Many years ago I was interviewing for a management job at a growing tech company. After a long day of meeting with engineers and product managers, I made it to the final boss, the VP of Engineering. He introduced himself, put his hands together at the fingertips, and said, "Tell me your top accomplishments for the last three and six months."
I froze up. It had been a very busy year. I’d worked on a wide variety of things. I stalled. "Hmm... Let me think about that." He quickly cut me off. “No. That's not a good answer. You should be able to answer that without hesitation. Communicating the value you bring to the organization is an important part of being a leader. My advice for you is to set a calendar reminder. Every three months write down the top achievements for your team and your personal ones."
I was not offered that job. But I appreciated the great advice! After the interview, I set a calendar reminder, and every quarter since that day I have written down my top accomplishments. It's a very helpful habit for reasons I describe below. Many things that help me succeed in my role as an engineering leader are simple habits, like that one. I developed a set of daily, weekly, quarterly and annual routines that I'll share in this post. Many were tips given to me by coworkers, some I read about in blogs and books.
These habits are all personal actions I would practice regardless of the type of project or team I’m working with. This is definitely not a comprehensive list of everything managers need to do to be effective. They’re just a few things I find helpful. Here are my habits:
Daily Habits
Identify Your Top Six Priorities
I use a to-do list in Evernote to record all my pending tasks. During the day I’ll agree to do some work and add a task to the bottom of my to-do list. The list gets long during busy periods, so I prioritize it daily using the Ivy Lee Method. Productivity consultant Ivy Lee recommended this method to Charles Schwab in 1918 as a way to help his company’s executives be more efficient. It’s very simple. At the end of work each day you rank your top six priorities in order of importance. When you start the next day, work on the tasks in priority order. That’s it! I typically set out to tackle three-to-six tasks per day, so the Ivy Lee number seems appropriate.
Write and Share Daily Intentions
Most software engineering teams start each day with a “standup” meeting where each member summarizes what they plan to focus on that day. The team I currently work on is distributed across US and EU time zones, so we do this asynchronously by writing that info into a Slack channel used for daily standup posts. I find it helpful to record my daily intentions as it motivates me to complete what I publicly said I’d do. Having those entries written down also helps me remember what I accomplished when I write my weekly status update.
Keep an Emotional Journal
Since the COVID-19 pandemic started I’ve been trying to keep closer tabs on my emotions. After experiencing strong feelings like stress, irritation, fear, anger, or excitement, I jot down a brief note about the emotion and situation in a notebook I keep on my desk. Recognizing and naming your feelings is an important part of building emotional intelligence. My daily entries are useful to reflect on when I write my weekly impact journal entry. They often describe the emotional roller coaster I experience while encountering setbacks, pitfalls, and small wins.
Weekly Habits
Update My Calendar
It’s important to start your week with a good plan. As a manager in a medium-sized company, I usually have 2 to 4 hours of meetings per day. Many of those are recurring like 1-on-1’s and weekly staff meetings. Others are ad-hoc project meetings that I need to prepare for in advance. I take a few minutes each Monday morning to look at the week ahead, canceling or declining meetings I don’t need to attend, and adding blocks of personal time for accomplishing the tasks on my “top six priorities” list. This helps me spend my time intentionally.
Exercise
Exercise is an important tool I use to manage stress. I’ve been going to the gym twice a week for years and doing the same simple workout. It’s such a regular habit that, after years of repetition, it requires no will power or deliberate effort on my part. It has been tricky adapting my exercise habits during the pandemic, but I’ve made do with jogging, YouTube yoga, and buying a bench and a few free weights for my basement. Whatever routine I follow must be so easy that I have no excuse not to do it. I also listen to things I enjoy while exercising like music, podcasts, and audiobooks as a rewarding motivator.
Review Indicator Metrics
In the seminal management book “High Output Management”, Andy Grove recommends establishing indicators to help you understand how you’re progressing towards your goals. Pursuing metrics blindly can cause unintended problems, so Grove recommends using “paired metrics” that show both the positive effects of your teams’ focus as well as the negative consequences. An example is pairing Jira velocity (quantity) with the bug rate (quality). I’ve managed infrastructure owning teams over the last few years, so I’ve tracked metrics like:
new platform adoption %
weekly production incidents
off-hours paged while on-call
security tasks open past due date
Every Friday morning I add a new column in my “indicator metrics” spreadsheet then record 10 metrics for the week. This process helps me model how work flows through the system, and allows me to see if the team made progress or was interrupted by reactive tasks. It also produces data I use to create charts showing trends like the percentage of customers migrated to the new platform over the last six months.
Write in an Impact Journal
During an all-hands meeting, a VP at my company mentioned they keep a work journal where they wrote down the impact they made each week and how they felt about it. I started doing this and found it’s a very useful way to reflect. After starting his habit, you can scan the weekly wins you recorded every three months to remember the highlights from the quarter. Writing down your impact is doubly useful because you can immediately copy-paste it into your weekly status report. I’ve also found it interesting to read through my emotions from the last three and six months. When I read about my greatest worries and fears months after a stressful situation has been resolved, it reminds me of the powerful emotions we experience during challenges, and that every crisis is eventually resolved one way or another.
Share a Weekly Update
Information flow within your organization is critical and it helps to have a planned, consistent approach. This often looks like a weekly email, shared doc, or internal blog post shared with your manager and ideally with your stakeholders. There’s great advice on how to do these including Laura Hogan's “Week in Review Leadership Comms” and my colleague Jade Rubick’s “How to be an information flow superhero”. Currently, my process is writing a “reflection” on Friday mornings in Koan, an OKR tracking tool. It's visible to leaders in my org and I also share it with the team I manage. The format of the update is: things the team accomplished, things I got done, after-hours on-call support issues, priorities for next week, and concerns I’d like to raise. I write this after reviewing indicator metrics and writing my impact journal entry, so it’s mainly a copy-and-paste exercise. As we’re all remote workers during the pandemic, this habit is even more valuable. Your manager and stakeholders need to know where your team is focused, what’s holding you back, what's finished, and what you’re working on next.
Quarterly Habit
Record My Quarterly Accomplishments
Every three months I write down my top achievements under these categories:
Team accomplishments
Communications (internal blog posts)
Process work
Helping other managers
Hiring
I scan through my impact journal entries from the last 12 weeks and copy-paste the most impressive items into the quarterly accomplishment list. When it comes time for my performance review, which happens every six months at my company, I simply combine the lists from the last two quarters then share with my manager. Nice and easy.
It's great having a record from each quarter going back for years of the things I've helped my team do and other things I've done personally. If anyone asks what I've done over the last year, I know where to look to help jog my memory. Sometimes I go back through the lists during times of doubt and uncertainty to help me remember what is possible. Reflecting on how you overcame past struggles can provide insight into your current challenge.
Annual Habit
Create Personal OKRs
Each year on January 1st, I open a Google doc and create a list of personal OKRs (objectives and key results) for the year. I usually have three or four top objectives with about five measurable results under each one. After writing my list of new year’s resolutions, I set a biweekly calendar reminder to revisit and update my progress. Christina Wodtke, author of the book Radical Focus on OKRs, has some great tips about using personal OKRs here.
Personal OKRs help me focus on my health, family, friendships, and things I aspire to do outside my 8-to-5 job. Life is not all about work. It can be easy to continue thinking about work challenges on nights and weekends. This habit helps remind me there are other important things in my life.
Any Suggestions?
Have you formed a productivity habit you find particularly useful? Is one missing from my list? I’m curious about what works for you. Feel free to share your favorite habit in the comments below. Thanks!
