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5 strategies for self-care when working from home

Josh Tulloch — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 23:00:00 +0000

Get set up right...from the start

Any time my back starts bothering me, and my usual stretches don’t work, I call my brother. He’s a progressive chiropractor in San Jose, so he sees a lot of people working in tech. His latest horror story was about a 30-year-old patient with a particularly demanding employer. “They’re spending 15 or 16 hours at their desk a day, so it’s very hard on their bodies,” he says. She was worried her mid-back pain and bad posture might leave her with a permanently curved spine.

The COVID work-from home era proved that lots of people could be perfectly productive working at home in their pajamas, even over long periods. But removing that separation between home and office also led to more people working 8+ hours daily, and regularly letting work bleed over into the weekend. And how many of us are guilty of working at kitchen tables, sitting in bed or hunched over a coffee table?

After nearly two years of skipping remote work best practices, chiropractors are seeing what The New York Times called an epidemic of work-from-home injuries. Even if you personally feel that pain is weakness leaving the body, bringing that ethos to your company culture will probably end up costing you money. A 2018 study found that low back pain was the leading cause of disability worldwide. Johns Hopkins health economists found that pain costs US employers $299 to $334 billion in lost productivity per year. It also translates into lost wages for the person with the back problem. In his talk The Operating System of You, Shawn Wang, known in the industry as Swyx, breaks down how a bad back is bad for your wallet.

And when your neck, hands and back are hurting, it’s easier to wind up bickering with coworkers, missing out on family fun, and generally hating your life.

While it’s impossible to escape your keyboard and monitor, you and your team can avoid many common and painful injuries like tech neck, computer back and mouse shoulders with some simple changes. All it takes are some simple changes with the way you approach your workday, and your surroundings.

Change up your keyboard

Remember those weird split-in-two keyboards that first started showing up in the mid 90s? Well, ergonomic keyboards are still around and even more bizarre looking. But what they may lack in looks they make up for in function. It turns out the digital keyboard was copied from the old school typewriter, without stopping to think what would make your hands more comfortable.

This generation of ergonomic keyboards, like the Kinesis Advantage, 2 just feel better to use, even if typing hasn’t made your wrists and hands ache. That’s what Martin Fowler, a writer and pundit focused on software development, discovered after three years of typing on the Kinesis.

There are plenty of ergonomic keyboards around, Fowler especially liked this one because of the way it moved around various functions to optimize the way our hands work. Instead of limiting the thumbs to just pushing the space bar, the Kinesis has a couple clusters of function keys (space, return, delete) so the thumbs have more to do.

Level Up Your Workspace

And once you have a new keyboard, it just may inspire you to upgrade to an ergonomic workspace by tweaking your chair, monitor and lighting. The Wirecutter created an ultimate guide to an ergonomic work station, and here are a few high points.

Make sure to position your laptop or tablet so the monitor is at the proper height. If you do most of your typing on a laptop or tablet, there’s a very good chance you’re looking down too much, which puts a strain on your neck. Choose a sturdy laptop stand to elevate it so the top of the screen is two to three inches above your eyes.

A supportive and comfortable chair is foundational to good posture, and it’s worth spending some money to get a well made one. Look for models with armrests, and adjustable seat height, tilt and depth, such as the classic Aeron Chair by Herman Miller or a Steelcase Gesture. The latter was designed after a study of how using technology changes human posture. If you’re feeling guilty about the price, just divide the price by the number of days you’ll use it over the next three years, and you’ll realize you’re worth it.

The last key feature every workspace needs is good light. Staring at a bright computer screen in a dark room puts a strain on your eyes, and makes you lean forward and squint. If your workspace isn’t a light-filled loft, fake it by layering an overhead light that casts glow over the entire space with a task light on your desktop. And with winter coming, it might be wise to try out a seasonal affective disorder (SAD) light therapy lamp that delivers 10,000 lux of brightness. Dave Asprey writes that in addition to staving off winter blues, SAD lights can improve focus, increase energy, and restore natural sleep rhythms.

Move it

It’s true that regularly spending an hour at the gym will keep your muscles toned, improve your cardiovascular health and lift your mood. But it turns out you can get a boost from less exercise. A lot less.

Researchers led by a team from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute were interested in finding ways that mostly sedentary office workers could enjoy better wellbeing. They had 30 test subjects cycle through these three modes: sitting continuously for six hours, getting up every hour to walk on a treadmill for five minutes, and walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes every morning before work. Both walking groups reported feeling more vigorous and energetic, compared to people who sat all day. But at the end of the day, people who walked every hour felt lower stress, less fatigue and had fewer food cravings.

Be Happy

Get ready to have your mind blown. You may think that having a back that feels good will make you happy. But research shows that it’s the other way around: being happy makes your back feel good. The brain is powerful and can help shape our physical reality. Yes, it sounds woo-woo, but there’s clinical evidence to back it up.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that subjects had better pain tolerance after watching a funny movie than a dry documentary. And another study found that people with chronic back pain who were in a happy mood had lower levels of pain and more tolerance compared to those who were depressed. What makes you happy? Make time on your calendar for it every day.

Take a break

Mathilde Collin, the CEO of Front, isn’t the kind of person to waste time, In fact, the busy founder regularly charts out how she spends every hour and shares her time graph on Twitter. But she meditates for 10 minutes every morning, and holds a weekly guided team meditation. And Thursday afternoons are blocked out for what she calls"stepping back time." Collin swaps her laptop for a notebook and spends time focused on one issue. Both practices are part of the discipline that she says is key to successfully growing a startup.

And you’ll be surprised how just a little time away from your desk recharges you, especially if you walk in nature. Studies in the science called biophilia found that leaving the office to reconnect with nature, even for a few minutes, helps us return to our work with renewed attention and creativity.

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How to maximize deep work when working remotely

Josh Tulloch — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Goodbye, commute. Hello, ergonomic chair.

Working remotely offers plenty of benefits. Goodbye, commute. Hello, ergonomic chair. But, it also brings unexpected obstacles to finding your flow.

The world and everyone else from your office likely keep clamoring for your attention like a toddler interrupting a live television interview. So, how do you maximize your time in Deep Work while working remotely?

Take three intentional steps. Build a better checklist with defined tasks. Use that checklist to create meaningful boundaries. And then optimize your schedule to nurture the focus required for Deep Work: sustained concentration free of distraction.

1. Put Tasks in a Checklist

In the beginning, the sheer scale of a project can feel overwhelming. Focus on the steps rather than the end destination. That’s why Adam Savage, a visual effects designer and co-host of MythBusters, has spent his career building a better checklist.

“The value of a list is that it frees you up to think more creatively, by defining a project’s scope and scale on the page, so your brain doesn’t have to hold on to so much information,” writes Savage.

[] Start with Savage’s “brain dump.” Write down everything you need for a project.
[] Next, break down each idea into tasks.
[] Finally, organize those tasks into a sequential list that looks just like this.

A checklist provides you with a framework for tasks. It also gives small wins, the little boosts you get from literally checking the box.

2. Put in the Work to Free Up Memory

Tasks are part of every project. While weekly reviews and status reports – what Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World author Cal Newport terms “shallow work” – keep you connected to other people in the company, they also continually break into your flow state.

A ping. Three dots. I just need a 10 minute call.. Small, tiny interruptions have a very big impact on your ability to do deep work.

Freeing up RAM is critical because our active memory can only hold on to three to five items at a time. And it’s not only your available memory that’s the issue. Distractions and interruptions destroy your concentration.

Interruptions don’t just break up your flow, they make it harder to get back into the flow. A single interruption can take 23 minutes to move past. Unless you start acting as the gatekeeper for your memory, you’re going to keep getting distracted.

3. Create Meaningful Boundaries With a Batched Schedule

Checklists can be infinite. You are constantly reworking the list based off yesterday and today. Schedules, on the other hand, are finite. There are only so many working hours in the day.

Let the constraints of your calendar be a strength. Designate specific times to mark off tasks on your checklist and hold meetings. Likewise, designate the times when it’s just you and your code. Then, communicate your needs to the rest of your team. If you use a system like Slack, update your status to reflect the times that you are in Deep Work.

Let’s acknowledge the tension here. It may be hard to say you’re unavailable. Paul Graham refers to this as the maker’s schedule versus the manager’s schedule, i.e. the person scheduling weekly meetings.

“For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work,” writes Graham.

Be vulnerable. Acknowledge the tension. And be transparent about what you need to be successful.

“We’re simply not evolved to give concentration the same priority that we might give to evading a charging lion. Therefore, you cannot rely on willpower alone. You need all the help you can get to trick yourself into getting started with this activity,” – Cal Newport.

Optimize Your Schedule

You’ve set up protections around the time you want to devote to Deep Work; but the work doesn’t stop with building your schedule. As Newport once remarked, “it’s not enough to just track deep work.”

