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Well, I’ve gone and done it and started a podcast. This is the very first episode of the Engineering and Leadership Podcast. In this episode, I introduce the show, and share 5 productivity hacks that I use to squeeze more out of my week than the average engineer.

This being the very first episode, I’d really, really love your feedback. What do you like? What don’t you like? What’s just plain ugly about the whole thing? Any and all feedback will help me produce better shows for you, so I definitely want to hear from you.

You won’t find this episode in iTunes at first. I’m going to wait until I have a few episodes recorded before I submit to them and other podcast services. For now, you can listen directly from the player above, or download the MP3 and listed on your computer.

I hope you enjoy the show! Again, please let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Show summary

This episode is all about introducing the show and sharing productivity hacks that I use to get more out of my week. I also include a “Mailbag” section where I share comments from readers and social media, and close things out with a recommended resource.

Links

• www.engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted – Use this link to get my 12-week engineering leadership course for free.
• www.engineeringandleadership.com – The main blog
• Eat that frog! – An excellent book on productivity tips (affiliate link)
• Good leaders give credit and take blame – A post that Karen Lin (@KarentLinWard5) commented on.
• Why goals are bad for you – A post of mine that Ken Palamara of www.unchartedengineering.com commented on, winning him the comment of the week.
• www.Evernote.com – The recommended resource for the week.
• Proofhub – Project management software.
• Asana – My favourite task management software.

Transcript

Introduction

Not your typical engineering broadcast; This is the Engineering and Leadership Podcast

Welcome to Episode 1 of the Engineering and Leadership Podcast from, where engineering, management and leadership are shaken, not stirred, to help engineers like you go from good to great.

Head on over to engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted for a free course on becoming an engineering leader.

In today’s episode, you’ll learn productivity hacks that’ll help you squeeze more out of your week, and why eating frogs can be the secret to success in your career.

Welcome to the Podcast

My dear friends, welcome to the very first Engineering and Leadership Podcast!

I’m your host, Pat Sweet, I’m very, very excited to have you here for our first show. Before we go too far, I’d like to take a moment and tell you a little bit about this show.

The Engineering and Leadership Podcast is all about leadership, management, business and productivity in an engineering context.

It’s like an audio business school for engineers.

The goal is to help you learn about the softer side of engineering, but more importantly to help you go out and apply what you learn

My mission with the show is to help you become a stronger engineer, a stronger leader, or in the words of Jim Collins, go from good to great.

So, if you’re an engineer who wants to step things up in your career, make a move into leadership role, or want to improve your business and management skills, this is absolutely the place for you.

I’m glad you came.

I plan to mix things up from show to show. I’ll do interviews with interesting engineers from around the world, give tutorials, share tips, ideas and resources, but most of all I’m going to make sure that what you learn here is actionable so you can actually do something with it.

Before we go too much further, you probably want to know who this Pat Sweet character is. I’m a professional engineer working as a Product Manager in the rail industry in Ontario, Canada. I studied electrical engineering in undergrad, which makes me a super nerd.

I have a mild coffee addiction, play the drums, and love cycling.

A few years ago, I started the engineering and leadership blog at engineeringandleadership.com to share my experience and ideas with other engineers.

Most importantly though, I’m a husband and a new dad. My daughter Charlotte is 8 months old at the time of this recording, and my 100% totally unbiased opinion is that she is fantastic.

But enough about me. This podcast isn’t about me. It’s about helping you.

With that said, let’s get to the main segment of the show.

Main content

The topic du jour is productivity.

Today, I want to share five of my favourite little tricks to help you squeeze more out of your week.

If you’re a typical engineer, you’re not exactly sitting around twiddling your thumbs all day.

You’re busy, you’re over-worked and there are never enough hours in a day to get done what you need done.

If you can chose even just one of these things to implement at work this week, I’m promising you that you’ll be able to carve out extra space in your week to do things that you wouldn’t normally get to do, like reading a book or washing that coffee mug that’s been on your desk for months….

Whatever you chose to do, be sure to tell us about it by leaving a comment in the show notes by going to engineeringandleadership.com/episode1.

Tip #1 – Eliminate distractions, especially e-mail

Tip #1 is to eliminate distractions.

