The Three Buckets of my time
I have a small framework for how I carve out my (professional) time. It was taught to me informally by a former colleague a long time ago. Essentially, I think of my time spent into three buckets:
Time spent in the “team work” bucket are tasks related to the local team I am primarily working in. Usually the tasks are tied to issues in a ticketing system, but it can also be team ceremonies such as retros, planning etc.
“Company-wide work” is work spent that is related to things outside of my team. Usually the work impacts either the entire engineering organisation, the entire company, or at least multiple teams.
Tasks in this bucket tend to be more strategic and “extra curricular”. These are usually requests coming in from the company and are not related to the responsibilities the team I am in has.
These are initiatives usually coming from me. They are things I want to do and give me energy. They can include learning something new, like reading blog articles or trying out a new piece of technology. It can also be thinking about technical strategy, building some small tool to simplify my day, or coding up a small proof of concept I’ve been wanting to try out and showcase to someone. If my team has the concept of “hackday” I usually think of that as time spend in this bucket.
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