This isn’t about checking boxes. It’s about self-discovery. Engineer Shawn Wang, who goes by swyx, believes you must pay attention to your internal rhythms.

“Notice weekly patterns in where your energy lies and adapt your schedule to take advantage of when you’re most productive,” suggests Wang.

Give yourself grace. Admit that some days it’s harder to achieve a flow state. And that, Deep Work, like any habit, will not happen overnight.

“Your ability to focus needs to be trained and maintained like a muscle, learning how to do deep work takes time and devotion,” writes Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish.

5. Build in Schedule Breaks

Breaks are like help. We all need both every day.

“We need to alternate between focus and distractions,” writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Ness Labs. “Instead of forcing ourselves to work through fatigue and demotivation, we may as well take productive breaks.”

Decide how you want to decompress, whether that’s treating yourself to an elaborate lunch, going out for a walk, or catching up with a friend. Scheduling breaks will help you avoid burnout and give your brain a chance to recharge.

Once you’re in control of your schedule, you’ll discover that you feel more free to explore concepts. You’ll worry less about mistakes and, as a result, have more breakthroughs. Serendipity comes with clarity of purpose.

You can’t control everything in your environment when you’re working remotely. But you can control how you spend your time.

We live in a world designed to steal your attention. You must resist giving in. Your attention is your most precious commodity. Guard it by getting organized, putting up clear boundaries, and listening to your internal drive. Go do the Deep Work.

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How we minimize deep work interruptions at Stashpad

Josh Tulloch — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 23:00:00 +0000

Developer-centric schedules and feedback culture.

Nobody sets out to have an entire day of meetings.

But then your team doubles. Half your engineers are working remotely. And you wake up to discover your calendar is completely blocked off before you’ve even sat down at your keyboard.

When it comes to productivity, it often feels like you’re presented with a no-win situation. We can get on the same page through meetings and other communication or we can do our work. But what if you could better balance both?

Your calendar is likely a source of tension because interruptions destroy a developer’s workflow. A study from the University of California Irvine showed that workers needed an average of 25 minutes to get back on track after an interruption.

Yet, the needs of your organization don’t have to be in conflict with the needs of your team. You can encourage communication without intruding on a developer’s deep work time. At Stashpad, we’ve built a schedule designed to foster collaboration without sacrificing the space required for individual focus.

Here are our 4 strategies for minimizing interruptions to deep work.

1. Build a schedule for developers.

As a manager, you can give your developers the schedule you wished you had when you were a developer. But building that schedule isn’t always easy because you need time to get aligned on priorities, and it’s easy to forget the mindset of a maker now that you’re a manager.

“As a leader, you’re no longer expected to write the most code, solve the hardest technical problems, or fix the trickiest bugs. Instead, you’re responsible for ensuring that your team can do these things,” writes Karl Hughes, a software engineer and the founder of Draft.dev, a content marketing firm that works with start-ups. “It’s hard for great engineers to move into management because they like being deeply focused on challenging technical problems, not hopping in and out of a dozen meetings every day.”

It may take time; but you have to switch your mindset to facilitate the deep work of others. Creating a calendar with distinct blocks of time devoted to particular types of work enables incremental change in your habits and the overall work culture you’re trying to build. Here, you might want to take a look at the Pomodoro Method, wherein your daily schedule is broken down into digestible 30-minute chunks known as a “pomodoro.”

At Stashpad, we have a daily stand-up meeting for 10 to 15 minutes. That’s our opportunity to check in and ensure we’re all on the same page. If we need to have a project meeting, we put it immediately after standup so that we don’t create more context-switching.

We do this for two critical reasons. It stops our team from having to switch contexts and it enables us to keep our deep work time free of interruptions. Time blocking helps cut down on the mental fatigue from switching gears so we can channel our energy into problem solving.

2. Design an efficient feedback system.

Our work is interconnected; but the challenge is that team members always have different priorities. Waiting on responses or being stuck in a liminal state is an easy way to build resentment and frustration.

How do we make sure we’re giving specific, actionable requests? All of our projects begin with a spec with high level needs outlined by the project lead and presented at the start of a meeting.

We then sit silently for 15 minutes with people offering notes in the comments. This is a key stage of our feedback process because writing can be more inclusive – whether someone on your team is an introvert or likes to process ideas internally before offering suggestions – and offers a quick reference for the project lead on how to tweak a given spec.

Those 15 minutes are incredibly valuable to our team. That writing time gives everyone a chance to voice their feedback and express their ideas. And we often discover issues that need to be addressed, which hadn’t been identified and could have been major headaches if they popped up further along in the process.

The written notes form the basis for a brief conversation out loud, where the project lead asks for clarification or uses a written note as a jumping off point for a quick brainstorming session. At the end of the session, the project lead then has a blueprint for how to update their spec with the benefit of the rest of the team’s experience and ideas.

By eliminating ambiguity, you can streamline your communication to reports and gain back time. Give a clear description of each project task. Make specific, singular requests and offer actionable advice when presented with problems by team members.

3. Create transparency around availability.

A developer-friendly schedule doesn’t only account for meetings, it also creates opportunities for sustained periods of focus. ‘No Meeting Wednesdays’ sound great until someone sees that open block of time and knows that everyone always has a few minutes in the middle of the week.

Instead, let your team know that you value communication about availability. Encourage developers to block out their calendar with focus blocks. Tell your team to set their Slack status to reflect what they’re currently doing. For us, this is a great shorthand to quickly see if someone is in a flow state so that we don’t interrupt a productive stretch.

This is also where you need to pause before you reach out to a member of your team. As Gergely Orosz writes on The Pragmatic Engineer, “you have to think twice before broadcasting information.”

Go ahead and draft a message because the act of writing might reveal something new to you. Then, build in a moment of pause to consider what happens when you fire off that message.

If there’s too many requests on Slack and people feel pressure to respond promptly, then the cost of context switching outweighs the value of answering a question. On the other hand, if you’re completely stuck – see our handy 30 Minute Rule below – you need to be able to reach out.

Before you hit send, think about the importance of the message. Is it worth asking someone to context switch? If you’re stuck and your team values velocity, then it’s worth it.

4. Offer pressure release valves.

Building a resilient committed team requires trust. You have to trust that your team members will be able to solve problems. And you have to trust that they’ll be open to acknowledging when they need help. But how do you build the right amount of runway?

At Stashpad, we use The 30 Minute Rule. If you haven’t made progress on a project for 30 minutes, then you simply post in a Slack channel what you’re doing and the specific challenge you’re trying to address.

This ensures that nobody feels isolated or like they have to tackle a problem alone. It can often help a junior developer or someone working on a project with an expanded scope get unstuck.

It also has the added benefit of strengthening connections among developers. Our team often gains unexpected insights and finds joy in helping colleagues. This is how you leverage the experience of senior developers without sacrificing the autonomy of junior developers.

This simple rule reinforces the feedback process we’ve built as part of our product development cycle. It also ensures that a particularly frustrating bug doesn’t derail an entire block of deep work time.

When you create systems that encourage independence while also making space for collaboration, your team will excel. That success will then naturally strengthen and reinforce a schedule which allows two seemingly conflicting responsibilities – regular meetings and deep work – to co-exist.

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Why the pomodoro method is more useful than you might think

Josh Tulloch — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The pomodoro method uses scheduled breaks to maximize your time in deep work.

The Pomodoro Method is a productivity technique where you chunk your time into 30 minutes blocks and allocate 25 minutes for focused time and 5 minutes for break. Each 30-minute block is called a “Pomodoro.”

The technique was created by Francesco Cirillo while he was at college in the late 1980’s. Cirillo found that viewing your time through the lens of Pomodoro “alleviates anxiety and in doing so leads to enhanced personal effectiveness.” In short: it’s a way to get things done.

It’s worth noting that — according to Cirillo — a ’true’ Pomodoro doesn’t allow for interruptions. With each Pomodoro, you exclusively dedicate your attention to the task at hand for 25 minutes. Nothing else. It’s important to try and create an uninterrupted stretch of time. Maybe set your slack status to let folks know you’re locking in. Or block off time in your calendar manually or with a tool like Clockwise.

But — in describing a ’true’ Pomodoro — Cirillo is describing an ideal. Someone learning how to work at home over the course of the pandemic might not have had the luxury of only being able to focus on completing a single, specific task over the course of twenty-five minutes. Reddit users have spoken about how 25 minutes is too short a time to get ‘stuck into’ work, but one consistent comment is that even using part of the Pomodoro technique is an effective way to improve productivity.

Fred Medlin — a developer at Sittercity — has worked remotely for a little over 4 years. Each working week, he estimates how many pomodoros each task will take, and then tracks his work in a spreadsheet.

At the end of a Pomodoro,” he said, I doc in Stashpad how it went and usually what to do next. I do 25/5 pomodoros because … life. I used to do 50/10 but my time is so much more fragmented in the past year. I only do pomodoros when I have at least a 90 minute block of focus time and I only use it for sprint work.

