We believe that remote work with asynchronous communication and loosely defined working hours is the future of work for software engineers. It's a giant upgrade over office work. Get rid of that commute. Give people autonomy. Allow them to design the life they want.
But remote work comes with unique challenges too. There's such a thing as too much freedom. Just like their office counterparts, remote software engineers also have to juggle complex projects on tight deadlines. The work still needs to get done, except that it now needs to get done on a schedule you decide yourself.
To excel in such an environment, you need to master time management. In this article, we explore five time management strategies to help you structure your workday. Try them out. Some will stick and some won't, but all are meant to improve your focus, productivity, and work-life balance.
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management strategy developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It's designed to enhance productivity and focus by breaking work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Here's how to implement it:
The Pomodoro Technique helps you maintain concentration, prevents burnout, and improves your time management skills by dividing your work into manageable intervals. Also feel free to play around with the length of your timer. It doesn't have to be 25 minutes. If an hour and a half works better for you, then go for it.
This technique involves aligning your work with your natural energy levels, or biorhythms, throughout the day. Here's how to use it:
Biorhythm time blocking makes you a more efficient worker because you end up assigning the right tasks when you're most ready for them. While you can force yourself through a difficult task during a low-energy time, this misalignment eventually leads to burnout. Biorhythm time blocking stops this from happening.
The Maker/Manager schedule, popularized by Paul Graham in 2009, distinguishes between two modes of work, maker mode and manager mode.
Here's how it works:
By alternating between maker and manager modes, you can maintain your creative flow while managing routine responsibilities. This is particularly useful for software engineers who should ideally spend most of their time in maker mode. When you're a manager, you'll spend more time in, you guessed it, manager mode.
The Ivy Lee Method, named after its creator Ivy Lee, the founder of modern PR, is a simple but effective time management strategy that simplifies your daily to-do list and prioritizes essential tasks. Here's how it works:
The Ivy Lee Method promotes simplicity and focuses on completing a small number of high-priority tasks each day. While the original method focused on six tasks, you can and should adapt it to your needs. You may find that a shorter or longer list works better for you. But the key is to prioritize tasks and stick to your plan.
You'll be familiar with this one, although probably not in the context of time management. But sprint planning, often associated with Agile project management, can also be adapted to individual time management and task planning. It works just like you think it would:
By adopting the principles of sprint planning, you bring structure, clarity, and goal-oriented focus to your work as a remote software developer. This approach allows you to systematically tackle tasks, maintain a sense of progress, and adapt to changing priorities or challenges efficiently.