imacoward22

I don't know who Brenden Gregg or Jeff Dean are, but a cursory look at their profiles I imagine the thread linking them together is they've set aside time to do deep thinking and research -- rather than the piecemeal approach of implementation whack-a-mole.

So in that vein:

1. Find a very narrow area where you would like to have in-depth knowledge

2. Read the seminal works in that area (could be academic papers, could be blog-posts, could be even code)

3. Go for a long walk, and mull about it for a bit.

4. See if you can add something, no matter how little, to the area

5. ???

6. Rinse repeat

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Big question is whether that's something you're internally motivated by, or externally. The fruits of that sort of labor are mostly internal; and very few people have the stamina to continually do this, unless it personally fulfills them.

Do you really have 5 in-progress tasks a day... that are all blocked due to other people? I've never experienced that in software engineering/dev. I've experienced 5+ tasks per day as a code monkey; but never have I been completely and utterly blocked from doing any work at all -- because there's always something else I could be doing (see: backlog). And if I were still in the 5+ task per day camp, I would take my sweet time answering Slacks/etc.; because I'm already inundated with work, and breaking out of my flow to spend 15 minutes on a text chat that could have been 2 minutes through voice, is not something I'm going to do.

I do not understand it at all. Are you a junior/working on simple one-off tasks with inane deadlines everyday/not in engineering?

n.b. throwaway because I never post.