In today's episode we discuss focus, again. This time, through the lens of a few mental models that help us decide what is *actually* the right thing to focus on. You'll learn the real enemy of focus (note: it's not just distraction).

I'm joined today by Brian Pulliam. I've personally engaged Brian as a career coach. In this discussion we'll talk a bit about coaching, and about how you can set yourself up to become a much better candidate in your job search as an engineering leader.

I'm joined today by Brian Pulliam. I've personally engaged Brian as a career coach. In this discussion we'll talk a bit about coaching, and about how you can set yourself up to become a much better candidate in your job search as an engineering leader.

In this episode we talk about the concept of "resetting your base" - moving in a direction you don't necessarily want to go in order to achieve better outcomes in the long run.

In today's episode we discuss how you might build your confidence without being disingenuous. This isn't a lesson in psychology or tricks - it's about building true confidence in what you do (and importantly, don't) know.

In today's episode, we'll discuss an absolutely simple structure for prioritization and information flow in your daily work. The flow relies on a basic text editor - that's it!

You have seen "bias to action" on job requirements, but what does this really mean? Is it something that can be learned? Make sure you know the difference between this skill and a more automatic cognitive bias.

In this episode, we use the Start / Stop / Continue framework in a new way. As leaders, we should always know what outcome indicators a given discussion is based on. In this episode, we discuss the three core outcome indicators for managers to pay close attention to.

In today's episode, we talk about inversion and inverted thinking. This is a mental model inspired by considering the "negative space" instead of the space occupied by the thing you are seeking. For example, if you are trying to avoid failure, you might intuitively seek a "successful strategy" instead of looking at the reasons it may fail directly. Inversion will help you avoid these traps.

In today's episode we discuss a preparation step for your next one-on-one. Don't just wing it - do your homework... and talk to yourself a little bit.

In today's episode we'll discuss some counterintuitive advice for your interviews. This advice applies in interview settings, but also applies in 1-1 meetings as well.

After today's episode, your resumé is going to get better! In this episode I will share the biggest mistake and the best advice I've ever received about building a great resumé. This will take some work from you, but I hope you walk away from this episode feeling like you have the right mindset to improve your resumé drastically, and land more interviews, ultimately leading to better job opportunities for the Developer Tea audience!

In today's episode, we talk about the counterintuitive process of prioritizing based on critical path. This is not a novel concept that I've invented, but rather a revisiting of the classic discussion started by Eli Goldratt in his book "The Goal", and later in his book "Critical Path", based on the theory of constraints.

The most common mistake for any manager is to fail to clarify. This often happens because we mistake our average communications for having perfect clarity, when in fact we most often don't communicate at high levels of clarity. This isn't because we are bad at communication, but rather because our social communications carry less consequence when they aren't precise. Clarity is not simply being honest. We'll discuss the importance of clarity in this episode, and your first steps towards achieving clarity above the norm.

What does your culture have to do with your values? In this episode we open up the discussion about a model of thinking for culture and values to understand how they link, and more importantly, when they don't.

Your feedback loops should be short enough that the cost of making a mistake is low enough that the value of the learning in the feedback loop exceeds the magnitude of the cost of a mistake. In other words: shorten your feedback loops to the point that you're no longer afraid to make a mistake.

In this episode we discuss the importance of being your own advocate, and why this is likely the most rational position to hold. The takeaway: At any point, the person advocating the most for you is almost definitely YOU.

In this episode we discuss a practical application of information theory. Information theory is similar to the classic theory of communication, but distinct in important ways; these two theories together are a useful combo for creating a strategy for clarification.

In today's episode we talk about working principles again. Specifically, we're looking at a problem with measurement fixation, as well as the natural curve of degradation that most communication follows.

In this episode we are revisiting some of my own personal core principles of working. I'm sharing these with you for you to do whatever you want with them, so please share however you can! The principles we discuss today are around the relationship between clarity and focus, and about how most negotiations aren't about feasibility but instead about strategy.

In today's episode we talk about principles of productivity. Most of the advice you receive will fit in the two categories we discuss in this episode. Once you connect with these ideas, you'll be able to use them for your own gain.

In today's episode we discuss the concept of "cost of delay", and explore the fact that cost of delay does not necessarily follow a linear path. When cost of delay has a cliff, or an exponential curve, how do you weigh one opportunity versus another?

"What actions can I take to get better from here?" This seems like a simple concept, but in practice we often are more interested in protecting our ego. In this episode we try to practice this self-accountability through an exercise.

In this episode we continue our discussion about the most overused statistical measurement. We'll talk about a few more counterintuitive properties of the average, and how you might be underserving your colleagues as a result of thinking in averages.

On average, you're probably overusing this specific type of statistic. In today's episode, we discuss the king of all misleading numbers: averages! There's so much to talk about with averages that we're splitting this into two parts. Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician. But we will talk about some of the interesting properties of averages and why they are so addictive to use for humans, but more practically what counterintuitive ways we might be using them incorrectly. If you're using your sprint velocity to forecast work, this episode is for you!

Today we explore the idea of treating your time as a product. Start with a wishlist: what do you wish was true about your week? What are your "if-only" statements? Next, put on your product owner hat. How would you improve the situation, if you knew the "consumer"'s requests? This exercise should provide unique insight and a new lens to view your time and agency through.

The Von Restorff effect says we remember things that stand out. This is probably mostly intuitive - "that stood out to me" is a common colloquialism. But what isn't intuitive is the implied downside of uniformity, which is often the product of process. In other words, if your process creates perfect uniformity, elevating any one thing, say, in priority, is going to be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, if your "escalation" process is overused, it will once again violate the point of the escalation in the first place. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent."

