Jesús Ramírez Guerrero

Recently, I’ve been promoted to a Engineering Manager and I have received an interesting training about a Time management and how to deal with several priorities at the same time. This indeed it’s been a recurrent topic spinning around in my head, usually focused on how to help others to be more productive, but…hey! Let me give you a hint: “you can’t help others if you don’t help yourself first”.

Having said that I would like to share one metaphor that somehow I’ve always applied while I was dealing with several tasks with the same High Priority, it’s called “The Air Traffic Controller”

As you can see, the air traffic controller is showing several planes, taking of, flying around, just landed and close to land. But, which one is the most important one?

Obviously they have to kept track of multiple planes, ensuring they take off and land safely without collisions. But here is the hint: They need to priotize which planes need immediate attention and which can wait, all while staying calm and focused.

In the same way, our brains act like air traffic controller when we handle various mental tasks. This involves:

• Prioritising tasks: Deciding which tasks need immediate attention and which can be done later. Applying this concept to o an Engineering Manager prioritises tasks based on deadlines project importance, and team capacity. For example, they might decide that fixing critical bug takes precedence over developing a new feature.
• Managing distractions: Keeping focus on important tasks despite potential interruptions. Again if we apply this to a Engineering Manager role, we need to deal with unexpected issues or urgent requests from other departments, while keeping the team focused on their main tasks.
• Organising information: Keeping track of different pieces of information and ensuring they are processed in the right order. One last time, one Engineering Manager organises project timelines, tracks progress, and ensures that team members have the resources they need. For instance, they might use project management tools to monitor the status or different tasks and ensure everything is on track.

This metaphor helps illustrate the complexity and efficiency of our bran’s executive functions, especially in managing attention, planning and problem-solving and by acting like a traffic controller, an Engineering Manager ensures that the team operates smoothy, efficiently, and safely, much like how planes are managed at a busy airport.

The next question you may ask, how can we organise our daily work to achieve this? (This was exactly my question in the training session). Quick answer, there is no magical formula applicable to all Engineering Managers, but I can give you some ideas:

Organise yourself and your priorities

It’s obvious that as engineering manager the organisation of our calendars and tasks are key. For this, I’m using Microsoft Outlook (for my agenda) and Microsoft To Do to prioritise the tasks accordingly. It’s not about the software that you use, the idea is to have a way to organise your time, tasks and priorities.

• Time organisation: with Microsoft Outlook, I use the calendar to have clearly defined my working hours, (don’t forget to book time to eat!), my meetings and my focus time. Some hints: don’t accept meetings straight away, ask always for an agenda and the goal of the meeting (Keep GROW in mind). You can use Viva integration to create those Lunch / Focus meetings for you.
• Tasks priorisation: with Microsoft To Do I have a way to organise the tasks based on the priorities, using the Eisenhower Matrix concept I’ve created 4 different types of tasks (please check the priorities suggested by the matrix) and I strictly maintain my task organised in these groups. Remember that to achieve this we must review them every day as the urgency and how important it is vary over time and changing contexts. (Usually I’m doing this in 10~15 minutes the every night).
• Tricks
  • Integration between Microsoft To Do and Outlook are awesome, you can move the tasks from To Do to the calendar to create focus slots
  • Don’t work on something that it is not in your To Do list, always create an item for it.
  • Keep your To Dos organised and in a single app, of course you can take notes or write in a notebook but after that, take your action points into your To Do List with the corresponding priority
  • Remember that a proper task delegation requires time.

As you can see there are different ways to organise and prioritise the work, these are my main points, but what about you?