Distractions are a fact of life for anyone who works in a white collar job.

Phones ring, emails pop up, and Ted shows up randomly to talk about how awesome his golf game was last weekend… again.

Everyone can agree can distractions are, well, distracting, but most people don’t know just how seriously they can derail your day.

A study conducted at the University of California Irvine found that, on average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after you’ve been distracted.

23 minutes! That’s nuts! That’s an entire episode of the Big Bang Theory!

Small interruptions, then, can really add up and become a major problem in the run of the day.

The trick, then, is to avoid or eliminate distractions wherever you can.

For me, the number one distraction used to be email. I felt compelled to check my inbox every single time a new message came in.

With over 100 new messages a day, that’s a lot of interruption.

One thing I did was turn off the automatic email notifications so I didn’t have that nagging pop up enticing me to go to my inbox.

Now, I check my email on a schedule, three times a day, and I’m in control of how that time gets spent.

Another big interruptor is the phone. I’ll answer the phone if I recognize the number on call display, if not, I’ll let it go to voice mail. If the caller leaves a message, I’ll listen to it right away to triage the issue and decide if it needs to take priority over my current task. If not, I go right back to what I was doing.

That way, I avoid having some random eat up a half hour of my day just chatting.

What I suggest you do is this: over the next week, keep a pen and paper handy on your desk and take note of the distractions that occur. You’ll likely find that the same few happen over and over again.

Once you’ve determined those key interruptions, work out a plan to eliminate or mitigate them.

Tip #2 – Take brakes

Have you ever struggled with a problem for hours, and just had to walk away from it you were so frustrated?

Have you ever come back to that same problem little while later, devastated to realize how simple the solution was all along?

Every so often, its important to step away from your work and just take a breather.

It gives your mind a chance to reset, and lets you attack your work more effectively in the long run.

Everybody is different, but I find that taking about 5 minutes for every 45-60 minutes works best for me.

What I’ll do is chose something on my to-do list that I want to work on and set a timer on my phone for 45 minutes.

I commit to putting my head down and just given’er on that task until the time is up.

This helps me focus on the task at hand because I know a break is coming up, but for now, I have to work.

When the alarm goes off, I drop my pencil, and back away from the keyboard. No exceptions.

I’ll get up from my desk, stretch my legs, grab a fresh coffee, and often step outside for a minute to get some fresh air.

It’s like a smoke break without the smoking.

Once the 5 minutes are up, go back to work.

Tip #3 – Pareto’s principle

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote a paper in 1896 explaining that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. His inspiration for the paper game from his own garden, where he noticed that 80% of the peas came from 20% of the pea pods.

Later, management consultant and engineer Joseph M. Juran suggested that the “80-20 rule”, the idea that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes be credited to Pareto.

Thus was born the Pareto Principle.

The principle can be applied, generally, to almost anything. In this case, we’ll apply it to work.

The idea is that 80% of the work that you produce while working on a given task comes from 20% of the time you invested in that task.

What that means is that you’re nearly done an hour long task by the time you’ve spent 12 minutes on it.

The trick here is to ask yourself, do I need to take this to 100%, or is 80% good enough? Does everything need to be A+, or will B do the trick?

Because often, we assume that everything needs to be done to 100% perfection, when it would actually be better to hammer something out, get it done quickly, and move on to the next thing.

Tip #4 – Batch, don’t multitask

I’d like to dispel a myth here. Are you ready for this? You may want to sit down for this one.

There is no such thing as multitasking.

There, I said it. It’s countercultural, I know, but it’s true.

You can literally only use your brain for one thing at a time.

What happens instead is single-tasking with frequent switching.

When you do this, it’s like the distractions we talked about in the first tip. The distraction is just the next task.

Remember, it can take a long time to refocus your brain once you start something new.

I recently heard that the vast majority car accidents that occur as a result of texting while driving occur in the few seconds after the phone has been set down. Your brain needs to be able to focus on one thing, and one thing only.

So, while I used to pride myself on multi-tasking, I’ve started batching as an alternative.

For example, I don’t try and respond to emails one at a time as they come in. I’ll let my inbox build until about 10AM, and take 45 minutes to an hour and deal with all of them.