“I don’t do POMs for anything other than coding right now,” he continued. “Most everything else I can walk away from, or do little tiny bits of work without an interruption penalty. Coding is definitely different. What I’ve found is that [Pomodoros] actually slow me down but having some documentation for each one has been golden for tracking how a sprint went. The little bit of time I spend capturing things in Stashpad.”

Medlin isn’t the only one who has found modifying Pomodoros to be helpful. One Reddit user who suffered from depression and migraines found that a ‘Reverse Pomodoro’ helped them get work done. Another user found that only allowing for 25 minutes of work interrupted their concentration. Changing the 25 minute marker of the ‘Pomodoro’ into something else allowed them to study more efficiently.

Besides developers and students, the Pomodoro Technique is useful for artists as well. In the clip above, taken from the Netflix show Abstract, we see what happens when an illustrator shows up to work again and again. Artists don’t just rely on inspiration or planning — they show up to work and focus on working. This leads to results. Paul McCartney showed up to work, and — through dedication and focus — pulled the song ‘Get Back’ out of the air. The writer Richard Mirabella worked on his novel while holding down a full time job, tackling his novel thirty minutes at a time, and this also led to results.

Why is the Pomodoro important now, during a period of time still so marked by the pandemic? As Derek Thompson pointed out in his recent podcast for The Ringer, the boundaries between work and non-work have grown ’leaky’: we drift onto the web at work. Our phones are always with us. We work on an excel sheet while sitting on the couch at home. Our focus is continually being challenged again and again. (One study focused on the impact of Covid in the Netherlands posits that “when work-life boundaries are blurred, people are less happy.”)

The Pomodoro technique gives you a structure to better manage the blurring between work and life. It’s effective, easy to use, and something you can try today.

Go ahead. Get started. We’ll set the timer.

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5 ways to ease overwhelm at work

Josh Tulloch — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

How to set priorities, boundaries and increase your capacity

You’re drowning at work. Irritated at small requests. Collapsing under the weight of big projects. In short – no CAPTCHA needed for this one – you’re human.

Feeling burnout? You’re not alone. The Deloitte Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey showed that nearly 1 in 2 Millennial workers are feeling burned out at work and 1 in 4 “would like to leave their jobs within two years.”

So, what do you do when you’re feeling overwhelmed? Your instinct might be to work harder to simply outlast what’s in your way. But all you’re doing is running out of runway faster and operating at a diminished capacity because of all the resources you’re putting toward solving problems inefficiently.

You need a sustainable and sustained response to feeling overwhelmed. Establish clear priorities and boundaries to simplify your schedule and communicate your needs to teammates. Free up additional capacity by offloading ideas in writing and offloading tasks to your team. And, on occasion, let yourself reset with a pause at work.

Read on for our 5 strategies to help avoid feeling overwhelmed at work.

Let’s talk about what it means to be overwhelmed.

It’s difficult to look directly at stress. But stress is not the Eye of Sauron. And you don’t have to live in the shadow of Mount Doom.

Work avalanches come in two stages: discomfort and overwhelm.

-Discomfort doesn’t have to be a negative. The feeling of being out of your depth isn’t always a sign that something needs to change. When you take on additional responsibilities, author Tanya Reilly suggests it’s normal to feel uncertainty at work.

“That feeling of discomfort is called learning,” says Reilly, who wrote The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide For Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change.

And, good news, Reilly points out “that managing the discomfort is a skill you can learn.” We’ll show you how to effectively structure your work and manage boundaries below to keep discomfort from evolving into overwhelm.

-You’re overwhelmed when you can’t work effectively. When discomfort rises to a level that it’s impacting your work performance, that’s when you need to find ways to manage your workload.

Emotional overwhelm prevents you from absorbing knowledge and affects your ability to be present for your team. If you can’t get into a deep flow state or your to-do checklist never seems to shorten, it’s time to start proactively managing your stress.

1. Define your priorities to help guide your schedule

Let’s acknowledge that you probably do have too many things to do. Those responsibilities come with a cost as you’re constantly weighing what needs to be done, exhausted by a series of small dilemmas that eat your calendar like a Pac-Man game set on free play.

You’re suffering from decision fatigue and, as Sarah Drasner, author of Engineering Management for The Rest of Us, notes, “you can make poor choices when you’re not able to make a clear decision.”

How do you reduce the number of decisions that you have to make? Step back and decide what tasks, meetings, and projects align with your values because as Drasner notes, “what we work on is an expression of our values.” Create a decision-making matrix to evaluate your current obligations and future goals. Seek out feedback from project managers and developers to tweak or confirm what you’re doing.

As you key in what matters to you and your team, it becomes easier to weigh and reshape meetings or processes to become more efficient. An added bonus is that a small to-do list appears more manageable and gives you the small dopamine hits of crossing off items when they’re completed.

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, cautions you to not get stuck on your schedule and instead acknowledge that you’re reshaping your choices.

“Time management is really a misnomer, the challenge is not to manage time, but manage ourselves,” says Covey.

2. Set boundaries for yourself and your team

While you’re building the space to do meaningful work, you have to build in boundaries to protect that space. And that requires a paradigm shift about your own availability.

It can feel like you’re pushing people away when you set your status as unavailable on Slack; but Alice Boyes, PhD and author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit, sees it as another way to express your priorities or values.

“Consider that when people take a while to respond, it sends the signal that they’re busy and prioritizing,” says Boyes. “And may lead to other people respecting their time to a greater extent.”

You’re telling your team that you’re in a flow state and encouraging them to protect their own productivity. While you should always acknowledge a request, you don’t have to raise the newest request to the top of the pile. Instead, assess what’s in front of you or bring a collection of potential requests to your manager and talk through them to discover what aligns with the team’s priorities.

3. Write things down to free up memory

Solid boundaries help prevent distractions and improve your communication with other team members; but the key to corralling your own mind is to build a practice of taking notes.

Writing ideas down helps combat attention residue, the part of your brain that wants to keep surfacing and working through unfinished problems. We’ve written in the past about The Zeigarnik Effect, wherein psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik wondered why waiters in a Vienna restaurant could correctly remember an entire table’s order without writing a single thing down.

Zeigarnik discovered through studies – conducted after dinner – that the waiters’ thoughts were an unbroken circuit. They remembered complicated tasks because their brain kept holding the idea that a customer ordered a rare steak until the steak was at the table.

Your work often has a longer timeline than your dinner reservation. As a result, you’ve got to break the circuit and unburden your mind by writing down your tasks. Because the cost of holding all of that information (often called attention residue) compromises your ability to take on new tasks and process new information.

Writing things down frees up your working memory to focus on a code review or be present in a meeting. Reilly encourages you to create an anchor, building a new habit of taking notes to track your task list, as well as capture key ideas from meetings.

4. Accept that you don’t have all the answers

As you start to organize and document what you’re doing, that’s also the right time to acknowledge that you don’t have to do everything by yourself.

When you have too many tasks, your instinct is to work harder and push through the challenge. There are three main reasons that’s the case: you don’t acknowledge the work of meetings, it’s how you moved forward in the past, and you underestimate how willing others are to help.

-Meetings are work. Running meetings and managing people is what Drasner calls the “hard, human work.” It’s not easy to quantify what you’ve accomplished in a meeting, so you may unconsciously discount the time you spend facilitating a discussion. Start giving yourself credit for the “hard, human work” and celebrate the progress that comes as a result of your entire team’s efforts.

-Past you won’t have all the answers. In the earlier days of your career, your ability and success as an individual contributor was dependent on you producing code. And you were, rightly, rewarded with a promotion to engineering lead. Will Larson, the CTO of Calm and author of Lethain, recognizes that it's easy for developers to fall into a trap of inefficient solutions.

“Under pressure, most people retreat to their area of highest perceived historical impact, even if it isn’t very relevant to today’s problems,” says Larson.

You have to recognize that you’ve moved from a place where your success was dependent on you producing things to a position where other people now produce things with your input.

-Let your team help. Just as you might forget to acknowledge your own progress, you’re likely underestimating how likely it is that there is someone who can help you on your team.

Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University and author of You Have More Influence Than You Think, studied how people respond to requests and found something fascinating: we regularly think someone is going to say no and we’re likely very wrong.

It turns out that we underestimate the likelihood of someone doing what we ask by 48 percent. Bohns believes we tend to forget how awkward it is for somebody to refuse a request. So, the next time you think everyone else is too busy to help, consider the idea that instead you’re assuming they can’t help instead of simply asking and finding out what’s possible.

5. Step away from the keyboard

You can’t always strategize your way through feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes you have to change what you’re doing. There’s a difference between when you’re stretching as you learn and when you’re close to redlining and blowing an engine.

Rebecca Zucker, an executive coach and founding partner at Next Step Partners, contends that trying to push through your workload comes with a substantial cost and wrecks your productivity.

