👨‍💻Engineer’s Handbook to Longevity🏃

Your career is a marathon and not a sprint. Learn how to keep running consistently. 

Plan your day in advance

• Plan your next day the night before — hour by hour
• Have a morning routine/ritual
• Don’t plan critical rituals at night — get done with your most important rituals within the morning routine itself and before starting work
• Assess your daily To Do with end impact and only do meaningful things
• Know your backlog (things to achieve in a day/week/month/quarter/year)
• Know your most productive hours — use these for executing on your most important goals
• Know your least productive hours — use these for breaks or meetings
• Read More: ✅ How to Plan Your Day Effectively

Continuous Learning

• Become a life-long learner
• Plan what you should be learning (proactive and planned learning backlog)
• Improve general awareness — read blogs, newsletters, etc
• Spot problems at a job where there’s a lack of internal talent that you can learn and contribute to
• Also read: 🎓 Continuous Learning and 📖 Career as a Continuous Learner

Take regular breaks

• Use breaks not to recover but to not get tired in the first place
• Know what will help you come back energised after a break
• Plan breaks in advance (to ensure regular breaks and align goals accordingly) — it also helps in understanding when you can push harder vs when you need an intermittent short break

Build relationships at work

• Get to know people beyond work
• Help people around you succeed in their jobs
• Learn from people — their work and experiences
• Mentor engineers younger than you
• Spot opportunities to contribute beyond existing roles and responsibilities

Understand why you are feeling burned out

• It is not work hours (lack of impact, control, alignment, good culture, money, breaks, or something else)
• Find how you can take back control of your time — it works every time
• Plan how you can be proactive to avoid feeling the same in future

What you tolerate, You encourage

• Find what drains your energy or makes you feel irritated
• Either say no to things that aren’t helping you feel good, or take help from your peers/manager to find a solution

Have those difficult and crucial conversations

• Learn how to have difficult conversations at work
• Inform managers about what is your current motivation and align them on what you need to do to aspire for the same
• Learn how to deal with difficult peers at work
• Learn how to effectively deal with misguided feedback or understand critical feedback better to improve things
• Don’t avoid conversations that impact you in any shape or form

Meet people and gain more context on business and operations

• Regularly meet people at work with diverse teams, roles, responsibilities, experiences
• Learn more about how they are contributing to the organisation’s success
• Learn what matters the most in their role
• Ask them about how their day-to-day looks like
• Try to gain any insights that help you understand the business better

Managing Up

• Managing your manager is a real thing
• Understand what your manager’s top priorities are
• Get to know how you can help them with their most critical outcomes
• Regularly keep them informed and aligned with your top goals and progress
• Ask them about changing priorities and ensure you align your practice, peers, and team to the same