500 Words — Day Twenty-Four: Up Your Grindset
Today, I finished a day worthy of being featured on the Forbes Youtube channel. Although I have been working hard and getting good results based on my post from yesterday, today I upped my grindset. So how does a day look in the life of a software engineer in pursuit of greatness? It looks a little like this:
6:07 AM — I wake up after six and a half hours of sleep. Getting sleep is important, but the full eight hours is too comfortable. If you are going to be successful in life you can’t be comfortable. If you’re comfortable, you need to work harder. I get dressed and ready for my workout. I do a few squads, jumping jacks, and various other exercises to get warmed up, then finish warm-up on the treadmill with a slow mile. After that, five miles at an easy 7:40/mile pace. I have a long day ahead and need to converse energy for when it counts. I finish the workout with 25 push ups, 50 sit ups, and various stretches targeting different leg and foot muscles because I have too many miles to run this year to get injured.
7:30 AM — After the workout, I start up the coffee pot and drink a couple of large glasses of water with my breakfast of choice — greek yogurt. I avoid eating a large or carb-heavy breakfast because I can’t waste energy dealing with variable blood sugar. The morning is the most important part of a successful day and I need 100% focus. I take a quick cold shower and get dressed for work.
8:30 AM — I prepare some documentation to go over the design of a complicated feedback control application. The design team had been struggling for the past couple of months trying to figure this out. I have condensed those conversations into an easy to digest format and kill the 9AM meeting. The team is more confident in our path forward and is looking forward to the next iteration. I met with the software team afterwards for a quick daily standup to plan our day of attack. Today’s the last day of the two week sprint and there’s a lot of work that needs to get peer reviewed before it gets reviewed.
10:20 AM — After standup, I jump into my interview clothing and then have a couple of interviews with the next potential opportunity. Have a lot of good discussions about development workflow, culture, and that company’s bright future. Overall, pretty fun and good experience getting to learn more about different approaches to the software industry as a whole. I spent maybe 5 minutes prepping for those interviews. You’ve just got to trust your experience and hope that confidence will lead the way. Felt pretty confident throughout the process and asked good questions. Questions are a good signal of curiosity and openness, so you want to get better at interviews, learn how to ask good questions. Also, up your grindset.
12:30 PM— Jump back into work and get through a couple of meetings reviewing some documentation. I sneak a quick bite to eat in there, but eating is an easy enough function to multitask with work. Afterwards, three hours of straight code review. We talking about tracing the code line by line, making sure the tests make sense, and making sure that all of the refactoring we did the day before has been properly integrated into the codebase. I make sure that no defect gets by my lazer eyes. The other members did a pretty good job stepping up to the plate and solid progress is made closing up some open pull requests and issues.
6:00 PM — After wrapping up the sprint with the team, it’s time to work with my software collogue writing up the technical portion for a government proposal. I channel my inner salesman and we address all the weaknesses that we received in our previous review meeting. Considering the savant I am, I’m confident that the defense contractor I work for will be showered with a tidal wave of money. You’re welcome. That document is shipped off for another review.
8:30 PM — It’s dinner time. I cooked extra food the day before because I knew today was a busy day. When you are working up that grindset, you got to find efficiencies where you can. I whip up a quick salad and do the dishes for the day.
8:45 PM — It’s back to finish off the workday. I finish writing a PowerPoint for the review meeting tomorrow morning. I then take a little time to set up a pull request for a minor defect I found a couple of days earlier. The work day is finally finished. Solid 10 hour day despite the interviews sandwiched in there. Who needs breaks when you’re trying to conquer the world?
9:30 PM — I’ve got 500 words to write. Here they are. In fact, I’ve written more words in this post than any post prior in this series. I live for the grind. After this, I’ll be preparing for bed and getting fifteen minutes of reading to prime my brain with ideas that hopefully activate new insights for the next day. You have got to optimize that rest time with quality data to marinate those neurons.
In all honesty, I’m really tired and would prefer not to do that again. My body was shaking at the end (maybe I’m cold? I’m too tired to know) and honestly I was really struggling to stay focused after 7PM or so. I had a little extra coffee in the morning that gave me a second wind. I feel like I just pulled an all-nighter. Good thing, it’s only Thursday. Got to prepare to grind out one more day.
