How to split your time as a lead between IC and lead responsibilities.
The Wake-Up Call
When I started to work as a tech lead, I wasn’t sure what to do, I kept mostly doing what I was used to doing, programming. Maybe that’s your case too.
If you’re conscious about your new role, your responsibilities will start to surge. Your calendar will slowly start to be filled with meetings (the ones you planned AND the ones you will be pulled into), helping individuals from your team with any problems they encounter, up to the point you realize you’re not contributing anymore to the project.
When you started working as a lead and your IC time was pretty high, now you notice it dropped to a dangerously low level (even disappeared?), this is your wake-up call.
It’s time to find the right balance.
Productivity Has A New Meaning
Now your productivity is measured differently, it’s not about the number of lines of code you write, or features you implement. It’s about making things roll smoothly for your team so they don’t have to worry about anything else than their work and be able to work at their natural best.
The way I like to look at it is that if you’re taking a chart of your organization, traditionally as a lead you would be above the engineers of your team. Reverse it. You’re supporting them, it’s a subtle change, but this makes a complete difference, and if you can make this your mindset, it will make your job easier.
Think of yourself as an enabler, a multiplier, because you’re supporting your team, you predict their needs, you clear roadblocks before they encounter them, and help them resolve any issues they face, thus they will be able to be more productive. This added value will be how you measure your productivity.
Now you ask, how do we measure being a multiplier? When you’re an IC, it’s easy, you can measure that with how fast you complete one task after the other, how good the architecture of your code is, and so on.
It can’t be measured as easily as a lead, because the work you do is not as tangible as writing code. There is no specific task you can do to instantly be a better leader. Anything you do will take time to bear fruits, sometimes it will work, and sometimes it won’t. Keep in mind you’re not entitled to the fruits of your work, do the work you believe is the right thing to do. If it produces great results, perfect, if not, that’s also fine, evaluate what could be better, and how it can be done, put it in place, rinse and repeat.
With this in mind, what you can do is keep looking for ways to improve the life of your team, keep assessing yourself, get feedback from your team, and discuss with other tech leads.
In some cases when you feel you’re not doing so well as a lead, you will be tempted to swing back the other way, converting a major part of your time to IC time to implement features. Because that’s what you were used to doing, completing features will give you that quick shot of dopamine, and make you feel good and productive, but this is not your job anymore.
Another thing to keep in mind, it’s easy to know when you’re doing a bad job, you will hear about it, and you will see the surge of different types of problems. Good leaders are invisible. This is how our brain works, we notice when something doesn’t work and we complain about it. But when everything is fine, it goes unnoticed, and that is the result of good work. This is an indicator for you to know you’re doing something good.
Losing Touch With The Project
Not contributing directly to the project anymore is dangerous. Over time the disconnect between the engineers you support and you will grow to the point you don’t understand each other anymore. Seeing problems and experiencing them first-hand is not the same thing.
It’s easy to think that doing code reviews, and discussing with the engineers the solutions to use for the features to implement is good enough. It won’t replace dealing with the codebase yourself.
When you deal with the codebase, you’re more likely to experience the same problems and frustrations as the engineers from your team. When they will share problems with you, you will be more likely to understand them directly and empathize more easily with them since you might have experienced them.
That’s why you’ll see many tech leads recommending to strive to spend around 20-30% of the time as an IC.
Make The Most Of Your Time
When the lead responsibilities started to kick in for me, I struggled to find the time to be an IC. I was juggling between many different tasks of a lead (PR reviews, meetings, helping out on Slack/TS, …). It gave me this rewarding sensation of completing a lot by crossing off all these small tasks, it’s addictive but deceptive, it was keeping me away from spending time as an IC.
Another side effect of doing all these tasks and having more responsibilities was that the mental notes were piling up. Mental notes to remember the context for each task, mental notes to remember to get back to this specific person, mental notes to remember what I should do next, my mind was covered with mental notes. I was getting stressed as I was spending time remembering all the things I had to do rather than getting work done, and the end of the day was only getting closer.
That’s when I learned about the Eisenhower matrix. This matrix splits tasks into 4 quadrants: “Do”, “Schedule”, “Delegate”, “Delete”.
Here is an article that details each of these quadrants.
Avoid the “Urgency Trap” with the Eisenhower Matrix
With this in mind, I created a board (on Notion, feel free to use whatever works for you) with 3 columns (all except the “Delete” one), and I throw everything in there. The idea is to track everything work-related that lives in your mind to get rid of all mental notes. Now I don’t have to remember what I have to do next, nor forget things. If someone asks me for something, it ends up on the board, and I tell them I’ll do it sometime later. If something urgent appears, I’ll put on hold my current task, leave a comment on the task where I left the work I was doing, and when I come back to this task I know what to do. Everything is on this Asana board, when I start my day or when I’m done with a task, I open it and I know what is waiting for me next.
Be careful with meetings, it’s another time sink. Make sure they are worth your time. Ask for the agenda of the meeting if there isn’t one so you can decide if it’s a meeting you should attend.
Burnout
Make sure to not overwork yourself, more hours are not the solution to do everything. I’m not saying to stick to your work hours and disappear as soon as it’s the end of the day, there are times you will have to stay late to help someone, catch up with someone from another timezone to figure out something, get a presentation ready,… Once again, it’s about finding the right balance.
More hours will get you more and more invested in your project, and your work, and as soon as the slightest thing will go wrong, you won’t be ready to handle the situation in an emotionally smart way. Because you weren’t taking care of yourself.
Now starts the crisis stage of burnout, a horrendous spiral. I’ve been there, it feels overwhelming, and you doubt everything about yourself. Am I doing the right thing? Am I able to do the job? I should have been able to see it coming… These are dreadful times.
The idea is to not reach that point in the first place. Keep your well-being in mind, notice your behavior, see what should be improved, and define healthy boundaries between yourself and work. As discussed above, improving productivity to do more work in less time, is a step in this direction. Having personal hobbies is also a way to keep you in this healthy balance, and another way for you to get dopamine.
How To Keep Things Balanced
The way to keep things balanced gonna be different for everyone, but I’d like to share two habits I’ve been doing lately, they helped me to balance my IC/lead time, and to reduce my overtime.
Both of them are done with Google Calendar.
The first one is creating a new calendar to track the hours I work. I create an event for every chunk of hours that I work, and in the name of the event, I include the number of hours I worked that week until that moment. This way, I can see how it increases over the week, if it’s too high and too early during the week, I know I’ll have to slow down.
The second one makes use of the “Focus Time” events. For each chunk of time that I worked as IC time, I track it in my calendar as a “Focus Time” event. Thanks to that, in the “Time Insights” section of the sidebar on the left, I can see automatically how much time I spent as an IC during the week. For me, it’s a reminder when my IC time gets low and I should do more of it.
Making these two things visible makes me more conscious about them. Otherwise, it’s easy to forget how much I did, and I’ll repeat the same thing next week, until I can’t anymore, and burn out.
It’s A Long Way To The Top
I don’t wanna give the idea I figured it all out, it’s a long way to find the right balance, as it’s different for everyone, and there’s not one recipe that works for all.
But by being aware of that, acting on ways to improve my balance, and keeping assessing what goes right and wrong, I’ve been able to have a healthier work-life balance than I used to have before.