A lesson from Richard Feynman for Engineering Leaders
And practical tips on how to make you more productive as an Engineering Leader
Hello readers,
Today's article is on a topic I'm passionate about: the challenge of balancing urgent reactive work with more important and strategic endeavors as a knowledge worker.
Though I focus mainly on the perspective of an Engineering Leader, most of the concepts in the article apply to most types of knowledge workers.
The article covers:
🤝 Collaboration in the modern workspace
💪🏼 The Definition of Productivity for an Engineering Leader
⚛️ Richard Feynman's radical approach to productivity
⚖️ Less radical ideas on the subject
💡 How to put these insights into practice as an Engineering Leader
Let's dive into it!
🤝 Collaboration and the modern workspace
The modern knowledge-work workspace is largely built on the premises of collaboration.
People usually work in teams that share common goals and coordinate their activities very closely to achieve results. This approach is very common with engineering teams.
I call this the Type 1 level of collaboration.
Collaboration is built on a solid foundation of shared goals, mission, processes, and resources. All members of the team share the same incentives. Being part of this team is what they usually define their job. Collaboration in these settings tends to be highly effective once the right skills, processes, norms, and rituals are in place.
There is also another type of collaboration though, which I call Type 2 collaboration.
Despite the desire to make individual teams as autonomous as possible by reducing external dependencies, they all operate within the context of a bigger organization.
This larger organization is also a constant source of requests for collaboration: department-level initiatives, all-hands meetings, HR and finance processes that need to be executed, or simple ad-hoc requests for help. You name it.
Some of these requests for collaboration can be structured around well-defined processes, but many of them rely on more ad-hoc and haphazard unscheduled requests.
This approach is what Cal Newport refers to as The Hyperactive Hive Mind.
The challenge for someone in your position stems from the expectation that you will dutifully attend to all such requests because that rhymes with being a good employee. This is how we work here, you'd better get used to it!
As Engineering Leaders responsible for one or more teams, we're often bombarded with requests coming from disparate sources within our organization. Deciding to simply accommodate all of them in a purely reactive mode might make you very popular among peers, at the expense of your productivity or burnout.
What does it even mean to be productive as an Engineering Leader?
💪🏼 Productivity of an Engineering Leader
When you're holding a position in engineering leadership, you might be led to think you exclusively produce value through others. After all, you don't write code, and you might think the best way to set your team up for success is to always be available.
But your job is not to merely maintain the status quo and react to whatever urgency is being thrown in your direction. Depending on your seniority levels, you will have varying degrees of responsibility for setting the directions for your organization, improving the way the team works, ensuring the underlying systems keep evolving according to business needs, etc.
These could involve you working on projects such as:
🔭 Defining the next 1 to 3 years tech strategy;
👥 Evaluating and executing organizational changes;
🎯 Setting yearly/quarterly goals, and roadmaps for your team;
🤝 Establishing or revamping the recruitment process for key roles;
⚙️ Evaluating and introducing new processes to increase your team's productivity;
📊 Extracting insights from metrics available to you;
📝 Documenting a proposal, a new piece of technology, or a process;
Though some of these activities will require input from other members of the organization, they will require a non-trivial amount of directed focus and attention from your side. These are not activities you can perform during a 10-minute break between meetings, or while you're checking your Slack messages.
If you spend your days in pure reactive mode, you might be one of those to tries to catch up with these important but not urgent responsibilities in the evenings or during weekends. That's not how it's supposed to be.
The bad news though is that it's largely up to yourself to fix it. This is what is somewhat referred to as the paradox of autonomy. As nobody is supposed to tell you exactly how you should do your job, that often leaves it up to each individual to optimize their productivity. Your manager can and should support you, but don't expect them to fix the problem for you. They might be struggling with the same issue!
In summary, I believe productive Engineering Leaders are on top of their time and can consistently make progress on important strategic work while making sure urgent work is being taken care of in a structured and undramatic way.
How do you manage to achieve productivity while still being considered a good citizen of your company?
That's the hard part, and to figure it out we'll start by looking at a very radical example.
⚛️ Richard Feynman's radical approach to productivity
Richard Feynman is very well known for his broad contributions to the world of theoretical physics. He often attributed this ability to make such contributions to his radical approach to productivity.
Here is a quote from from him:
To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time. it needs a lot of concentration... if you have a job administrating anything, you don't have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I'm irresponsible. I'm actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don't do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, "no", I tell them: I'm irresponsible
A “default no” approach to potentially distracting collaboration is what allowed him to make significant contributions to the world of physics!
Of course, such a radical approach wouldn't be compatible with the reality of most knowledge workers. Should you go all Feynman with your colleagues, you might find yourself in a very unpleasant place very soon.
❌ Not something I'd recommend trying out!
Still, there is an important lesson here. Meaningful work requires a deliberate approach. If you want to make significant contributions to your job, you need to be very intentional about how you invest your time and energy.
If you leave it up to others and just say yes to any request coming your way, you'll be sucked into a life of shallow activities.
So, how can we adapt Feyman's approach to the reality of an Engineering Leader?
Let's look at some ideas that can help inform a more balanced approach.
⚖️ Less Radical Ideas on the Subject
In his 2009 book Collaboration, Morten T. Hansen introduced the idea of the T-shaped Manager in contrast with 3 other archetypes of managers, as you can see in the following 2x2 matrix.
