive”. Experiment with new tools or techniques, gather feedback from peers, and tweak your approach as you go. Sometimes, a small adjustment—like using AI to summarize a meeting—can unlock hours of extra focus.

Strategic visibility

Your contributions should be visible to your team and leadership. Share your Big Three accomplishments in stand-ups, retrospectives, or one-to-ones. Framing your work in terms of team and project goals ensures your efforts are recognized.

🎯 Conclusion: Small Changes, Big Growth

The power of prioritization lies in its simplicity. By focusing on three high-impact tasks each day, you cut through the noise, deliver meaningful results, and accelerate your career growth.

Start today. Pick your Big Three, commit to them, and watch as your productivity increases. Over time, this habit builds the foundation for sustained success.

What matters is doing it, not reading about it.