“The cognitive impact of feeling perpetually overwhelmed can range from mental slowness, forgetfulness, confusion, difficulty concentrating or thinking logically, to a racing mind or an impaired ability to problem solve,” says Zucker. “Cognitive fatigue can also happen, making us more prone to distractions and our thinking less agile.”

Sarah Drasner encourages you to track your energy throughout the day and make a plan based on your “personal energy cycle.” By discovering when you have low energy during the day, you can work to align your schedule with your own internal cycle.

Breaks are critical. It’s not only a way to release tension, the physical act of getting up and outside has other clear tangible benefits.

A 2020 study published in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park “reduced negative mood and elicited more awe.” A literal change of scenery breaks the swell of overwhelm and allows your mind and emotional state to reset.

No system is perfect or fixed in stone. As you work toward building a better system to manage your schedule and establish boundaries, understand that work will continue to stress the schedule you’re creating. Remember to continually adapt to what you need. Don’t wait until you’re burned out.

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You probably don't need a knowledge garden

Josh Tulloch — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:31:42 +0000

What if our tools fit the messy reality of our day-to-day?

When it comes to taking notes, we often find ourselves attempting to build a wiki-style knowledge base, knowledge graph, digital garden, or similar. While these aren’t all the same thing, there is a common denominator: the idea that we consistently document knowledge in an organized way so that we can revisit it and benefit from it over time. Let’s call this concept a “knowledge garden”.

(Note: while this idea, and much of what follows, can apply to shared notes, we’re mostly focused on a personal / individual use case here).

The Versailles gardens.

The reality is that, except for the most determined gardeners, a beautiful knowledge garden is unattainable. Even more, it’s not what we need to do our best work.

Building a knowledge garden may feel like something we want to do or should do, but it doesn’t align with our day-to-day reality.

Reality is messy.

We write things down, and most things are relevant only in the moment or for a short period of time. As time goes by, the usefulness of our notes usually decays rather quickly.

We brainstorm, pause, come back later, find parts of it to no longer be compelling, re-work what we have, and maybe share certain parts.

We get interrupted while in the middle of a task, or have a sudden thought about something unrelated.

We come up with ideas in fits and bursts, and go on tangents that may or may not come in handy later on.

More often than not, we are dealing with works-in-progress. Things are inconclusive, we’re in the middle of working through our thoughts and getting them in order, new information comes in, we have to switch contexts, multiple things are going on at once, things are useful for a short time before our attention shifts elsewhere… This is the kind of state we’re usually in.

Let’s embrace messiness.

The trail of artifacts that we create in the process is meant only to serve us in the act of building. They’re not for show - not about impressing others, or for us to admire. We’re in motion. Work is in progress. We can arrange things however we like, such that the things we need in the moment are at our fingertips. The goal is getting stuff done.

Our mess is synonymous with progress, with adapting to change, with the freedom to shape our environment according to what we’re trying to accomplish.

We’d benefit from tools that are designed to assist us in navigating our messy reality. Tools that don’t promise the perfect outcome, but instead support us in our imperfect endeavors. Tools that don’t require massive levels of dedication on our part to make them work - but rather tools that ergonomically fit into our hectic lives and that make the mess a little more manageable.

Stashpad serves our messy reality.

Stashpad is the working memory that enables us to execute on what we’re doing throughout our day.

It's a note-taking app that acknowledges that reality is chaotic, that progress is non-linear, and that our day sometimes unfolds in unexpected ways. It empowers us to capture and work through thoughts without the pressure to make them look good. It gives us a place to hone in on what matters most at this moment, and handle challenges that are thrown our way just a little bit better.

A deep dive into flow

Josh Tulloch — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Get in flow to do your best work and enjoy the process.

Every once in a while, it’s just you and a screen. The rapid click of keys. The beat in your headphones. The joy of uninterrupted work.

This is “flow.” You might not call it that. You might not even know exactly how you access it. But you’ve been to the peak of the mountain. Now, how do you get back?

You start by learning the story of flow – an idea popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, a Hungarian American psychologist obsessed with discovering the “secret to happiness.” [Hint: it starts with ‘f’ and ends with ‘w.’] Then, you look at how flow factors into your story.

Ever wonder what happens to your brain when you’re in flow? Or why it might help you do your job as an engineer? Us too. And what we found is fascinating.

The final step in optimizing flow is tracking your tasks and work habits. Then, you can start building systems to stay in a deep work state for the ideal amount of time.

What do you say? You ready to get going with the flow?

This is the story of flow.

Flow is a state of being. It’s the time when you’re working at a high level with clear focus. You’re stimulated and invigorated. You are completely absorbed in what you’re doing.

The concept of flow is attributed to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who spent more than 50 years traveling the globe to try to understand what powered creativity.

He found there were moments where people felt like their work or hobby was effortless and outside of time. A state of being where they felt in control because their skills were well matched to the challenge they hoped to best.

Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow,” and expanded the idea in his 1990 book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.”

These are the four key conditions for flow:

The task needs to be the right amount of hard. You’ll get bored with a simple task before you’re done. And the frustration surrounding an unreasonable task or one not relevant to your skill set is a clear barrier to finding your flow.
You need feedback from your work. Both the short term happiness you get from making a quick code change that solves a bug and the larger satisfaction from finishing a project.
You need to be able to focus. Eliminate distractions. Silence alerts. Close your tabs. Build an environment where the majority of your stimuli is coming from the task in front of you.
You need a clear goal. Get clarity about why you’re taking on a challenge. Clear goals stave off doubt. Keep your brain from wandering during a task. Put simply: we all need a purpose for doing something.

Beyond defining the conditions for flow, Csikszentmihalyi also made one point clearly and repeatedly: anybody can find their flow.

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Why is flow important for engineers?

Flow is critical for engineers because it is a path to getting your work done efficiently, but more importantly, it is a path to enjoying the process.

You can slog through work not fully focused. It will feel like a grind and move slowly. Or, you can structure your work day to spend more time in flow. You’ll feel more rewarded because you’ll be dedicating your time to the work that matters.

Flow accounts for the idea that engineers are individuals with preferences about how and when they work. Beyang Liu, CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, suggests that developers in flow can have more agency over their jobs and design systems that let them move faster because they’re delighted by the tasks in front of them.

As Liu notes in a post about productivity, flow is “when you have ‘paged in’ all the necessary context and can actually have fun. It’s when you’re coding at the speed of thought.”

The story of flow extends beyond productivity. It can also make you more adaptable to change, which is particularly important in a startup where pivots can happen regularly.

Richard Huskey, an associate communications professor at the University of California-Davis, has spent years studying the neuroscience underlying flow. He noted that recent studies have shown flow can help you be more resilient.

This is your brain on flow.

In an effort to learn more about what is going on in our brains during flow, Huskey recently tested a theory that flow was derived from our brain’s ability to be flexible. So, the professor developed a point-and-click video game, Asteroid Impact [get the code here], with a pair of colleagues.

He had people play the game. Collect gems. Avoid asteroids. He adjusted the difficulty. He then scanned their brains while they were playing to see what happens when we’re in flow. The results astonished him.

“There is no “flow” region in the brain,” explained Karen Michele Nikos-Rose, the associate director of news and media relations for UC Davis. “Instead, flow results from networked interactions between multiple brain regions.”

In the midst of flow, your brain network is continually adapting to the task at hand. Your brain isn't working harder, but rather it's working smarter via more direct pathways. So, as Huskey noted, flow is ““simultaneously perceived as high-control and effortless, even when the task difficulty is high.”

This is why you need to be challenged – and have the skills to meet that challenge – to achieve a flow state.

Here’s why you may be really feeling the flow.

Flow isn’t only using your neural networks, it’s also influencing how you emotionally respond to the task at hand. During flow, the good vibes roll and your inner critic is muted.

Nearly two decades ago, researchers at Bonn University discovered runners in flow had higher levels of endorphins. Since then, studies have shown those in the flow state to have elevated levels of four other neurochemicals: anandamide, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

Author Steven Kotler, who has written repeatedly about how humans achieve peak performance, explained these “pleasure-inducing, performance-enhancing” neurochemicals are important because they increase “everything from muscle reaction times to attention, pattern recognition and lateral thinking—the three horsemen of rapid-fire problem-solving.”

Flow is not only about potential happiness; it also may help stave off self doubt. Kotler pointed to research from Charles Limb, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins University, for additional insight into why we might be able to stay in a flow state.

Limb studied the brains of jazz musicians during an improvised jam session and found that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain in charge of working memory, executive function, and self regulation), turned off. In other words, that little voice saying something couldn’t be done was silenced in the middle of a flow state.

Free from our inner critics, Kotler suggested that “creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk tasking becomes less frightening, and the combination lets us flow at a far faster clip. “

How much time should you spend in a flow state?

