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Hartley’s Handbook #5 — Spring Cleaning

With Spring basically upon us (I don’t care what Phil says) I’m thinking about Spring cleaning, both at home and at work.

John Hartley

Mar 2, 2023

With Spring basically upon us (I don’t care what Phil says) I’m thinking about Spring cleaning, both at home and at work.

At home it’s simple. Go through a room, ask if an item “sparks joy,” then trash, donate, or keep. For work, we should be doing the same thing, with projects, meetings, and relationships.

Projects

The dreaded infinite backlog happens in every company at some point. Working with a colleague, we’re digging through to determine if there are project ideas we should throw out (good ideas always come back), hand off to other teams, or push forward and complete.

Meetings

This is a fun one. What meetings are you in that spark joy? Which should you trash completely? Which can you “donate” or delegate to someone else? Plenty of opportunities to clean up your calendar over the next month.

Relationships

A bit more meta, think critically about your work relationships. Which conversations with individuals are struggles? Which conversations do you leave feeling energized? Are you getting enough collaboration? Think about getting rid of or fixing the relationships that are not fruitful and doubling down on those that leave you feeling like you can take on the world.

So how about you? What does your Spring Cleaning look like for 2023? Let me know in the comments below!

What I Read This Week:

Tell me about a time documents — Sally Lait — Similar to a bulk resume or hype doc, Sally’s notes on how to keep good notes for the prompts laid out should go into everyones arsenal, regardless of if you’re currently looking for a new role.
Evidence-Based Management: The Case Of HR — Forbes — Steve Denning’s comments on “The Problems Of HR Lie Outside HR” help outline the transitions the workplace at large is going through and how it has evolved over time.
Advice for new engineering directors — Jade Rubick — I feel like I send Jade Rubick’s blog to just about anyone who will listen and this is another gem. There’s not much info out there on being a successful Director, but Jade breaks it down and has some good callouts around “level of involvement.”
8 signs you’ve mistimed a major IT initiative — CIO — Number 7 is a doozy. “Poor business stakeholder coordination” is a great way for a project to fail, especially in tightly coupled organizations.
An interview with Claire Hughes Johnson — High Growth Handbook — Stripe is well-known as a company that puts culture first across all aspects of their business and Claire Hughes Johnson had a major role in making that a focus. Her book “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building” releases March 7 and I’m excited to read it.
The Engineering Manager Guide: Spinning Up a Results-Oriented Team — Bastien Falcou — Especially when re-establishing a team or starting one net new, this guide looks to provide some great starting points in getting to a team charter, setting goals, and breaking out of the “storming” phase with ease.

This newsletter first appeared on LinkedIn.

Have an engineering leadership question? Let me know! I would love to find an answer together with you.

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