In today's episode, we do a journaling exercise to provide a new lens on developing your own career roadmap. We're going to practice the power of hindsight, finding our wiser selves, and ultimately looking forward and backward...at the same time. It sounds a little odd, but it's all based in solid cognitive science. If you have a notoriously hard time figuring out your career path, I'd invite you to participate!

As you grow your career, you will continuously lean on delegation to scale your efforts and focus on the most important things. True delegation requires ownership, and ownership can be thought of in two critical parts: agency and responsibility. In today's episode, we discuss the fool's errand of delegating only one or the other of these parts.

Little's Law explains, in a given queuing system, what the relationships of throughput within that system are. We can garner insights both for our work, and for our own lives, by recognizing how these relationships work and what we can do to utilize them. In this episode, we talk about when it is useful to use Little's law to your advantage.

Finding leverage is difficult to do, but a lot of the reason for this is that we allow ourselves to fall into well-traveled cognitive pathways. If we reject the solution domain-set that comes to mind immediately, we may be able to consider options for solutions we had never considered. This larger solution set may also include a high-leverage option we had previously ignored.

In today's episode, we discuss turtles, resolutions, and why your beliefs and what you see as fact is probably worth questioning anyway.

Today Marks 9 Years of Developer Tea. Thank you all for your support, and your friendship. I wish you all well on your journey, and may you find clarity, perspective, and purpose. (Don't worry, we aren't going anywhere!)

What characterizes good plans from bad ones? And how can you make your plans better on average? In this episode we discuss how to better organize your intentions and processes to yield better plans.

The "lollapalooza" effect (coined by Charlie Munger) occurs when multiple other effects have a compounded outcome that tends to create an extreme situation. In this episode, we discuss lollapalooza effects and how you might fall victim to them, and more importantly, how you can use them to your advantage.

When you are newly joining a team, you have a huge opportunity to do something that no one on the team has: to find your "weathervane." The pressure pushing against you to adopt the beliefs of the team you are joining. What you do with it is one huge way a team can improve, or otherwise, stay the same.

Most people believe good things will happen by default. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a downside to this endless optimism. You cannot will good things to happen, and when you don't prepare for adverse events, you won't be ready when they inevitably occur.

Your team's process for managing a backlog is probably growing stale because you are running on habit rather than procedure. Break out of procedure and remind yourself why you have a process to begin with: orient yourself to the outcomes!

What is it about our present situation that changes our perspective? In today's episode we talk about the availability bias and why our present reality looms so large in our decisionmaking.

What do you expect of yourself? Are you spending your time in ways that align with those expectations? In this episode, I provide you a simple framework as a starting lens for getting a better idea of how you are spending your time in relation to who cares the most about those investments. You'll walk away with a new lens on how to evaluate your most precious resource: time.

Almost every conversation you have will start with a question. Have you stopped to listen closely? Questions are extremely meaningful and deeply human. Paying close attention to questions is a skill that will put you head and shoulders above the average engineer or manager.

How often does reality match your expectations exactly? Sure, you may guess in the ball park, but usually there are errors in our expectations. In today's episode, I talk about a simple shift in thinking that will help improve your expectations for your work.

In this episode we continue a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." How do you get better at anything? (Hopefully you said "practice" almost instinctively.) What does good practice look like? Your team has an opportunity to practice every meeting and every day. But if your days look different from one to the next, how will you ever have the opportunity to actually do that practice?

In this episode we continue the mini-series "Backlog psychology." Would you rather have $5 now or $50 next week? The answer to this question, though it seems logically obvious which is better, does not always produce the same response. The required incentive to convince someone to wait tends to follow an exponential curve upward. This is not just true with money, but for any benefit and incentive: monetary, social, emotional, physical, etc. What does this mean for our backlogs? What about our daily habits?

In this episode we kick off a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." You've heard you should "limit your work in progress" - why? What makes more work in progress more difficult to handle? Cognitive load isn't just about multi-tasking in the moment - it's also about limiting your open tasks.

Your retros may feel like deadends where complaints go to die. If you're running retros and treating it only as an avenue for emotional support rather than continuous improvement, today's episode is for you. Retros are for improving iteratively over time. That can only happen if your outcomes are aligned to that iterative mindset. Two simple adjustments can help drive that improvement.

Count the cost of learning. When you choose a path towards a goal, it's absolutely critical to optimize for the cost of learning. Often, with software, it is easier to learn by a series of smaller steps, even if they start out as random, rather than take on the major risk of a large step possibly going the wrong direction. This isn't always true; sometimes, the cost of learning is *greater* with small steps. Determining which is true in your situation can make or break your plans.

Decisions are made in many ways, but one important type of decisionmaking tool is the "rule." This is something you follow without any cognitive processing. But, we eventually develop rules as a part of habit-building. These are "implicit" rules - they aren't necessarily something you have set as a rule, but they are followed as if they were. These are worth interrogating, and perhaps replacing with more explicit rules.

Are you stuck trying to prioritize your long list of things you need to do? Maybe you're trying to establish a habitual routine or areas of investment in your schedule, budget, or decisionmaking. Figure out what you need to avoid first. This creates the opportunities you need to say yes.

Are you measuring the wrong thing for your short term game? If so, you probably continuously change directions and are never sure if anything you do is working. It's time to rethink your scoreboard.