I’ve been tracking my nutrition macros this year where every day I track how much protein, carbs, and fats that eat as part of my total calories for the day. As part of that I’m also tracking my fiber, and how much water I drink.
The goal of tracking my macros isn’t just for weight loss, but to increase my overall health, strength, and performance. The macro I’m focused on the most is protein by making sure I consume 175g everyday.
I’m enjoying the process of seeing how consistently hitting my macros translates into positive side affects like being able to clean and jerk a 185lb barbell, something I couldn’t do several weeks ago.
This got me thinking about what would the “macros” would be for my job as a software developer where I want to increase my overall productivity, quality of my work, and be a better teammate. Here’s what I’m come up with so far:
- Deep Work Hours: 4
- Code Reviews: 2
- Pull-Requests Created: 1
- Commits: 2
- Pull-Requests Merged: 1
These work macros aren’t necessarily set in stone, and will likely change as I figure out what metrics lead to the positive side effects I’m trying to achieve. They likely will be different for other software developers as well.
The deep work hours are the number of hours I’m working on a specific tasks, I’m focused, and using a timer to track my time, but aren’t my total work hours for the day.
By tracking the number of code reviews I do I feel like I’ll spend some time helping my coworkers move their work along, as well as learn from them by reading the code they write.
I’m not sure I’d enjoy having specific work targets forced upon me from above and compared with my peers, but I’d encourage others to have their own personal work macros they are striving to hit each day.