Monday morning, I'm on a train en route to our offsite in London. It's time to spend some time with my British and Lithuanian colleagues, as well as French ones as I work remotely from the centre of France, 400km away from our offices in Paris.
Travelling days are definitely not my regular days. As a father of two under 5, my week is highly structured with little room for improvisation. Much to my occasional despair. I used to be an early bird, but now, prioritising sleep, I wake up with the kids around 7am—unless one of them decides that waking up at 5am is the regimen for the whole family that day.
Getting them ready and gulping down eggs over the counter takes us around an hour. My wife and I share the responsibility of driving them to day-care and school equally throughout the week. I'm back home a bit before 9am, giving me time to grab a coffee and a glass of water (stay hydrated) before heading into my home office. I look at today's schedule. I normally don't have a lot of meetings, but if I don't identify clearly when they are scheduled and what's the topic, it can ruin my day.
As someone who is neurodivergent, I stick to my rituals. Not because I like them, but it's a proven way to make the most of my day without burning out. These days, setting an alarm clock for the next 50 minutes and writing the task for that period on a sticky note allows me to kickstart my dopamine-deprived brain. I normally alternate focussed work and breaks like that till 1 pm. At least, that is the plan. When my ability to focus crumbles before that, I will end my morning with some exercise (yoga, weight lifting, outdoor stroll). On the other hand, sometimes I experience hyperfocus, lose all sense of time and exhaust myself by skipping all breaks—including the kind nature insists on—till it's 3 pm and I'm hungry and moody.
The 50min focus time can be on a variety of different tasks. As a Principal Engineer I still code regularly but I also spend more time discussing the vision with our CTO, reviewing architectural decisions, or refining specifications for a feature someone else will build. And obviously I read a lot of code. Reviews are an important exercise conducted by software engineers: no new code goes into production without having been read and tested by at least one other member of the team. Besides the evident benefit for software quality, as bugs can be discovered earlier, it's also a good occasion to learn new parts of the system, cool tricks in the language or framework, and generally upskill the reviewer as much as the reviewee. Finally, it helps standardise the coding style across the team, which in turn makes reading code in other parts of the API easier for everyone, increasing productivity and reducing the onboarding hurdle quite naturally.
My lunch break is either shared with my wife when she works from home or with Netflix. Or both…
Early afternoons are usually reserved for 1-to-1 catch-ups and team meetings of any sort. I've never been a big fan of meetings, but we're not in garage mode anymore and, with a bigger company, we need strong alignment and sharp prioritisation. Rituals are again necessary to make the most of any meeting. I grab a glass of water, my notebook—I rarely have to read my notes back but it helps me stay focused—the timer is set for the duration of the meeting and my sticky note now has the topic of the meeting. Other windows are minimised or closed and notifications disabled before connecting to the call to minimise the risk of being interrupted and led astray on a side quest forgetting about the ongoing call.
Around 5:30pm starts family time and Dad reports to duty! Screens are turned off and after a few hours of code reading, now it is rough play and storytelling time. The monster is no longer a bug or a dreadful incident, but a wicked wolf or an evil witch. Shhh!
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