You NEED These 3.5 Tips For Organizing Time As A Software Engineer

as software Engineers one of our goals when we're working is to get into this state of flow and this flow state is where we can be really productive with respect to either coding or working through problem solving and it almost feels like what you're thinking is just coming out of your fingertips and going right into the computer it's almost magical in a sense but when it comes to getting a state of flow and when we talk about productivity and other things like that there are so many people creating content online talking about this so many experts that have all of their opinions and to be honest I'm not an expert on this however I am a principal engineering manager at Microsoft and I do have my opinions about how to make this work better in one of my one-on-one conversations recently this came up from an employee and we were chatting through some different opportunities in order to get some more productivity out of your calendar time in this video I'm going to show you three and a half tips to try and organize your calendar and get a little bit more time out of what you're doing with respect to software engineering and before I dive into those tips just a quick reminder to subscribe to My Weekly Newsletter it's totally free it has exclusive articles and early access to videos just like this it goes out every weekend and the link will be in the comments below so tip number one with respect to your calendar time is going to be trying to group days into themes or when I say days this could be portions of days as well and the idea behind this is that if you know you're going to have particular recurring meetings um so for me I have one-on ones with my employees but for the individual employees on my team they might have things like all hands meetings that we have within our team maybe it's a weekly sync that they have to do between them and another team that they're working on a project for there could be all sorts of different things we even have things like weekly service reviews where we're going over data for how the service was running and things that we can fix or improve but this type of thing is going to look different everywhere the point is that we have some type of recurring meetings and different themes of things that we need to work through unfortunately some of this stuff is out of of our control right because if we're one person attending the meeting it's not going to be such that we can just adjust the whole schedule for everyone else that's involved if there's like maybe 10 plus people on the meeting or something like that so you might start to notice that your calendar is getting shaped in a particular way just by some external factors like these meetings but from there what I would recommend doing is the stuff that you do have control over try to theme your days or portions of your days so that you can have blocks of time whether that's a c couple of hours at a time maybe in the morning in the afternoon maybe your Tuesdays and Thursdays are reserved for meetings and Monday Wednesday Friday is you know fully free where you can go crank out code or problem solve this is a relatively simple thing that I recommend people try to do because by having that time available especially at hours at a time if you're able to that's going to afford you the opportunity to hopefully get into a state of flow where you can remove the other distractions around you there's 's other tips for that but the point is that you have your calendar cleared out so that you have that time to go dedicate to your work and you might say Nick okay that's cool but that seems infeasible because there's always stuff popping up and look I get it I work in big Tech and I know that this kind of stuff happens all the time so what I recommend for tip number two is blocking off your calendar purposefully and I mean it I seriously block off portions of my Calendar recurring for different slots every week just so that people don't schedule time with me now that's not to say that I don't make exceptions for things where if that's the only time people can meet that I just say absolutely no way I'm not going to meet with you but a lot of my role in particular is meeting with other people so the point here is that by blocking off your calendar you're prioritizing your time first you are signaling to other people by setting boundaries that that time is reserved for you and you don't have to necessarily make your calendar public and say this is Nick's personal time don't message me kind of thing just make a private meeting and put it in your calendar mark yourself as busy this way if you find that people are trying to book you they might be reaching out and saying hey that time slot that you have on Tuesday from 2: to 3:00 is there any way that you could move that meeting around and this affords you the opportunity to decide for yourself are you willing to give up some of your potential Flow State maybe maybe there's an exceptional case that you want to work through and that's totally acceptable but you now have the opportunity to think through and decide do you want to give that up and do the meeting or do you want to be able to say back to them sorry I'm busy I can't move it if it's really important that you attend that meeting that person will find a way to reschedule it to ensure that you're included however if it's not super important that you're there not a big deal they'll schedule the meeting at that time and you won't attend maybe there's a recording or some notes you can follow up on if you're interested maybe you can reach out to the person that organized the meeting and get some information about it after but the point is if it's not critical that you're there they'll keep doing it if it is critical you're there they'll find a time that you're free so tip number two is truly to set some boundaries by blocking off your calendar to ensure that you can do tip number one well for tip number three how do we decide if it's worth for us to go to these meetings so whether or not you're in a position where someone's reached out to you during some block time and they're asking if you can move things around or that time's totally free you get a meeting request that comes in why should you go I think many of us just say well I've been invited to a meeting I better just go but if you find that you're going to a lot of meetings and you're doing a lot of nothing when you go to those meetings maybe it's time you start questioning this personally this is something that I've started doing more often and truthfully I need to do a little bit better on my delivery about asking this however I do reach out to the person that's organizing the meeting and if I'm not totally sure what the goals are I just ask I try to say hey look like I see what you trying to do in this meeting but what's the outcome that you're trying to accomplish because these are very different things you could say we're going to talk through these things in this meeting but what's the goal that you're trying to get out of it because if you're just going to talk through it and I've already talked through it or read through it I don't need to do that again however if the goal is that you want me to offer my feedback about something and make sure that we can reach a conclusion that's a slightly different story I know what end State you're trying to achieve not just some of the actions that you want to do in the meeting but asking for what the goal of the meeting is brings us to tip number three and A2 and that's the ability to say no when you have the goal given to you and it doesn't align with the best use of your time and it sounds a little weird and I think it's really difficult for people to say no to meetings because someone's reached out to you and they've said you're invited to this they've opted to include you in the conversation and I think that's good right we want to make sure that people are being inclusive and then we can participate and be given the option to participate however if it's not a good use of your time and it's not a good use of their time to communicate some of this stuff for you for whatever reason based on the goals that they provided say no of course you don't have to be rude about this I know it feels rude to say no and believe me I get it because I have a really difficult time saying no and I'm telling you this because I have to practice it so I totally understand but being able to say no is ensuring that you're respecting your own personal time boundaries and in fact if that person's a little bit confused why you're saying no perhaps they need to clarify the goals a little bit more perhaps they are requiring you to be there and they do need your input but they're not really articulating that clearly so there's nothing wrong with saying no if you've asked for what the goals are and they don't align with the good use of your time and those are just a quick three and a half different tips that you can try to implement to make better use of your calendar time the first one that we were looking at is being able to group portions of your days or entire days into different themes to try and ensure that you can get some amount of block to get get Flow State and to help ensure that you do that that brings us to our second tip which is actually blocking your calendar so that you have those contiguous blocks of time where you can dedicate to problem solving and writing code and tip number three and three and A2 we're around asking for goals of what the meeting is so that you're able to say no and if you're still struggling with the idea of being able to say no and communicate this effectively especially if you're dealing with more senior software Engineers that might be reaching out to you to invite you to these meetings you can check out this video next thanks and we'll see you next time