Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts

This covers a bit more than a week, but it’s been wild over here. Onboarding into the company that acquired us, the whole family getting COVID (we’re all doing better thanks), and the associates quarantines, mixed with one of our cars being in the shop has made for lots of craziness.

But let’s talk about some mindset shifts for the new year!

The first article in the category for the week is Practice the Maui Habit to Build a Success Mindset (my notes and highlights). The primary takeaway is that you use a daily affirmation of the goodness of the day to get you off to a positive start. “This tiny yet powerful habit is successful because it is simple, is positively framed, and has a specific trigger i.e you do it when you get out of your bed.”

This is a great example of small things that have big payoffs in practice.

The next article is The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools to Add to Your Toolkit. Which is probably something we all have heard already, but the article lays out some great techniques to break out of solving problems to coaching team members through problems. This is a hard mental shift for individual contributors in their first management lead in particular. But such an important shift!

Then comes Reframing Tech Debt from Increment Magazine (which is just always so good! My notes). It presents the idea of working from more positive reference points in dealing with tech debt and focusing in on making it part of your regular cycle. Tech debt as a regular part of the work cycle is a great engineering culture hack for lots of reasons.

It allows for time to actually do it! It reduces bugs over time, it allows time to rethink and improve. It’s great!

Next is a simple one, What Engineering Can Teach (and learn from) Us (notes). Simple because all you have to do is decide to think like an engineer. Allow some space for planning, and design, and you are well on your way. Lots of other good things in the article.

Last one for this week’s topic is The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence (Notes). Lots of interesting things here. First, we’re all experimenting higher anxiety than baseline. Second, we’re in uncharted territory with the durations we’re seeing. Third, learn change management tools. Lastly, it will eventually get better, but it may take 8 months for us all to return to psychological baseline.

So give people extra patience, including yourself.

Conclusion Work on shifting your mindset this week. Decide to be an engineer, start your day with a positive affirmation, remember we’re all under stress we’ve never felt with and haven’t really researched, tech debt handled well is your new friend, and don’t solve your teams problems, let them solve their own by coaching them.

Originally published in this issue of my newsletter.

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