An Engineer's Independence Day

Most people have traditions for the holidays they celebrate, usually having a day off work to hang out with family and friends and enjoy a good meal. It’s a small percentage of people that celebrate or observe the original reason the holiday was established for.?

Independence Day took on a new meaning for me over the last few years: Work Life Balance Independence

• “Hey, can I get your help with this project?” (2 weeks after original request)
• “Sure, I’ll have a look next week.”
• “Great, thanks.”

No rush and nothing needs to be done today, or on Friday before a holiday weekend. They are just happy to get the help they need since there is never a shortage of work to be done, or other people’s time they need. All due dates are fake dates for a perceived definition of efficiency, very few will cause bad things to happen if they don’t get help today or tomorrow. There’s plenty of other work they can do in the meantime. The fact that it’s not worth rushing to take care of everything right this second is something worth celebrating and cherishing.

The reality is that you can’t help everybody simultaneously. I used to have a 15 minute to 1 hour response SLA, and I was helpful with transactions but projects rarely got done since you’re busy dealing with the noise. Now that I focus on strategic heads down projects most of the time, I have a ~1 month best effort turnaround with a self service ticket approach for adding your project to the queue. This has reduced my daily response time from 6 hours a day with Slack responses down to less than 2 hours. The number of projects I completed increased 5x.

It’s like landing a plane at an airport, everybody joins the pattern and we land each plane one at a time. Just let me know if you’re low on fuel and need to declare an emergency to get prioritized landing, but if everybody declares an emergency or tries to land at the same time then we’re just going to have a lot of plane crashes.

It’s important to have the independence to choose what day that work fits into your schedule and when you’ll be in the right state of mind. Can you predict when you want to group your Cessna-sized problems together to solve or when you can give more focused time to solve a 747-sized problem? Don’t burn yourself out, because the planes will never stop coming.

In our informal team discussions, we have a more down to earth approach.

• “That sounds like a (next) Tuesday problem.”
• “That sounds like a September problem.”
• “This solves so many problems at once, let me figure it out and show you what I come up with in 2 weeks.”
• “I’m winding down for vacation, can we wait until I’m back in 3 weeks to talk about this?”

Have the independence to live your life with the understanding that work will still be there tomorrow, or after you get back from your camping/road trip, or after your trip to Disneyland.?

Your family, your friends, your health, and your enjoyment of life can all be balanced by having the independence of async work and empathy that others will help you when they can, and returning the same courtesy and understanding of delayed response. You never know when you or a family member will have a life changing event or get sick and change your narrative of what matters.??

Someone will always be knocking on your door. The world will always be on fire.

Close your laptop, turn off your phone, and go enjoy life. Your email inbox will still be there after lunch, or next week.?

One of my teammates used to post on Slack every day between 4:45pm-5:00pm that he was taking off for the day. Another teammate would post an anxious message that they had to take off early at 3:30pm, but they could still be reached on their phone.?

We’ve shifted our culture on our team to sign off when your brain is done for the day, and simply set your Slack status orb to away. No need to post, no need to feel guilty for not “staying at your desk until 5pm”. Now I see their status orb turn off around 3pm most days, and the number of Git MRs per week (productivity metric) has more than doubled since they group together the work that makes sense instead of what can they do before signing off at 5pm.?

Every company’s culture is based on the deliberate actions of each team member.?

The engineers on my team now have an average of 3 hours of 1:1 meetings per week (manager 1:1 and 2 peer 1:1) plus 2 hours of optional meetings (company wide calls). All other collaboration is async. It’s a lot easier to plan and be flexible and focus on getting the work done.

We don’t have status report meetings since our team are mostly introverts and might share 2-3 bullet points on an hour long call. We have automatically generated list of all issues and code merge requests you’ve worked on that is generated every 1-2 weeks (team member’s choice on the day it gets generated to reflect the work they are doing). This report usually has the equivalent of 30-50 bullet points that can be skimmed in 5 minutes asynchronously. We still use our 1:1 meetings that are focused on a specific problem we are trying to discuss the engineering solution or code pair on solving it together, but no meetings for the sake of having a meeting or collaboration alignment without a deliverable purpose.?

I see other department team members’ calendars filled with 30 minute meetings 5-8 hours a day (40 to 64 per week) to stay aligned on a lot of topics. Productivity can be measured in a variety of objective and subjective ways, but their automatically generated status reports usually have less than 5 bullet points on them each week of “shipped work”.?

Collaboration and results work are two different things. You need to decide for yourself and your role what matters.

If you’re measured on results, not hours or collaboration meetings, then be efficient with your time and celebrate your independence with the hours you regain to live life to the fullest or balanced with relaxation.

Streamline your project process so others can enter your landing pattern automatically so you can focus on landing the planes (projects). Then work the hours while your brain is at its peak and enjoy a relaxing life during the downtime.?

My brain doesn’t function well on Fridays for projects, so I do house projects instead. My brain comes up with a lot of great ideas on Saturday mornings after a relaxing cup of tea so I crack my laptop open and write them down or create diagrams and docs. Do what works for you.

Just like the days before people discovered remote work, you are a lot happier beating traffic at 3pm than sitting in traffic at 5pm. There’s no need to let your brain get stuck in traffic. Go out and enjoy your garden or be the cool parent that gets to watch your kid’s Little League practice 3 days a week after school.

Now think about The Great Resignation and the root cause. You can get similar benefits without leaving your job by rethinking your job to align with what matters with your lifestyle.