Surfing the Productivity Waves: A Tech Leader's Guide to Balancing Energy and Output

Remember when you were at your peak, effortlessly managing team reviews, contributing to strategic documents, and feeling unstoppable? But then, as the seasons changed or after a major project completion, your energy dipped, and self-doubt crept in. This isn’t unique – it's a common cycle in software engineering. 

I've experienced these highs and lows multiple times and realized they follow a predictable pattern. Recognizing this pattern can simplify our professional lives significantly, allowing us to manipulate our internal cycles to align with the external ones. 

Waves Everywhere 

Look around you. Waves are everywhere. Light crests, and days turn into nights. Sundays turn into Mondays. Summer turns into fall. Relationships follow a wave pattern. Moods cycle. And yes, energy levels ebb and flow too. 

In software engineering, there are two types of cycles: external and internal. External cycles are ones set by your environment. Project cycles. Sprint cycles. Performance Review cycles. This translates into periods of heightened activity followed by periods of lessened activity. 

Internal cycles are ones of motivation, engagement, collaboration, and energy. You must have noticed there are times you’re more motivated than others. At times your team hums along, and other times everyone’s off in their own little world, pounding away at the keyboard. Sometimes you feel energetic enough to pull an all-nighter if you need to, and other times you can barely get through the door. 

It’s obvious that external cycles affect our internal ones. But here’s the rub. When you’re at the crest of one wave, you’re high enough to see the other waves, and to see the troughs between them, the low points. It’s easy from that vantage point to tell yourself, “yeah, I know I’m on top of my game now. At some point in the future that won’t be the case, but then the next wave will carry me back up again.”  

However, when you’re in the trough, all you can see is the walls of the waves around you. You can’t see the crests. You will frequently forget those crests even exist. At that point life seems all doom-and-gloom, with no hope of ever improving. 

Normally, these trough parts of the cycle aren’t steep enough to cause actual depression or suicidality. Normally, we just feel meh, and struggle to get through the day. Eventually the next wave carries us back up.  

The danger, from the software engineering point of view, is when the external cycles are not aligned to the internal ones. 

For example, let’s say you have your performance evaluations coming up, but you’re down in the trough of your internal cycle. Think that’ll affect how well you evaluate your team, or how well you’re able to represent them in Talent Reviews? Or, let’s say, your team has a high-priority deadline and is struggling to meet it. Think you being in your trough is going to influence the team’s chances of a successful delivery? 

Being Aware

Awareness of this cyclical nature of productivity is important. We’ll discuss how that awareness helps leaders succeed, but before we get there, let’s discuss how it can help you approach your teams with empathy. 

The problem with cycles is that they create self-doubt. This is especially true with those who haven’t yet experienced their full power, and are suddenly finding themselves in the trough, unable to maintain the productivity they’ve come to expect of themselves. Self-doubt, in turn, breeds disengagement and yet less productivity. It becomes a vicious spiral that can torpedo an engineer’s output long after their natural wave should have crested. 

If you, as a manager, notice that your star employee hasn’t been producing as much as before, the worst thing you can do is start “asking the hard questions.” Yes, it’s good to gently probe, but there’s a very good chance that they’re merely in the trough of their cycle. That’s not a permission to slack off, but at the same time, a word of reassurance can go a long way toward breaking them out of that trough faster, and you, as their manager, should understand that the drop in productivity is temporary and will be offset by a corresponding peak. 

You should understand your team’s individual energy cycles and align the work you distribute to those. For instance, let’s not give a critical deliverable to someone who normally flags during this time of year, or just has been flagging recently. (Stretch goal: set up your team so that your team members understand this cyclical nature of their output, and volunteer themselves for the work when appropriate, rather than having it be given to them.) 

Cycles in Leadership 

Leaders go through the same sequence of internal cycles as their teams do. And it’s critical to learn how to align your energy and mood cycles to the external ones imposed by your work. Doing so will allow you to be at your best when being at your best is most critical.  

But how do you do this? 

Step 1. Achieving understanding 

First, you must understand the cadence of your cycles. Do you normally produce more in fall and spring than summer and winter? Are you more productive on Wednesdays than on Mondays? Do you get more done in the morning than in the afternoon? Map out your cadence, from the small, daily cycles to the large, yearly ones. Then overlay these against your company’s cycles.  

Are you scheduling important meetings on days when your energy usually flags? Do you spend the most productive time of your day answering emails? Are you having to write performance reviews in December, when you’re at your least productive? 

Step 2. Making a difference 

There may not be much you can do to adjust your short-term cycles, other than adjusting your day or week to suit. You’ve heard the guidance of doing your most important work in the morning. Well, that’s when people tend to be at their most productive, but individual patterns differ, and you should be aware enough of yours to adjust your schedule to it. 

What about scheduling your most important meetings for the most productive day of your week? 

Asleep on Friday afternoons, at Sprint Review meetings? Talk to the team about moving them to a more productive part of the week. Struggling to write a coherent status update email on Monday morning? See if you can put the email off until the afternoon, or possibly even the next day. 

There are, however, things you can’t control, like project deadlines and company-wide activities. The best thing you can do there is adjust your own productivity cycles to suit. To do this, be aware of your energy expenditure when you’re in the productive part of your internal cycle. The more energy you expend during that period, the steeper the drop into the trough will be. Learning to moderate your activity when you’re up will help you mitigate it when you’re down. 

The next big lever you can pull is engagement. Engaged people tend to feel more energized. Are there ways you can set up your activities so that the more interesting, engaging work happens just as you’re exiting the productive phase of your cycle? This could help raise your overall energy levels, postponing the trough. If you do this for long enough, your overall energy cadence would shift, just as sleep patterns gradually shift after a timezone change. 

Finally, whenever you can, surround yourself with high-energy, high-engagement people, and work to avoid the energy-draining ones. This isn’t always possible in a work environment, but approaching your work social circle intentionally (for example, avoiding negativity) can go a long way toward preserving the energy you have no matter what part of your own cycle you’re in. 

As a manager, this also means doing all you can to promote a high-engagement, high-energy climate on your team. Identify and address those adding negativity to your team, as negativity will have a dampening effect on all the team members’ individual productivity cycles, hastening the onset of the trough period. Conversely, reward lavishly those who raise the team’s energy levels—those folks are your force multipliers--even if their individual output doesn’t measure up, the overall productivity increase they inspire makes them supremely valuable teammates. 

Conclusion: Awareness and Empathy 

Be aware of your personal cadence, and, as a manager, to the cadence of your team. This awareness will serve many purposes, but the most important will be the security that comes in knowing that, no matter how bad things might get, they will recover. This is true for everything in our lives, from personal situations to work ones.  

That confidence, in turn, can allow empathy to flourish. If you know that your direct is going through the trough part of their cycle, you can help them feel better about it, and thus hasten the increased productivity. Not to mention that this sort of empathy inspires loyalty and trust.