Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

My Experience With Burnout as a Startup Founder
4 minutes read.

"This is how I’d describe my experience of burnout: I lost motivation. I just didn’t care. I knew I cared deeply, but I had nothing left. I couldn’t get up in the morning. I felt very sensitive and emotional. It was like anything could set me off, and make me well up. I cried a lot, by myself and with people close to me." -- Joel Gascoigne shares a personal and important topic that we should try to make more legitimate to discuss in public.

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Fake It Till You Make It
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make
5 minutes read.

The way you enable learning in your company relies on how people feel when they need to make decisions: safety (of making mistakes), being heard, feeling they can own their mistakes and grow from that. Letting others make decisions can be (emotionally) hard as the cost of a mistake can be significant, or so we often feel. Can we allow that? How can we measure the quality of our proposed decisions? Is it documented and reviewed later? Do we learn from it? Can we collect feedback to get the team's perspective on our tradeoffs?

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"My Team Has a Prioritization Problem. Help!" Product Prioritization, a Thread
5 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi wrote another epic thread on product management. This time covering Systematic Planning and how to use it to nail your strategy, execution, and communication to the team.

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Time Confetti and the Broken Promise of Leisure
5 minutes read.

Ashley Whillans wrote a post I needed to read and remind myself how powerful and negative inertia can be: "Stress spurs busyness, which creates stress, which spurs busyness. [...] No matter what time affluence looks like for you, the happiest and most time affluent among us are deliberate with their free time."

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Early Work
6 minutes read.

"Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes urgent. But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative trick, and those tend to spread quickly." -- Paul Graham wrote a post I plan to share and discuss with my close friends and with my kids. We need more builders and dreamers.

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What Do You Do to Make Your Day Suck Less/Stay Productive When Tired? Any Hacks? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Helpful ideas in this thread Andrew Wilkinson started for what you can do when feeling tired or not productive. I'll add my tip to the mix - I plan in small details the day after. It's a way to tell myself, "today wasn't great, but tomorrow will be. I made it easier."

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Scaling Yourself (Video)
29 minutes read.

Scott Hanselman with a great talk I enjoyed listening to while commuting to work (yes, it happens!). You'll pick up a few ideas to improve your energy and time management (to avoid burnout), that one I'm sure.

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@karen_meep: The thing about working with toxic people is that over time it rubs off on you. You think you’re building endurance and strength but what you’re actually building are bad habits.

@brandonthezhang: Diversify your points of view. Centralize your life principles. Diversify your social platform. Centralize your core audience. Diversify your relationships. Centralize your partnerships. Diversify the books you read. Centralize the books you read repeatedly.