Productivity on Justin Carmony

Engineering Managers: Don’t Forget the Individual Contributor’s High

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 19:09:11 +0000

I was having a conversation with one of my engineers, and they were pretty worked up. They felt frustrated about a hiccup in one of our processes resulting in a minor delay of finishing their feature.

I empathized with their plight and reassured the hiccup wouldn’t have any major effects. The team was still on schedule for their deliverables, their boss (me) understood why for the delay, and I knew it wasn’t the fault of the engineer. We also had a good plan in place to prevent the same issue in the future.

My iPhone Has Hindered My Email

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:17:40 +0000

What!? What is this that I speak of? My very favorite feature of the iPhone has actually hindered it?! How can this be? Its really straight forward actually. Before my iPhone, when I checked my email I was at a computer and typically would respond to emails immediately. Now, however, I read most of my emails first on my phone. The problem is that sometimes I would forget about an email when I finally arrived at a computer, and some things have fallen in the cracks. Nothing catastrophic, but I feel bad when I get a second email asking “Hey, um, did you get my first email?” The iPhone has been pretty disruptive in my typical email habits, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage it. I actually love it because it keeps me more aware throughout the day. I just can’t forget to respond to certain emails.

Being a Productive Developer

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:50:59 +0000

Doh! I meant to schedule this for Thursday, so oops! Already off my schedule, but oh well. :P

These last few weeks my productivity seems to have been fluctuating, and it has been irritating. So I’ve decided over the next few weeks to keep track of how I work, see what works well and what doesn’t, and figure out how I can be more productive.

Just as I would suggest any company with scaling/growth problems, I’m going to do the same with me: metrics. You can’t really know where and what to fix if you can’t tell how they are performing. So I’m going to start to keep track of my time in a lot more detail. I think this will help me in so many fronts, and I’ve known for a long time I need to do this. I’ve signed up for a demo account with Harvest, a time tracking software. Why? They seem to have a great interface, both Windows and Mac apps, and iPhone web and native app. So it will be easy to keep track of what I’m doing no matter what or where I am.