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Illusion of Time - The 50 Day Rule

I like nice things. I often like to mark a good occasion in my life by either organizing a fun experience or by giving a really nice personal gift to my loved ones or myself. I often think about how I would like to mark an occasion like my retirement (which is probably quite a few years away) and I find myself gravitating towards a classic artifact - a …

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3 years ago · 2 comments · Shiv Shankar

The point of that article was to point out how little ‘real’ time we have to get anything done. The logical conclusion from that analysis should be then - i’ve got to make every one of those days count!

A bunch of my 1:1s (as recent as the ones I had a week ago) revolve around motivated devs who are unhappy with how little they are getting done or questioning if they are being productive enough. The number of times I have had this conversation ever since I became a manager always amuses me…

Part of the problem, I always find, is that motivated devs tend to micromanage themselves. They are their own worst critics!

Devs try to make progress on multiple fronts and want to get as many things over the line as possible in as little time as possible. Reality check arrives at the end of the day when it becomes apparent that everything did not go to plan. Nobody likes that feeling and people become frustrated with themselves and sometimes at their environment.

This is really not that different to having an unrealistic set of targets for becoming healthy and then finding that you bit off too much.

^^ That plan is not practical. It won’t really work. It will probably do the opposite and stress you out.

If you can afford it and you actually hire the services of a qualified gym instructor - The first thing they will push you towards is realistic goals and the benefits of steady and sustainable progress.

When climbing mountains in Nepal - the wise Sherpa keep telling enthusiastic tourists “Bistari, Bistari” - “Slowly, slowly”.

You cannot climb mountains - literal or figurative - by dashing at the goal. You have to take it slowly and systematically.

My own system for approaching my work week is to focus on 3 tasks a week.

It’s that simple.

After a lot of trial and error - I have found this is the most sustainable number of real tasks I can have for myself per week. It’s a number that tells me that the ball is moving and things are getting done!
It’s a number that lets me (and this quite important if you want to build a career in anything) take the weekend off!

The more complicated part of this goal setting is not the number of tasks but rather which tasks. It goes without saying that if I choose trivial tasks or completely insurmountable ones - the system will not work.

I focus on picking 3 tasks that take up a considerable amount of my mental bandwidth.
I find that things that worry me or bother me have a much bigger impact in my assessment of my productivity rather than regular aspects of my job.

If I can knock off three things that were bothering me, in a week - my outlook on how productive I have been, completely changes.

In practice, I manage this in a google doc that I have been writing in (wait for it..) for 597 weeks (I numbered my weeks.. that’s how I know).

Here is an entry from 2022 (which involves some of my personal goals as well) as a reference:

Week 561 - Jun 26, 2022

• Progress from last week:

  • [Work] Week 4 at Ava Labs, made some headway in figuring out what was the issue with <redacted>.

  • [Work] Met with nearly everyone in the broader team.

  • [Work] Finally have a set of HW assignments to take on. 

• For next week:

  • [Work] Need to look at setting up something regular with every EM and PM in org.

  • [Work] Finish the HW tasks.

  • [Work] Make sure my 401k stuff is set up correctly. I think I locked myself out last time.

  • [Personal] Need to review if I should be investing in Series 1 bonds. 

  • [Personal] Swetha is still frustrated with <redacted>. Must focus on being more supportive. 

This takes me 10mins - and it’s a ritual I repeat every Sunday.

It has helped me look ahead and plan a productive week for years. I would highly encourage you give it a shot as well.

I often like to mark a good occasion in my life by either organizing a fun experience or by giving a really nice personal gift to my loved ones or myself.

I often think about how I would like to mark an occasion like my retirement (which is probably quite a few years away) and I find myself gravitating towards a classic artifact - a watch.

The watch I would probably choose for my retirement would be the IWC Ingenieur.
According to the IWC website “The design of the Ingenieur Automatic is a homage to the technical ingenuity of the 1950s, when engineers were the heroes of the technical age.”

I imagine the watch (or chronograph) would serve as a reminder of my most important responsibility (and hopefully achievement) as an engineer - finishing things ‘on time’.

I can say this with some confidence that there is no talent that is appreciated more by senior executives in engineering firms than release discipline. Companies love people who Get it done…and get it done on time!

During the initial part of my career (I imagine like a lot of people) I could not plan or estimate anything to save my life. Very rarely did I overestimate - most of the time it was an underestimation of the time it would take me to ‘complete’ my work and after a few weeks I was often talking to people to manage expectations and explain what went wrong and how (most importantly) it was totally not my fault.

For a time I would brush this off by finding excuses and saying things like “As an eternal optimist…” or “Since I wanted to be aggressive about deadlines…” or “As someone with a bias towards action…”.

I observed, however, more senior and capable engineers seemed to never get into this mess in the first place. I realized this was something I needed to fix about myself if I ever wanted to get ahead in life.