Flow cultivates a positive state of mind. Studies have shown that flow is a buffer to experiencing burnout. And, correspondingly, that a lack of flow, can make it harder to stop feeling like the work will never get done.

Aiming for constant flow is an unrealistic goal. There are too many distractions. Too many interruptions. Tasks that will be too difficult or hard. But, being intentional to spend just a little more time in flow during the work day can yield big results.

A study from the consulting group McKinsey shows that knowledge workers are five times more productive when they’re in a flow state. If you can spend 2 hours each day in a flow state, you’ll achieve as much as you would in a 50-hour work week of average productivity.

When should you aim to be in flow?

Author Jari Roomer, the creator of the Peak Productivity Planner, suggests looking at your current routine.

“So little time is spent in a flow state because operating at maximum mental capacity is energy-draining,” wrote Roomer. “That’s why it’s critical to do your flow state work when your mental energy levels are at their peak.”

Try to assess when you have lots of energy for work – perhaps at the start of the day or after a workout – and when your energy tends to wane – post-lunch or after back-to-back meetings. Then, adjust your schedule based on what you learn.

Build in clear blocks of time for specific types of work. You might try the Pomodoro Method (breaking your day up into 30-minute bites known as a “pomodoro,”) and designated meeting times each week. Time blocking cuts down on the cost of switching and helps you slip into the flow state more easily.

You might want to start tracking your flow.

Tracking flow probably feels a bit like trying to hold water in your hand. The harder you squeeze, the more it seems to slip away.

Tracking flow is really about paying attention. It’s about understanding when you are productive. And when you are lagging. And then examining the work you were doing in both instances.

Keep a journal or make notes in your schedule about when you were in flow. Try and jot down exactly what you were doing and for how long. Don’t ignore your emotional state, whether you find the work taxing or enjoyable. At the end of a week and then a month, look back at your notes and take action to make your schedule work better for you.

Build support systems for your team to encourage and sustain flow.

Once you start to recognize flow and assess the frequency or duration, you can find your flow faster.

While Csikszentmihalyi believed we all could achieve a flow state, we don’t arrive there in exactly the same way.

People he termed “autotelic,” were task-oriented. They could find meaning in the constraints of a job and might be open or seeking new experiences.

Sound like you? Since you can likely navigate internal distractions that compete for your attention, you should focus on limiting exterior distractions. Set expectations with your team about your availability. Block off hours for dedicated coding time. Schedule meetings around your peak energy hours.

If your tasks don’t get you out of bed in the morning, don’t worry there’s still a path for you to find your flow.

Exotelic folks – motivated by the end goal or what happens as a result of an action – need help managing internal distractions. This is where you may need to work to change the job or task itself to mirror what happens in a game.

Add more stimuli. Offer added attention, feedback, or praise. Tweak the difficulty or add in feedback (stimuli) once you’re engaged with a project, just as Huskey adjusted the difficulty of a video game, to try and keep a player engaged.

We all may arrive at flow in a different way; but we all can benefit from understanding more about the process of flow. Take the time to understand what you need to get into the flow and discover exactly what you’re capable of when you’re performing at your best.

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4 ways to reduce tech debt while working at a startup

Josh Tulloch — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 10:59:59 +0000

We asked startups to share how they prioritize tech debt, tests, and performance in their product roadmaps.

You've launched or released a major new feature. But there's still all of the code that’s hard to work with because it needs rearchitecting.

"Tech debt is unique to start-ups in that if you're worrying more about tech debt than the growth of the business, it probably means you’ve made it… to a certain degree." said Sonia Yang, CTO and co-founder of Treet, which helps brands with resale services.

Congrats. You've got tech debt. You probably also have a list of bugs and tests (which your engineers have told you about once…or a dozen times) on your to-do list.

Now, there's another feature to be shipped. A customer base with a slight uptick in churn. So, how do you know when to shift gears from product to proactive maintenance?

We talked with the teams at Treet, Edify (Slack-native technical onboarding and training to enable your software engineering team at scale), and Linear (issue tracking tool for high performance teams) to understand more about how they’re approaching tech debt, tests, and bugs as a startup. And we came away with 4 clear lessons on accessibility, decision-making, prioritization, and story-telling.

Keep reading to discover why maintenance tasks and tech debt don’t have to sidetrack your product roadmap.

1. Level up your code quality to help usher in new teammates.

When you think about tech debt, you probably (and understandably) focus on all of the things you haven’t done. But if you want to develop a sustainable system for high code quality, you need to think about the engineers who haven’t yet joined your team.

"We realized that if we want to grow, we have to make it easy for people to enter the culture," said Treet CTO and co-founder Sonia Yang.

Much like when you clean up your house because guests are coming over, Treet found the right moment to solve lingering bugs was in the weeks before onboarding a new pair of engineers. Yang scheduled a sprint session with her team centered on a checklist of issues that was discussed, edited, and then assigned.

While the pause to clean up code was effective – Yang estimated they tackled 70% of their issues during the time dedicated to fixing code – it was what happened afterwards that could yield significant benefits.

The company put in place monitoring to measure the effectiveness of the work. They’re also re-examining how they document changes.

Treet and other startups could look to Linear for a blueprint on how to advance projects while fixing bugs. Linear CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen has developed a culture that encourages engineers to fix problems when they’re noticed; but also know they’ve got a backstop.

"We have one engineer in “goalie,” rotation, which is basically the person to help support and fix bugs and issues that get reported," said Saarinen.

Treet is weighing a rotation or dedicated percentage of bandwidth to ensure there’s always someone chipping away at the tasks that need to get done.

"One sprint session will never clean our entire plate off," said Yang. "Now, it’s top of mind when we’re building something to think about how sensible it will be for another engineer to come after."

2. Find the right decision making framework to balance maintenance and features.

Small teams are nimble by design. Decisions need to be made quickly to account for user feedback and product pivots.

Yet, how do you hold on to flexibility – to defuse potential tension between the need for maintenance and the desire for better performance – as your team is growing?

For Jayme Rabenberg, Director of Product for Edify, the answer is simple. You need to adopt a clear decision making framework to decide when and how you’ll tackle testing, code quality, and tech debt.

"You have to start with a framework because you can't develop one in the heat of the moment," said Rabenberg.

Since decisions may be difficult, it’s imperative the decision-making process be simplified. Rabenberg is partial to The Eisenhower Matrix, a time management system developed by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Here, potential problems are addressed, delegated or deleted according to their urgency (x-axis) and importance (y-axis). If something is both urgent and important, it takes priority.

At Edify, there’s a decision maker for each project. The rest of the team then slots in as advisors, offering context (what customers want or what results might follow) to allow the decider to understand the urgency and importance of a given issue.

Tech debt and tests are unlikely to be deemed urgent; but they can take priority when long-standing issues are slowing or stopping new feature development. Conversely, functional bugs and performance issues often seem urgent, yet may only be important to solve if they’re detracting from the user experience.

A decision-making framework provides the consistency you need to weigh different courses of action and determine how resources will be allocated. It also creates transparency. The voices of team members are heard. Decisions are then holistic accounting for the needs of different departments and feedback from users.

What about the small fixes, what Rabenberg terms "microdecisions," the ones that might fall through the cracks?

Rabenberg empowers her team to make their own choices to efficiently solve discrete problems. For those decisions deemed too small for the formal process, Edify has outlined design standards and establishable, measurable outcomes to help offer guidance that still allows for autonomy.

3. Consider costs and benefits to know when to tackle tech debt.

Once you acknowledge that you can’t – and might not even want – to address all of your tech debt, the work isn’t done. You still have to decide when to prioritize maintenance.

At Treet, Yang honed in on the errors that interrupt an engineer's ability to engage in deep work.

"If an error is happening multiple times a day, and that error needs a manual fix each time, that’s time away from doing core work," said Yang.

Treet often prioritizes bugs that need to be solved immediately because the cost of that debt – the lost time and focus of an engineer – is too great. Another way to assess the value of a maintenance task is to consider the ultimate benefit to your end users or team.

At Stashpad, we're hyper-focused on performance. Developers can't get value from our product unless it's fast.

"Performance standards are part of the acceptance criteria of all new features and we prioritize tech debt when it’s starting to get in our way and slow us down," said Stashpad CEO and co-founder Cara Borenstein.

By keeping our core feature set small, we make it possible to keep our standards for performance high. This provides common ground and a shared language for our product and engineering teams, ensuring decisions are based on how they ultimately affect performance - even if that means fewer features are shipped.

"Narrowing scope is empowering," said Borenstein, "The less surface area we are trying to cover, the better job we can do at the one thing we’re trying to do well. The best products are very simple and work very well."

4. Don't forget to tell the story of each decision.

Once you’ve actually made a decision to prioritize tech debt, bugs, or new feature development, it’s important everyone on your team understands why the decision was made.

"I had to learn to articulate why I made decisions," said Rabenberg. "I don’t think that's particularly innate even to those of us that are good at making decisions."

