Energy Management

I recently read The Engineering Leader by Cate Huston, a former senior lead at Automattic. The book covers many aspects of engineering leadership and highlights that being a lead means doing most of those things—like holding 1-on-1s, knowing what to discuss in them, hiring well, and onboarding people effectively so they integrate into the team instead of heading straight for the exit, but also providing feedback, managing performance and so on.

There’s one idea in the book that especially resonated with me, and I think it’s worth exploring further: the recognition that doing both lead work and programming work isn’t just about time management. It’s about energy management.

Take programming, for example. I might get a task like: rework this flow so it now handles five new behaviors. That kind of work flows roughly like this: I check the code, break the work into five tasks plus another five hidden requirements, estimate the total effort, and start closing the issues one by one. We end up completing 12 things, dropping a couple of the original five, and calling the project done. This is mostly a function of time spent, with just a few moments requiring deeper mental effort—typically at the beginning (when figuring out where to start or syncing with stakeholders) and the end (when shipping and hoping nothing breaks).

But then there’s another kind of work: writing a post-mortem for something I broke. Giving feedback to a direct report. Auditing a past project and writing up the results. Clarifying project requirements with external stakeholders. These tasks aren’t necessarily time-consuming, but they’re mentally expensive. They’re ambiguous, emotionally uncomfortable, and often easy to avoid. Stack three of them in a single day and you might get nothing else done—or feel like you can’t do anything at all. And if you don’t do them, the next day will be the same.

Cate Huston puts a name to this: mental energy. For me, just acknowledging that this is a major constraint in leadership work is the biggest takeaway from the book.

Looking back, I had already developed some coping strategies without realizing I was solving an energy problem:

• I schedule draining tasks directly into my calendar. This includes not just work tasks, but things like dentist appointments—or even just scheduling the dentist.
• I’ve learned which personal conversation topics tend to drain me, and I try not to explore those too deeply.
• Quick but draining tasks get done first thing in the morning.
• A task that’s so unpleasant it puts me “in the red” gets prioritized—because while I’m in that state, I can’t reasonably do much of anything else.
• I break difficult tasks into smaller, more approachable chunks, and just tackle one at a time.

However, now that I know this is actually science, I can explore it further and see where can this get me.

Cate Huston raises plenty of other interesting topics in the book, and overall, I think it’s a worthwhile read.