Working hard is not the same as working efficiently. The number of things that we could possibly work on can be boundless, yet our time and resources are limited. Being effective means working on the things that provide the most value while requiring the least amount of effort. The 80–20 rule, also known as Pareto Principle, applies here: 80 percent of results should come from 20 percent of effort.

Apart from routine work, engineers also have to refactor inefficient code, address technical debt, and improve workflows. With so many tasks, it is important to prioritize and manage time effectively. Prioritization requires us to assess the leverage created by a given task. Leverage, writes Edmond Lau in The Effective Engineer, is defined by a simple equation: It’s the value, or impact, produced per time invested.

Former Intel CEO, Andrew Grove, explains in his book High Output Management that your overall leverage, the amount of value that you produce per unit of time — can only be increased in three ways:

By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity. By increasing the output of a particular activity. By shifting to a higher-leverage activity.

In order to be more efficient at our work, we need to align ourselves to these 3 goals at all stages, in every activity we do.

In this article, we will explore how you can be more efficient at meetings, while checking your emails/slack, and while resolving your tickets.

1. Efficiency at Meetings:

Check if you really need a meeting

If you just want your team to vote on something, or resolve a query with someone in particular, IM or Email may be a better bet. Instead of a long-winded discussion, you will be able to get the responses you want, without having to collect everyone in 1 place.

Set agenda and schedule

Meetings can often spiral when the agendas to be discussed are not fixed and handed out to everyone in advance. Set out the points to be discussed and the time you expect to be done with them beforehand. Have clear moderation of the discussion and finalize a plan at the end of the stipulated time.

Give everyone homework

In order to contribute effectively, every attendee of a meeting must have a clear background, pre-requisite knowledge, and ideally their own viewpoint outlined. When everyone is prepared, meetings stick to the agenda and run more efficiently.

2. Efficiency with Alerts and Notifications:

It is important to stay in touch with what’s happening around you, and email and IM notifications are indeed a part of work life. It is important to know when something goes down, but constant interruptions can halt your flow. In a day, we need to take out some time for deep, uninterrupted, continuous work. Mute your notifications for an hour or 2, and finish the project at hand. When you can work continuously, you’ll be surprised as to how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time. You can always check notifications while you take breaks, when you are okay with saving the task you’re on and taking it up later.

Slack allows you to mute notifications for a channel, or customize them per your preference. This allows one to keep working and only receive notifications from the most critical channels.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, defines this continuous work as:

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

I’ve also heard this concept referred to as flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. People who have experienced flow describe it as

“a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lost their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.”

Getting to this state for a few hours every work day will add significantly to the leverage of the work you create.

3. Efficiency with tickets:

Even when you are assigned a ticket, which has been through story time and sprint-planning stages, you can increase the leverage of your work by trying some simple things:

Make use of existing libraries and code. As tempting as it may be to write from scratch, it is pointless to re-write code

Automate tasks that can help you and future developers.

Make your code re-use friendly by abstracting common tasks into functions/classes and documenting heavily.

Focus on the MVP: Minimum Viable Product. You can always add the fancy bells and whistles in the next iteration, or when you have more time. At the end of the day, releasing small ships and reducing scope without reducing value will make you a more efficient engineer.

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