Acknowledge that individual emotions are part of the process, even if the decisions are based on a clear set of metrics or the demands of the market. By holding space for people to share what they're feeling, it eliminates the possibility a pivot may leave one of your team feeling left behind. It also can help you gain clarity on what you need to prioritize next.

"As a leader, I think my job is to facilitate an environment that feels safe," Rabenberg said. "How we show up as humans and interact as humans is the thing that makes us successful."

Remember, you're not only taking care of the emotional needs of your team, you're also aligning team members, customers, and your leadership. The story of a decision is part of the story of your company as each decision is a step in a new direction.

"When we're clear on the why, it's much easier to prioritize and find the right path forward," said Borenstein.

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How to be successful in your next agile spike

Josh Tulloch — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 11:23:20 +0000

Focused sessions cut down on risk and clear up product timelines when there are open-ended questions.

Time sucks loom with every blink of your cursor. A big new feature with unclear parameters. A sticky technical question that stops your progress.

Big open-ended questions steal your focus. Technology hiccups you once tolerated feel like banging your head against a wall as ship deadlines approach.

Technical or design frustrations tend to invite ad hoc solutions. Problems to be solved in or around your work. But by failing to devote dedicated time to solving nonbinary problems, you’re missing out an opportunity to make critical discoveries, share knowledge, and cut down on future risks.

You need to do a spike, what engineer Kent Beck – author of the Extreme Programming book series – called a “very simple program to explore potential solutions.”

Spikes, which came into vogue during the rise of agile software development (Beck was an original signer of the Agile Manifesto), are still valuable tools two decades later for answering ambiguous or lingering questions.

Read on for insights into the types of spikes, how to effectively structure these “simple programs,” and communicate what you learn to your team.

What is a spike?

A spike is a way to set aside time for a developer to try and find possible answers to open-ended questions. If you have multiple options for solving a technical challenge or aren’t certain if a given solution will give you the results you want, a spike might be just what the doctor ordered.

In Microsoft’s Code With Engineering Playbook, they categorize two main types of spikes: technical and functional.

Technical spikes are for when your team believes there are a number of answers to an engineering problem or are unfamiliar with technology that might be the answer to that problem. With a tech spike, you might assess the load impact of a particular function or whether to build or buy software.

A functional spike dives into the process around solutions. It’s a deeper look into the steps you need to take, the potential risks, and how implementation could get complicated for your team and the end user.

You may often do a spike before or at the beginning of a sprint. A spike has four distinct parts:

You know the problem. And it’s meaty.
You don’t know the solution.
You investigate to try and find the best approach.
You report back what you find.

A successful spike often doesn’t end with an implemented solution. The outcome is a deep understanding of the problem and, if available, a recommended approach to solve it. Sometimes a spike unveils a deeper challenge that requires a further spike.

In explaining the idea he coined, Beck suggested this was an opportunity for “driving a spike through the entire design.” It’s a way to poke holes in your design theory. Others, in turn, have extended that idea to suggest that a spike is a deep – but narrow – dive (akin to an actual metal spike driven into wood) into a topic.

In an effort to back away from such a direct metaphor, Beck suggested “architectural prototype,” as another name for this process of exploration. He saw a spike (in the same fashion as an engineering feasibility spike) as a means to put some parameters in place that might help your team move forward or narrow the scope of pursuit.

“Most spikes are not good enough to keep, so expect to throw it away,” said Beck. “The goal is reducing the risk of a technical problem or increasing the reliability of a user story’s estimate.”

3 Steps for Structuring an Effective Spike

The start of a spike might feel like the expanse of outer space. A moment of exploration and of possibility. But just as you wouldn’t step out of a space shuttle without a tether, you need anchors before you do a spike. Spikes are valuable for what they reveal; but they lose utility without clear constraints in place.

1. Define what you’re looking to answer.

Treat spikes as science experiments. Begin with a clear hypothesis.

“Build the spike to only address the problem under examination and ignore all other concerns,” explained Beck.

While it’s important to define why you’re doing the spike, you don’t need all the answers before you start the process. In a forum discussion on Scrum.org about sizing spikes, Daniel Wilhite, a manager of software engineering at health insurer Bright Health, stressed the importance of not being paralyzed by choice.

“A spike’s purpose is to learn more about something in order for it to become ready for a sprint,” wrote Wilhite. “But you should always be willing to move forward on things with a bit of uncertainty because you will never know everything before you start.”

2. Time box your spike to stay on task.

While a spike affords you the freedom of time to try and address an ambiguous problem, you need to decide the amount of time and resources you’re going to commit before you dive into the unknown. For Andrew Fuqua, the SVP of Products at ConnectALL (a value stream management company), a time box – a predetermined amount of time – eliminated one of the main variables that could derail your exploration.

“Setting a small time-box limit is another way to encourage clarity,” wrote Fuqua. “I like to set explicit policy for them…no vague spikes with vague results.”

The structure of a time box follows the same parameters as productivity techniques like the Pomodoro Method (30-minute blocks divided into delineated moments of work and rest). It sets expectations for how a spike fits into workflow and when you’ll reconnect as a team to determine next steps.

3. Take notes to document what you discover.

With every spike, you’ll find interesting and unexpected pathways that aren’t on task. It’s easy to get carried away with details that don’t matter. But if you don’t document what you discover, you’ll find it’s harder to come back later and remember all of the details.

Notes let you stash those ideas without getting derailed. Hold your focus and build a written record in real-time. Don’t get bogged down by organization. Instead, look to capture your ideas quickly to keep moving forward and make sure you’re staying on the path to answer the question that launched a spike.

Tell the story of your spike through a presentation.

After a spike, you know a lot that your team doesn’t know. And now, it’s up to you to decide how to summarize your discovery.

If you’re briefly sharing what you’ve learned in a stand-up meeting or Slack, hone in on the key point and the big steps that led you to your finding. Use bullet points or organize your ideas in a similar fashion to draw a clear line through what you’ve uncovered.

Some spikes will require a more thorough discussion. But how do you distill 48 hours of research into a 20-minute presentation?

Take a page from Google software engineer Addy Osmani, who recently shared clear tips for how to communicate effectively as a technical lead on LeadDev.

“Shorter messages are more likely to be interpreted in their entirety,” said Osmani. “Don’t stray from the core point of the message.”

You’re telling a story and your team needs to be able to follow alongside. Pick the most important point of discovery (what Osmani calls the core point) and then take your team on the path.

Briefly restate the problem you examined. This is why you did the spike. Set the expectations for what you’re going to cover in your presentation to keep your team focused on the task at hand. This also helps you maintain focus, similar to the start of your spike.
Explain how you arrived at your conclusion(s). Let everybody into your moment of discovery first. Show how a given piece of software or feature can address the problem. Then, go back to the beginning and be specific in outlining the potential benefits or reasons you’ve landed on a given pursuit. Don’t get hung up on branches of inquiry that didn’t yield fruit. That’s why you took notes for an appendix (see below).
Offer an idea of what might come next. Frame the next steps as a recommendation, leaving time and space for your team to pick up the thread of what you’ve started. With a clear grasp of how long a project may realistically take, your project manager can work with you on planning and establishing timelines.

Use your notes as the foundation for a written appendix.

There’s always more to the story than what you can share in a presentation. That’s why a written appendix ensures a spike has utility beyond the moment of exploration.

“Having full results detailed somewhere will help the team trust the results,” explained Microsoft’s Code With Engineering Playbook. “Data can be interpreted lots of different ways, and it may be necessary to go back to the original data for a new interpretation.”

We’re all wired differently. While some of us may want the story around a solution, others want to be able to come to their own conclusion with a thorough look at the source material.

Once the spike is completed, the creation of an appendix gives you the opportunity to reconsider and organize those spontaneous thoughts. A written record also serves as a handy reference in the likely event that you want to revisit an idea.

Spikes rarely offer a singular path forward, instead giving you valuable insight into the unknown. They’re an efficient way to pursue open-ended questions, share knowledge, and shine light on potential solutions.

Make time for spikes to save your team time in the long run.

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Code review best practices on our team

Josh Tulloch — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 10:24:25 +0000

How Stashpad and other startups engage the whole team to build a code review culture that works.

Code reviews might feel like bumper-to-bumper traffic on your morning commute. You’re stuck. You just need to get through it in order to get to your destination.

Code reviews can sap the joy out of your day. Steal focus. Make it hard to concentrate, even if (in reality) you haven’t left your desk all morning.

As a result, you could have a tendency to try and rush through a list of pull requests. Or put them off until they threaten to get in the way of moving a feature forward. But with both approaches you’re missing an opportunity to strengthen the culture of your team.

For Derek Prior, a staff engineering manager at GitHub, code reviews are how you build the right culture at your company.

“Code review is the discipline of discussing your code with your peers that drives a higher standard of coding,” said Prior at RailsConf.

