I used to end my weeks with a list of commits and a vague sense of progress.
But when things went wrong, I couldn’t explain why.
I was shipping but not learning.
In my earlier days of engineering, I was really focused on pushing as many changes as possible to prove to myself and others that I was productive.
The few moments I would pause and reflect on my engineering work would be either following an incident: our team would get together and dive deep into events to identify the root cause and derive any learnings to avoid repeating the same issue. Or during the occasional team retrospectives which felt mostly forced and focused on deliverables rather than actual reflection. These retros, despite being important in their own right, are more responsive rather than proactive. Why wait for an incident or wait until the end of a sprint (or longer) to reflect?
As engineers we should take a proactive rather than reactive approach to reflection. Think of reflection as an extra tool in your stack that you need to keep sharpening over time.
I noticed that we tend to be good at reflecting on systems (what went well, what broke, and why ...) but we rarely do it for ourselves. Reflecting on ourselves allows us to be more in tune with our own emotions and to take different stakeholder perspectives. This has the potential to improve team culture and foster collaborations at many companies.
I started tracking how I think - not what I ship - and it changed me as an engineer. For the better.
I created a dev journal using a simple google doc where I would write down my thoughts and emotions at the end of the day and tie them to my deliverables. This became a daily ritual for me.
My frequent reflections pushed me to pause between commits and think deeply about what went well, and also what went wrong. It allowed me to ensure that my deliverables and contributions were aligned with my career goals. Regular reflective practice was a major contributor to my job promotion last year. It allowed me to declutter and understand my impact at a deeper level and communicate this clearly to my manager. Think of reflection as clearing mental debt, just like we refactor to reduce technical debt. It pays off to reflect regularly.
The company I was working for actually encouraged us to share our weekly deliverables via Slack which included a reflection part. This shows there is real value behind this practice and this is also getting increasingly recognised at a company level.
With the increasing use of AI in our daily workflows, it is increasingly common to ask the models to summarize, decide, suggest, and even judge trade-offs for us. We’re basically allowing the model to think for us. This is technically referred to as cognitive offloading. That’s powerful but also risky. When a system does more of the cognitive work, our feedback loop weakens. We ship faster, but we retain less context about why a decision was made. Over time, that creates a gap between output and understanding.
Reflection acts as a counter-balance to this kind of cognitive offloading. It forces us to pause and reconstruct our reasoning. For instance through asking ourselves important questions such as:
- Why did I accept this suggestion?
- What assumptions did I outsource?
- Where did I rely on speed over judgment?
In this age of generative AI, critical thinking is no longer optional, it’s a competitive advantage.
So how does this work in practice?
Sit down and write down your thoughts about a decision, trade-off, or moment of friction from the week. Or anything else you choose to reflect on.
One reflection per week is a good start. Consistency is the key. Ideally you would ramp this up to a daily practice. But let's start small and learn fast. Over time, you will gradually create thought patterns and build up your feedback loop.
A paper from a Harvard Business study, demonstrated that even 15 minutes a day of structured reflection can improve your work performance by a lot. And over a period of only 10 days!
I actually started sharing one reflection prompt per week in a small newsletter along with my reflection and insights generated by Jot's Reflection Engine, an app I built to sharpen reflection skills. No hacks. No hot takes. Just one question worth sitting with and reflecting on as an engineer. Maybe you get inspired to start your own reflections.
Time for some homework (don't scroll, I see you)
If you had to pick one question to reflect on this week, what would it be?
With that question in mind, try to reflect on it.
Feel free to share your reflections in the comments and I will reply with a free reflection insight and score generated by Jot's Reflection Engine.
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