Philibert Dugas

April 23, 2021

Managing Energy

I work on many different things in a given week. I navigate between technical discussions, individual career growth, interviewing, and more. It's very easy to get lost and let the calendar happen to me. When that happens, I lose both my energy and efficiency. The key to good weeks, and good months, is managing my energy. Making sure I'm self-aware about how I spend my energy, and taking control of my calendar are two important things I pay attention to every week.


Taking over the calendar: Planning the week

I start my week with two simple questions, they set the tone for my weeks.

Where do I want to be by the end of the week?
I start by defining the goal line and work back from there. This is usually informed by broader monthly goals. Laying down where I want to give me focus on what's important versus not important.

What learning are you looking to apply?
I read a lot of different things. Those learnings are not quite integrated unless I practice them. I pick topics that I've learned about recently and try to put them into practice every week. This is both helpful for the team, and for me.

Planning is something, but executing is as important. To organize my week, I use a simple labeling system in Todoist:
  • Quick Win: Tasks that can finish in 30 minutes or less
  • Focus : Tasks that need 1 hour or more of uninterrupted time
  • Execution: Tasks related to the execution of the ongoing projects
  • Team: Tasks related to the team (1-to-many) (e.g. Culture, Habits, Hiring, Meetings, etc.)
  • People: Tasks  related to the individual growth of members in the team (1-to-1) (e.g. Performance review, 1:1s, etc.)
Every week, I schedule a mix of quick wins and focus time. After the weekly planning, which is usually Monday morning. My energy level is: 100% 🔋

How I gain and spend energy

I gain and spend energy in two ways. First, through the weekly responsibilities and tasks of my role. It's a balancing act to progress on my objectives while having a good balance of energy.

Second, passive gains and spending. This is like a background process. I have thoughts, ideas, worries, etc. They either unlock me to do the rest of my work better or slow me down.

Active Gains & Active Spending
Listing down the type of things I do during a week with how I would usually label them. Also, what does an 🔋📈energizing 🔋📈version of this looks like? And what does a 🔋📉draining🔋📉 version of them look like?

Team meetings
Type of tasks: Team && (Focus || Quick_Win)
Planning
The Monday team planning is one of my favorite meetings. It sets the tone for the week. When done right, it feels like a quick brainstorming on how to move as fast as possible for the next 5 days.

  • 🔋📈 When everyone contributes to the discussion and we come out of the planning with clear goals and owners.
  • 🔋📉 When participation is low, and I have to nudge people to talk, volunteer tasks for them, and we exit with a lack of clarity.

Information gathering
Information gathering meetings are common. They come in the form of "brainstorming" or questioning. I prefer to have a written artifact ahead of time to guide the discussion for this kind of meeting.

  • 🔋📈 When everyone starts with a common foundation. We enhance each other's understanding during the meeting
  • 🔋📉 When everyone is starting on a different level, and we spend most of the time getting on the same level

Decision making
Decision-making meetings are where we gather as a team and discuss trade-offs. We expect to come out with a decision taken. 

  • 🔋📈 Everyone is participating and we're having a healthy debate. The meeting has a clear decision taken and the owner for the next steps.
  • 🔋📉 There is a very low number of opinions floating around. I have to nudge people to speak. We exit with no clear decision

1:1s
Type of tasks: People && (Focus || Quick_Win)
A crucial part of the week, I need to be at my best. I'm a morning person, so I try to always book them in the morning. I try to do at most two 1:1s per day. I experimented before, a full day of 1:1s. Trust me, the last one of the day, I wasn't helpful at all to the person

  • 🔋📈 I love coaching. When the other person realizes something as a result of their own reflection it's quite rewarding.
  • 🔋📉 Some 1:1s have difficult emotional situations. That's okay, it's part of the role of a lead. It does take a drain on my energy level. When that happens I look for a way to pause or reset my day

Wednesday, no meetings
Type of tasks: Execution && Focus
Wednesday is a day at Shopify where there's no meeting. I use this time to do deep-focus work. Depending on the week and stage of a project, this can be a different sort of work.  Some examples: people strategy, project strategy, code exploration, fixing bugs, and more.

  • 🔋📈 When I complete a single big task that's high in complexity. Finishing one or two of them on a Wednesday is a success.
  • 🔋📉 I get distracted during the day and I end up working on a bunch of small quick wins. This doesn't feel productive because the long focus work doesn't get done until my next window of uninterrupted work.

Interviews
Type of tasks: Team && Focus
An active part of my work, it takes a big investment of time. At most once a day for me. They need preparation and recap. The interview itself is between 60 to 90 minutes. After an interview, I'm usually toasted and I need a reset. I like to schedule them right after lunch since my mornings are for 1:1s.

  • 🔋📈 We have a productive pair programming interview. I learn new things about either the language, a way to solve the problem, or else.
  • 🔋📉 Candidates get stuck on problems, that's fine. I have to spend energy nudging in the right direction and debugging the problem with them. When that happens for 90 minutes, it drains my energy level

All the little things
Type of tasks: (Team || People || Execution) && Quick_Win
Very easy, but very dangerous. Those are things that can be quickly done, but can also distract me from more important things. Some examples:
  • Send a reminder
  • Follow up on learnings from yesterday
  • Send a quick digest of what I read this week
  • Reach out to customers
  • Follow up with another team on their progress

  • 🔋📈 It's finished in under less than 30 minutes and it cleared up my list of TODOs
  • 🔋📉 I get sidetracked in a rabbit hole and lose track of time. This takes > 30 minutes.

Passive Gains & Spent

A neat analogy I've heard is to consider my brain as a hard disk. It has a limit on the amount of information it can hold before it starts rejecting stuff. When a hard disk is full, the rest of the system starts to slow down. Unfortunately, I can't increase the size of my hard disk. Luckily, the cloud is there for this. I try to flush as much information to a place where it will be relevant just when I need it.

Some examples that take space on the hard disk:
  • I have a new idea that I want to take time to try and explore
  • There's something I forgot to do but isn't tracked anywhere
  • There's a new limitation I find on the technical solution, it's not documented
  • I start working on some code but I don't finish it. This creates work-in-progress

Ideally, those are things we can complete right away, but it's rarely the case. It's been helpful for me to document them in a place where I know I will find them again later. If I don't do that, I will forget them and feel bad that I'm dropping things.

There are three main places where I upload my hard disk:
  • Todoist: I need to do something by a specific date
  • Fellow: I want to communicate an idea to someone
  • Notion: I have a broad idea I want to write down

As long as I upload my ideas in there, I know that I can find them back and I don't need to worry about them. Not having this space taken allows me to do the rest of my week in peace and generally improves my energy retention.

This is how I think about managing my energy during the week. Curious to hear your thoughts, hit me up on Twitter

Cheers