Though the book focuses mostly on the context of big collaborative projects within a firm, it provides some interesting input for our topic. Specifically, the quadrant called The Butterfly.
Butterflies are employees who are always willing to help, jumping from a fire to a committee. As a consequence of that, they struggle to get their work done.
My observation is that in many workspaces we tend to promote a culture of butterflies as a way to cope with lack of structure and processes. Butterflies can be very popular in such environments but likely stagnate in their progression.
Note that Richard Feynman would be a Lone Star in this model, an archetype that brings with it a whole lot of complications.
In his 2013 book Give and Take, Adam Grant looks at workplace dynamics from a different angle, comparing Givers and Takers.
🫱🏼 Givers are people who tend to selflessly help others, regardless of their own needs.
👊🏼 Conversely, Takers tend to take advantage of the help of colleagues to their advantage.
Grant argues that to be a successful professional you need to develop the traits of a third archetype: The Otherish.
Without going into too many details, the main difference between a Giver and an Otherish is that the Otherish is very strategic in figuring out when it's worth helping others. More importantly, they don't do this based on self-interest, but rather on the overall impact of the collaboration.
Both Grant and Hansen suggest that successful professionals need to find a healthy balance between helping others and getting their most impactful work done.
It sounds obvious on paper, but putting it into practice requires a strong deliberate approach.
Let's look at some practical approaches for someone in your position.
How to put these insights into practice as an Engineering Leader
Enough theory, you might say. How do I apply the learnings from Feynman to my daily job, without turning into an absolute jerk?
Here is a list of tips I recommend you to experiment with and keep adjusting to suit your preferences and needs.
🏋️♂️ Know when you're most productive
I recommend you start by optimizing your schedule based on your different energy levels throughout the day.
I know I'm more productive in the morning when it comes to focus and depth. For this reason, I schedule my recurring and ad-hoc meetings in the afternoon whenever possible. I make exceptions to this rule if there is a real urgency or if someone is in a timezone that would make it unfair for them to adjust to my strict schedule. Occasional flexibility is what I'd recommend.
🗓️ Do a weekly plan
List your key priorities for each week, and proactively schedule time for working on them in your calendar. Do not just optimistically assume you'll figure it out as you go. Block time in your calendar in advance to make sure you'll have enough time to make progress on the important tasks.
📆 Do a daily plan
Start each day planning your activities into single-purpose time block intervals. Make sure you factor in time for important work that is on your plate and enough time for reactive and interactive work.
📥 Schedule slots for processing inboxes
As part of your daily plan, schedule 2 to 4 slots in the day during which you will process your various inboxes: slack, email, teams, etc.
Outside of those slots, you should keep those applications or browser tabs closed. Yes, closed. This might generate some anxiety in the beginning, but you'll get used to it.
Some people might be annoyed at first. Your way to cope with that is to make sure you process your inboxes very effectively during the time slots dedicated to them. Once people see that you are not dropping balls or ignoring them for too long, they'll come to appreciate your structured approach. They might even try to take inspiration from it.
Pro tip: I always list my phone number in my Slack profile to ensure anyone in the company can find the information if needed. That gives me peace of mind when deliberately disconnecting from all the internal communication tools.
⏱️ Set a time budget for recurring weekly meetings
You want to limit the time you dedicate to recurring meetings: 1-to-1s, team meetings, etc.
If you have too many direct reports, either discuss with your manager to find a way to reduce that number, or reduce the frequency of 1-to-1s for some of your team members.
If you're invited to too many recurring meetings, figure out if you need to be there, if the length or cadence of those meetings can be reduced, and lastly, if someone else can step in on your behalf. This could be a good way to start grooming your potential successor in the team.
🧾 Have a system to track all your ongoing projects and obligations
You need to track all your commitments and obligations in a system that you can trust. Your memory isn't one. Pick a tool or a format that works for you, and stick to it.
A lot of ad-hoc communications and interactions are caused by being late on a deadline, and someone trying to chase you.
By becoming more structured in handling all your commitments, you can drastically reduce the amount of these ad-hoc interactions.
✅ Validate your priorities with your manager
If with all of the above, you still have too many requests on your plate that are eating up all your time and attention, bring this topic up with your manager.
You don't want your manager to do all the work for you in figuring out what to deprioritize.
Instead, you want them to confirm that your thinking around priorities is the correct one, and will provide the necessary backing and support in case of backlash. This means you should come up with your proposal to discuss with them.
If your proposed approach is the right one, your manager will appreciate your ability to prioritize the right thing. If he's suggesting changes to your plan, you will learn something valuable about your priorities from their perspective. In both cases, you're gaining something useful.
🏁 Conclusions
In this week's article, we've explored the challenges that an interconnected and interdependent work environment can pose to our ability to produce meaningful work as Engineering Leaders.
In search for solutions we've explored:
Richard Feynman's radical approach to productivity
The work from Morten T. Hansen on Collaboration
The research from Adam Grant on Givers and Takers
A list of practical tips for you to start mastering the fine art of balancing the urgent with the important
I hope you found this exploration useful, and I recommend you go deeper into some of the quoted resources if you want to know more about the subject.
Also, if you have some tips you're using that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, I'd invite you to post them in the comments section.
See you all next week!