Other skills that matter 🤌

The best engineers I worked with did know a lot of technical stuff but I’m sure they didn’t get where they are only because of it.

There are a set skills that we tend to underestimate on the early stage of our careers and we keep neglecting them until we notice that what took us here won’t take us to the next levels.

At this point you may think that I’m talking about non-technical skills, right?

Right 😅 And believe me, if you’re not working on another planet, you will need a bunch of these kind of skills to succeed (even more) in your career. It’s not a matter of choice.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

In this article I’m going to talk about two things that I’ve invested a couple time and effort to improve myself in the last years.

Ps: It doesn’t mean that I’m a role model on these, it’s just a couple learnings that may help you on getting more FOCUSED and PRODUCTIVE.

FOCUS

There’s nothing worse than those days where you have no clue on what you need to do when the day starts and then you finish the day still trying to understand what happened during those ~9 hours that you were “working”.

This usually means you couldn't focus on nothing during the day and these couple things may help you on having focus.

Organization:

There's no focus without organization. Have an agenda and also your mind in place. Don't blame the company, your manager, the customer. It's on you, organize your demands and have clear what you need to do before starting your day.

Prioritization:

Have clear not only what you need, but WHY. In most cases this will help you on prioritizing things. If it's not clear, ask help for your pairs or leader so you understand it.

Shut up the noise:

We are constantly consumed by a lot of noise that don't help us on anything. Silence them. Mute (and leave) channels. Block notifications. Focus is an exercise, practice it and stay tuned to all those things that makes you lose focus on your objectives.

PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity is about delivering more with less effort or within less time. We all want this and, as you advance in your career, this is something highly expected.

Ps: delivering more doesn't mean more work, most of the times this is not where the actual value is. Always seek for high quality deliveries.

Think before starting:

There's nothing worse than advancing on the wrong direction. So before starting any kind of job have clear in your mind how things will look when you finish. Ask relevant questions and, only after this, start working on it.

Use the correct tools:

This is where a lot of us suffer the most. Don't accept suboptimal tooling, seek for the best tools. Whenever there's a tool missing, consider building it ✨

Document:

Write your doubts, things you've discovered, the reasoning on a design decision, etc. This is not about a complex documentation. Simple notes to yourself forces you think twice about what you are doing/thinking, this habit will help on you getting to better decisions and also make your communication better.

Ask for help:

Senior professionals knows when request help. Don’t get carried away by the ego.

Self-Review:

Be the first one to reason about your decisions. Anticipate the questions you'll be asked.

Conclusion

There are a set of practices that we do without noticing that makes us more focused/productive. Not noticing them is not necessarily a good thing since it's hard to replicate something you don't actually know you are doing. That's why I wrote this article, it’s mostly for myself but i really hope it can help others too.

Focus and productivity are very connected and applying these techniques to your daily work will certainly boost your capacity of delivering value to the environment where you are. Let me know if it works for you!

See you 👋