Those discussions around code give you insight into your team, encourage knowledge sharing, and drive innovation. You’re not stuck in code reviews. They’re the path to getting unstuck.

Code reviews can be a grind. They can bring out our worst habits. But, they can also help you understand the needs of your team and forge deeper connections.

By building a good code review culture, you will make a better culture for your team. Here’s how to do it.

1. Find your code review bottleneck.

Before you can change the code review process, you have to understand where it is breaking down. There’s always a bottleneck with code reviews. And if you’re a founder or senior engineer, it may very well be you.

Developers with the most experience are the ones on your team most likely to be asked to check out code. It’s a lot of work. And a lot of weight. A backlog of reviews might even be blocking progress in other areas like shipping a new feature.

Maybe you’ve already recognized the problem. So, you started to train someone. But training takes time and trust. Meanwhile, your backlog of pull requests is growing.

Change begins with acknowledging that someone on your team is carrying too much of the burden. Remember, a senior engineer is often not the only one who can review a piece of code.

Your team wants more ownership. And you’re probably ready to clear your plate. So, how do you lighten your load and give them the opportunity?

2. Assess your team’s attitude and comfort with code reviews.

When you notice that all of your code reviews are being done by the same person or a short list of people, Uma Chingunde, VP of Engineering at Render, recommends asking this question:

“Is everyone feeling confident to do code reviews?”

Even the most functional teams struggle with how to comment in code reviews. In the early stages of remaking your code review process, encourage teammates to remember there’s a human behind the code.

Gergely Orosz, the developer behind the blog and newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, believes empathy plays a big role in better code review culture.

Start by acknowledging that members of your team might still be learning your guidelines or parts of the code. Then, he recommends focusing on “explaining alternative approaches,” and submitting reviews that are “very positive in tone, celebrating the first few changes to the codebase that the author is suggesting.”

There are lots of reasons why members on your team aren’t taking on code reviews. You won’t know why unless you ask. Here’s how Chingunde suggests digging into what’s happening.

“If someone on the team doesn’t review, then have a chat,” said Chingunde. “You can say, ‘I notice you don’t review.’ It’s possible they don’t feel confident or they don’t get the value.”

Your teammate’s answer will let you know if you need to look at how you’re communicating, sharing knowledge, or assigning code reviews. Spoiler alert: It’s all of the above.

3. Good communication begins with clear, concise pull requests.

Ambiguity is a quick way to side track code reviews. The best outcomes – whether it’s code reviews or brainstorming – come from asking distinct, meaningful questions.

The team at Palantir, in a blog post about code review best practices, has developed a practical method for streamlining the code review process.

“"Only submit complete, self-reviewed (by diff), and self-tested CRs,” notes the Palantir team. “In order to save reviewers’ time, test the submitted changes (i.e., run the test suite) and make sure they pass all builds as well as all tests and code quality checks, both locally and on the CI servers, before assigning reviewers."

Take the time to catch the things that are obvious. You’ll make it easier for the reviewer to get at what’s important and you’ll benefit from insight into challenges you can’t solve on your own.

For Prior, the pull request is the opening of a conversation. The request author provides context – he suggests two paragraphs (focusing on what you’ve learned) for each change – to help the reviewer understand why a given code choice was made. That explanation is also relevant to future discussions because it becomes part of the commit.

The reviewer of the code, in turn, should “ask questions rather than making demands.” By framing potential changes as questions, you’ll encourage discussion that makes space for multiple perspectives and the chance to share knowledge about why a given idea could be the best way forward.

4. Track how long it takes for code reviews to be completed.

As you begin to incorporate more of your team into the code review process, things could naturally slow down.

So, what should you do if code reviews are taking too long? Chingunde thinks this is a great time for another check in with your engineers.

“If people take too long to do reviews, is it because they’re too busy doing their own thing? Or is it because they find it hard to review the code?”

It’s typically some combination of other responsibilities and unclear expectations that may lead to a slower pace of code reviews. In order to overcome that inertia, you will have to intentionally build time into your team’s schedule and reassess how you assign code reviews.

5. Optimize your schedule by using pause points for code reviews.

Code reviews don’t have to be a drag on productivity. By building in time around natural pause points, you can avoid disrupting your flow and the cost of context switching. Take the 30 minutes before lunch or after the morning stand-up to review code.

Regular time set aside for reviews minimizes begins to build a habit. You might even use whatever comes next – an espresso or walk around the block – as a reward for completing a code review while you’re establishing that habit.

This strategy is a way to effectively use the time when you’re transitioning away from meetings or coming out of deep work. If it’s following a stand up meeting, the code review could even begin with a short dialogue with the author of a pull request to help give you additional context or emphasis beyond what’s been typed.

6. Assign code reviews to establish expectations for your team.

Your team might be operating under the assumption that code reviews aren’t their responsibility. Asking for someone to contribute isn’t enough to break that assumption. You have to assign code reviews to each member of your team to make it clear this is a shared responsibility.

There are a number of ways to structure assignments. Here are two ideas that could work for your team: Pair engineers together on tasks so you don’t need separate reviews or assign reviews via a rotation system.

Pairs are a useful construct because they facilitate dialogue. And you don’t need to explicitly assign someone to a review. You write each piece of logic as a pair – one person “driving” (typing) – as the other person reads and discusses their code. There will inevitably be more ideas shared and different approaches.

You’re introducing a partner to speed up the pace of play. While pairing, you automatically have a built-in code review as you write the code together. That knowledge – that someone will back you up – also alleviates the stress of feeling like you have to handle everything.

We’re currently evaluating automatic code review assignments. Creating an automatic assignment rotation helps both the author of a pull request and the assignee. Make sure there’s a clear way for team members to tell everyone, whether in Slack or somewhere else, that they’ve claimed a code review.

An automated system reduces decision fatigue for your engineers. It eliminates the feeling that code review may be a burden and the cost of trying to remember who you last tapped for a review assignment. Perhaps, most importantly, it supports a culture of code reviewing by making it clear that everyone will take a turn.

You can always add in an option to override the automatic assignment if you need someone on your team with specific skills to review your code.

Building a sustainable code review culture encourages productive debates and unexpected insights. Team ownership of code strengthens relationships by defusing conflicts and preventing burnout.

Your team might get by without a well-defined code review process. But establishing clear practices and expectations around code review can help your team better share the load and move forward more smoothly and efficiently.

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Attention residue is eroding your focus

Josh Tulloch — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 18:04:31 +0000

3 intentional steps to recover your focus and flow

When you hop on back-to-back Zoom calls, ever feel like your brain is still hung up on the last conversation? Of course you do. You’re a developer.

You’re wired to keep searching for the answer to the problem. When one meeting bleeds into another, you’re often left frustrated.

As you context switch, you’re experiencing what Sophie Leroy, Associate Professor at the University of Washington Bothell School of Business, defined as “attention residue,” which is “when our attention is focused on another task instead of being fully devoted to the current task at hand.”

With attention residue, unresolved ideas take up valuable processing space and impact your ability to be present. But – cue the inspiring soundtrack – there are clear and effective strategies for lessening the effects of attention residue. By creating time limits, a dedicated writing practice, and intentional spaces, you will find it easier to focus and achieve deep work.

Read on to discover more about attention residue, how it’s impairing your performance, and the three changes to your workflow and space that help build effective boundaries around your task list.

What exactly is attention residue?

You’re not paying full attention while doing a code review. A block of meetings jams a wrench into your mental gears. Attention residue – the lingering, and, in some cases, nagging thoughts from what you just stopped doing – is the cause. Attention residue is why context switching wrecks your concentration.

In her groundbreaking 2009 study, Leroy discovered we struggle with attention residue when we’re interrupted, when we fail to finish tasks, or feel like there is not enough time to complete a task.

“Our brain finds it hard to let go of these tasks,” explained Leroy. “And instead keeps them active in the back of our mind, even when we are trying to focus on and perform other tasks.”

You can’t be present because part of your mind is still in the past. Yet, attention residue isn’t only an issue on days where your calendar is full of meetings. You’re interrupted at work every 11 minutes, according to researchers at University of California, Irvine. So, you’re feeling the effects of attention residue literally every hour of every day.

“The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”

– Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired.

How does attention residue impact your work?

Attention residue harms productivity, stifles communication, and adds stress that impedes your ability to focus.

Attention residue steals focus and makes it harder to do deep work.

You’re not at your best when you’re distracted. And attention residue keeps taking your brain off the beaten path.

While we might not want to admit it, there are limits to how much we can hold in our minds at once. In a post about distractions, Unito, a platform integration software company, explains the cost of stacking tasks. Writer Sarah McMahon-Sperber noted that “attention residue seriously impairs our working memory capacity; our brain’s ability to compute and prioritize signals in order to decide what information to ignore or absorb.”

Tasks hang around. You experience information overload. And you’re operating at a diminished capacity. Attention residue is why you might be struggling to do what author Cal Newport refers to as deep work: the flow state where it’s just you and the challenge before you.

