Make Your Bed

Making your bed sets the tone for today but also provides an additional benefit – when you return to bed at night, you’ll have a reminder of your accomplishments and incentive to restart the process again tomorrow morning.

Similar to John Wooden and Bill Walsh, the author of Making Your Bed emphasizes getting the little details right. Without doing little things correctly with a high attention to detail, you will never achieve big things.

In software development, doing the little things right comes in many forms:

1. Consistent formatting
2. Clear and readable variable names
3. Accurate commit messages
4. Writing automated tests
5. Documenting launch plans

Engineering managers hoping to transform their team’s performance might be tempted to look for higher level wins, but counterintuitively we first need to go deeper into the weeds and get the little details right.

Transformational engineering leaders know that they need a partner. Fortunately, many people don’t want to lead the charge but when called upon respond positively to being co-pilot.