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Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

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Re: Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

#12

Post by playingalong »

Lack of clear goals from the management.

Too many meetings, especially the recurring ones. Domination of spoken culture instead of written for collaboration.

Lack of proper sleep and rest. Working outside of your normal brain activity hours.

Sudden fire drills - "unforeseen" audit with deadline next Tuesday, a security vulnerability mentioned in TV and you needing to redeploy/upgrade everything ASAP.

Re: Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

#13

Post by larsrc »

A trick from my PhD days: start the day with one to two hours of concentrated work. Don't look at your email or news or anything until you've done that.

This worked fabulously for me because it allowed me to "swap in" my work enough that I could avoid distractions.

And yes, I have ADHD.

Re: Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

#17

Post by siliconc0w »

A big one is keeping iteration times fast.. If you have to wait more than a few minutes to run through your test suite or deploy to a dev environment it really kills the momentum. It starts easy but as you add complexity, dependencies, slow or flakey tests, it is slowly gets eroded.

Re: Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

#18

Post by el_benhameen »

playingalong wrote: post #12

Lack of clear goals from the management. Too many meetings, especially the recurring ones. Domination of spoken culture instead of written for collaboration. Lack of proper sleep and rest. Working outside of your normal brain activity hours. Sudden fire drills - "unforeseen" audit with deadline next Tuesday, a security vulnerability mentioned in TV and you needing to redeploy/upgrade everything ASAP.

> Domination of spoken culture instead of written for collaboration.

I have sometimes wondered if this was just me. Glad to see it listed. I can’t count the number of times that “oh yeah, we talked about that and decided xyz” or “do you remember where we landed on abc in that meeting?” in a distributed environment.

I can’t force others to communicate about everything in writing, but I’ve learned to take detailed notes of my own thought processes and to write down everything important that happened in a meeting or conversation immediately after it finishes.

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