As one of the key conditions for deep work, Newport wrote that “to produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.” Attention residue prevents you from reaching your peak because you’re never completely focused on a single task.

Attention residue makes it harder to show up for your team.

When you’re hung up on solving a problem from a previous conversation, it doesn’t just impact your performance. It also harms your coworkers because they’re not getting your full attention.

Attention residue can have a wide range of effects and they all impact your ability to be present as Leroy told the BBC recently.

“You might not be as good a listener,” said Leroy. “You may get overwhelmed more easily, you might make errors, or struggle with decisions and your ability to process information.”

Your divided mind makes it easier to make mistakes and makes it harder to listen. This is why you feel impatient or unengaged. It’s also why you might be struggling to communicate what you want from team members.

Attention residue increases your stress and steals attention.

Attention residue isn’t only an issue on busy days. It’s about the cumulative effect of those days. We’re (unfortunately) remarkably adaptive to the problems in front of us.

By ignoring attention residue, you’re sacrificing long-term focus and engaging in what The Art of Concentration author Harriet Griffey called “always-on behavior.”

“We exist in a constant state of alertness that scans the world but never really gives our full attention to anything,” warned Griffey. “In the long term, the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol create a physiological hyper-alert state that is always scanning for stimuli.”

It gets harder to concentrate. Easier to lose yourself in distractions. Stress builds as your performance suffers in a cycle that can feel difficult to break.

3 strategies for limiting the negative effects of attention residue.

You have to be proactive to break the cycle of distraction. Leroy suggests limiting the amount of time you spend on a task to help find closure. She also believes it’s important to increase the amount of time between tasks so you can write down a plan for how to return to work that’s unfinished. And since managing attention residue is also about managing stress, we believe you’ve got to rediscover your third space (easily lost in the midst of remote work).

1. Time blocks offer the closure your brain needs.

Your thoughts may not end; but your time is finite. You will always have to break for something else when there is still more you want or have to do.

Intentionally reorder your schedule to account for that uncertainty. Create time limits for tasks using a system like the Pomodoro Method – 30-minute blocks of productivity known as a “pomodoro” – to add more structure around your creative brain. Here, Leroy makes an important distinction between “closure” and “completion.”

Completing tasks is fulfilling; but it won’t eliminate attention residue because your curiosity may still have you wondering later in the day if there is a more elegant or official solution. Seek closure in lieu of completion. The end of a dedicated time window will help train your brain to accept that it’s time to move on to the next task.

2. Time between tasks gives you time to write down ideas and move forward.

As long as you’re blocking time for tasks, build in additional time between those tasks for taking notes. We heard from a Stashpad user and engineering manager, who utilizes this technique to address the hanging questions from previous conversations, what he calls “residual attention.”

The process of writing often gives you clarity. The time you set aside for writing isn’t about how you follow up with someone else. It’s explicitly about helping you transition between tasks by getting your ideas out of your head in a process we, at Stashpad, often refer to as status dumps.

You’re acknowledging that something may still be in progress; but taking a concrete pause. Leroy calls this a “ready to resume” plan. Jot down where you left off, as well as the next steps you want to take. This exercise helps you be present for the next meeting or period of deep work.

As part of your new writing practice, reserve time to review your notes at the end of the day. This is where you can refine your thoughts and create action items.

3. Find your third space. Again.

As we adapt to a remote work environment, your schedule and where you work may look quite different than it did even a year ago. While you might not miss your commute, you may not realize how much you miss your “third space.”

Mike Bifulco, a developer advocate at Stripe, explained the idea on his personal blog for developers, “the third space is a place where you're not expected to work or look after your household and family chores. It's an important part of life and finding balance.”

Don’t underestimate the value of a third space. For Bifulco, the right spot – it could be a coffee shop, co-working space, or public park – offers “balance and tranquility, social interaction, and serendipity.” You have to decide where you feel energized and away from the very real pressures of home and work.

With a third space, you get to choose the moment you switch contexts. It’s a relief because in the rest of your day you may not have control over when you’re switching contexts and laboring under the weight of attention residue.

Free from the constraints of your home or work, you’ll unwind and you might discover how to revisit or fix things crowding your head space.

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My top 5 WebStorm shortcuts

Josh Tulloch — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 17:57:45 +0000

TL;DR:

Shift + Shift - Search everywhere, do anything
Cmd + [ and Cmd + ] - Navigate through the cursor's position history
Shift + Enter - Newline without having to be at the end of the line
Cmd + Shift + F - Find text in project
Middle click - Go to definition / Show usages

ILTR (I Like To Read)

Shift + Shift - Search everywhere

This shortcut opens the "Search everywhere" modal, which you can think of as a sort of Swiss Army knife for your keyboard. From this modal you can find anything and perform just about any action that WebStorm is capable of performing simply by typing what you want.

Along the top of the "Search everywhere" modal there are six tabs indicating categories of items that can be used to narrow your search. The first tab, and the one you're thrown into when you first open the modal, is "All". As you type what you're looking for in this tab, the list will populate with a grab-bag of anything and everything from your project that matches or comes close to matching your query — classes, variables, files, directories — it's all there. In my own work, I most frequently use this to navigate between files; rather than reaching for my mouse to dig through my project tree for a file, I'll tap Shift + Shift, start typing out the filename, and typically within three or four characters my file (or the class/function/etc. that I'm looking for within that file) is selected at the top and hitting Enter will take me right where I need to be.

If you're looking for classes, files, or symbols specifically, you can use Tab or Shift + Tab to switch between the tabs and narrow your search according to type. I like to use the "Actions" tab when I don't know or simply can't remember a keyboard shortcut. In that tab you can find any action that the IDE is capable of performing. Actions are displayed along with their keyboard shortcuts, if assigned, and conveniently you can even assign shortcuts without ever leaving the "Search everywhere" modal.

Cmd + [ and Cmd + ] - Back and forward navigation

As you're working, WebStorm keeps track of everywhere the cursor goes in a really convenient navigable history, and you can use Cmd + [ and Cmd + ] to jump back and forth through that history. For example, you place the cursor in a new file and create a class. You then open an existing file, make some changes to the imports at the top, then scroll way down to the bottom and add a new function. If you wanted to quickly get back to the new file you created, you could tap Cmd + [ twice and WebStorm would bring you right back to where you left off in that file, reopening it if necessary. Two more quick taps of Cmd + ] and you'd be right back at the bottom of the other file where you created the function.

WebStorm does a really good job of differentiating between useful locations and individual cursor positions; so as you type, the cursor position after each character is not added to the history, nor are short cursor movements from the arrow keys. I find this to be extremely useful as I'm working on a task that touches a few different locations among a few different files, particularly if don't have the screen real estate to display everything at once.

Shift + Enter - Newline from anywhere

This one is really simple, but I use it constantly. A common scenario in my work is that I've edited some code, leaving my cursor somewhere in the middle of the line, and I want to add a new line. Rather than jumping to the end of the line and pressing Enter, Shift + Enter will add a newline and move the cursor down all at once.

I've also mapped ⌥ + Shift + Enter to add a newline before the current line and move the cursor there. Though I use it less frequently, this is a particularly useful one in cases where I decide I want to add a comment or documentation line to the code I've just written or edited.

Cmd + Shift + F - Find in Files

This one overlaps a bit with "Search everywhere" in functionality, as many things can be found using either method, but there are two key differences when deciding which to use. First, Cmd + Shift + F is essentially a powerful string search over your entire project; so if you're looking for a named variable or specific piece of text that lives in a comment or an actual string variable, this is what you'll need to use, since it likely won't show up in the "Search everywhere" results. Second, the modal interface is a split view where the top half shows a list of results and the bottom half is an editor opened to the file containing the currently selected result, highlighting the line that contains the matched text. Having the additional context of the surrounding ~20 lines of code can be extremely useful in locating exactly what you're looking for, and since the bottom half is a full-fledged editor, making quick changes is a breeze.

Middle click - Go to definition / Show usages

While not technically a keyboard shortcut, I've included the middle click in this list because I use it almost as much as my actual keyboard shortcuts, and it's one of the main reasons I'll actually reach for the mouse. Middle clicking (clicking the mouse wheel), e.g. a variable name, in WebStorm will either take you to that variable's definition or if you've middle-clicked on the variable definition, a list of places where that variable is used will pop up. If the variable is only used in one place, WebStorm will just take you there rather than pop up the list.

This functionality applies to everything. So if you come across a variable/string/function call/class instantiation/library import/etc. and you're not sure what it is, middle-clicking on it is always a good place to start digging for more information.

In my work, I get a lot of use combing middle-click with the Cmd + [ and Cmd + ] navigation shortcuts. A typical use case is that I middle click a couple times to get to the few files I need to reference, use Cmd + [ to navigate back to my starting point, and I'm off to the races.

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