So, I reached out a lot of engineers and took them out to coffee or spent time in their offices (yes - this was when Microsoft had offices for engineers!!).

After talking to a lot of senior engineers I came to the conclusion that my inability to estimate time properly stemmed from a deeper misunderstanding of how much time I actually thought I had. That realization has stayed with me to this day and I often find use for it for nearly everything life throws at me.

YOU do not have as much time as you think you do. Not even close!

Before I dove deeper into the series and talked about how I like to structure my time - I thought it would be important to layout some thoughts on how MUCH time people actually have.

I find most engineers are still too optimistic about how much time they have - this usually sets them up for failure throughout the year (and tenure).

The mental model that most companies use to discuss their year is as follows.

52 weeks in a year - broken by quarters. Each quarter roughly 13 weeks.

Note - For this article and nearly every subsequent article, I use the week (sometimes also referred to as the dev-week) as the smallest unit of time. IMHO, a lot of situations change on a day to day basis but key metrics like distractions and productivity are more reliably measured on a scale of weeks.

13 weeks is a lot of time…isn’t it? You could get quite a lot of stuff done in 13 weeks.

13 weeks is.. 91 days.

In 91 days - you could go around the world using steamers and trains and then take a 11 day spa break.

What can one do in 91 days?

1 XL and 1 small project or

2 Large projects or

1 Large projects and 2 medium sized feature or… something along those lines.

That is probably true - but here is the problem. You don’t really have 91 days.

Not even close.

If you take some reasonable time off (for personal and health reasons) and if you go on call for at least 1 week a quarter (which is a perfectly reasonable expectation imho) - you have 50 days a quarter not 91.

This 50 days includes meetings, testing, incremental rollouts and emergency rollbacks (#fml), planning, 1:1s, self reviews and stand ups.

It took me a while to internalize this but individuals (or teams) that start their year or quarter with the assumption that they only have 50 productive days or 10 dev weeks (whichever number scares you more!) to achieve their targets - tend to ship more than folks who believe that they can always push themselves harder to get more done.

50 days - well that’s not even enough to circumnavigate the planet. Darn!

What can one do in 50 days (with all the distractions at work)?

Maybe code complete on 1 XL project or

1 Large and 1 Small project or

2 Medium projects or… something along those lines.

A harsh but necessary correction towards figuring out how much time you have per quarter is the first step towards creating some structure in your life.

I definitely believe that some folks will work on weekends or work longer hours or get more out of their quarter to get things over the line - but, I have observed that folks who plan on doing that at the outset end up signing up for even more work and are consistently set up for failure.

It is always wiser to start with a reasonable estimate of your time and then deliver more.

Tbh, I was THAT guy - the over optimistic dev who would sign up for 2 large projects in a quarter only to be code complete on one (just a few bug fixes left and then we can rollout - I promise!!) and be 25% done with the other project (whatever 25% of a project means!).

By over estimating my time, all I did was make myself and everyone else involved more anxious and stressed out.

The quarter I moved towards using the “50 day rule” is the quarter I truly felt like I started making progress in my career.

I felt decluttered and much calmer as I figured out how to get things over the line.

Which is why I feel that having a good grasp of how much productive time you have per quarter is a necessary first step in creating a framework for thinking ahead - I would suggest starting with the 50 day rule and then customizing it for yourself.

Unsurprisingly, I often find my 1-1s revolve around career, impact, promotions and company plans. In my opinion - this is a good sign and a sign of a healthy team/company.

Motivated individuals should always be asking themselves how they could be more impactful. Excellent engineers I have mentored or worked alongside always want to crack the magical balance of

• Personally delivering more,

• Motivating/influencing folks around them to be better,

• Becoming a good leader and

• … not burning out.

A lot of LinkedIn posts, blogs and coaches give you a quick summary of ‘what successful people do’ or the ‘7 leadership principles to keep in mind’ or the ‘perfect meal plan for successful engineers’. Those posts are usually never wrong - just not that helpful.

They are a bit like telling you to ‘sleep well, eat well and exercise regularly for good health’. All of us (I hope!) know these to be the integral ingredients of a healthy life - what we lack is the structure to help us break down those goals into something that we can practice in our daily life.

Gyms and fitness gurus make a good and honest living breaking down fitness goals for people and help them achieve those goals. There are even coaches for high level executives to help them achieve their company goals.

‘Regular’ engineers and managers (such as myself), however, have to rely on books, blogs, newsletters and mentorship to start doing some structured thinking to maximize their careers. After 12+ years of working in a few different companies and continents - I decided to put together my own book blog newsletter, to add to that publicly available resource list.

Over the next few months, I hope to write down some of the things that I practice on a regular basis to ‘structure’ my professional life and provide my company, my team, my manager with my best possible self - without (and this part is important) burning out or ignoring my personal life.

I hope these articles act as good jumping off points for your own 1-1s with your managers.