This is much more efficient and saves me a lot of time throughout the day. It pairs nicely with the break-taking technique mentioned above.

Batch, don’t multi-task.

Tip #5 – Eat that Frog!

Mark Twain once said that if you could start each day by eating a live frog, you could go through the rest of the day with the satisfaction that the worst thing that is going to happen to you has already happened.

Brian Tracy wrote an excellent book of productivity tips based on this idea called, as you might suspect, Eat That Frog! I’ll include a link in the show notes.

Your “frog” is the biggest, baddest, ugliest task on your to-so list.

Eating your frog is just tackling that big, bad task first thing.

Don’t check your email. Don’t clean up your desk. Just eat that frog. Everything else can wait.

If you can get into the habit of eating your frog first thing every day, you’ll eliminate a lot of stress and get through your to-do lists that much faster, because you’re not getting hung up on those ugly things you’d rather not do.

Mailbag

This is the part of the show where I read your mail, comments, tweets and messages and answer your questions. I promise to read everything you send me, and I may even share your note on the podcast here.

If I chose yours as the comment of the week, I’ll send you a very snazzy E&L t-shirt that you can wear with pride to your next formal event, like a wedding or board meeting.

This weeks comments:

TechGeekUr left a comment on the blog recommending ProofHub as a cool project management tool. I use Asana for tracking tasks, but it looks like ProofHub is a full blown project management package, so check that out.

Karen Lin (@KarenLinWard5) on Twitter challenged the idea that leaders shouldn’t take credit for their work, suggesting that as long as they give others credit, too, then that’s OK. This was in response to a post I had written on the blog, so I’ll leave a link in the show notes so you can weigh in and let me know what you think.

Finally, Ken Palamara from unchartedengineering.com had the following to say on a post about Why Goals are Bad for you:

In my experience … I have found that having goals is in fact very important in life fulfillment and building as a person.

Not achieving goals does tend to bring on discouragement but that’s part of life.

It’s important to have long-term goals to set you in a direction that you want to follow and short-term goals that take you along those paths.

The advice that I have been given that helps you avoid massive disappointment and helps you keep moving toward your goals is to celebrate your tiny victories and to enjoy the process.

Acknowledgement of these small wins and having long-term goals not only gets you to where you want to be faster but overall it helps you maintain a better attitude and higher self-confidence.

Not to mention this allows you to help as many people as possible along the way.

Thank you very much for your comments, Ken. YOU have been awarded the comment of the week, and I’ll be reaching out to you in the coming days to make sure you get that T-Shirt.

If you’d like to submit a comment, Tweet me @engileader, or leave a comment in the show notes at engineeringandleadership.com/episode1.

The engineering toolbox

In this part of the show, I’ll share with you some kind of tool or resource that I use that I find super helpful in my own engineering career, and that I think you might also find helpful in your quest to become an engineering leader.

Today’s resource is Evernote. Evernote is software that helps you to remember everything. It lets you quickly and easily take notes that can be shared across all your devices.

One of the best things Evernote can do is search text in images, even handwriting. So I use Evernote quite a bit to take pictures of whiteboard after meetings so that the text on the board is searchable. It’s pretty fantastic.

You can get it for free at www.evernote.com.

Outroduction

That’s all the time we have for the show today. If you enjoyed the show, it would be awesome if you could leave a review on iTunes for me. If you have any ideas or thoughts on how to make the show better, please let me know that too!

Don’t forget to head on over to engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted for a free ebook on becoming an engineering leader, and tune in next week when we discuss which is better, becoming CEO or Guru.

Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon.

Music Credits:

Main segment 

Urbana-Metronica (wooh-yeah mix)
by spinningmerkaba
featuring Morusque, Jeris, CSoul, Alex Beroza

ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/33345

CC Attribution (3.0)

Intro/ Outro

Move Like This
by spinningmerkaba
featuring Texas Radio Fish, Alex Beroza, and Snowflake

ccmixter.org/files/jlbrock44/33397

CC Attribution (3.0)

Mailbag

keychee – driptrips – 120bpm – samplepack
by keychee

ccmixter.org/files/keychee/32541

CC Attribution (3.0)