How to Avoid Getting Caught Up in Career-Development Details as an Engineer
Here’s a HUGE challenge engineers face in their career development: they get caught up in the details of day-to-day tasks and forget to look at the big picture and how all of their actions affect it. This is totally understandable. Our job as engineers, from a technical standpoint, is to make sure that all of […]
Engineering Productivity: How and When to Break a Task Up into Smaller Steps
If you read my blog regularly, you know that I often write about efficiency and productivity in the workplace, as I believe lack of these things is the leading cause of engineers working too many hours. I believe that one of the most important aspects of being productive is the ability to focus for a […]
Engineers, Everything You Accomplish After Lunch Should be a Bonus
I recently read a book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The book details the daily routines of the most successful authors, screenwriters, and painters of all time. One of the recurring themes for most of the artists in the book was that they did their most productive work before noon. Some of them would […]
How to Create an Extraordinary Engineering Career – Anthony Fasano’s Complete Engineering Career Guide
JULY 2014 UPDATE: Since I wrote this post in October of 2013, the feedback from engineers has been amazing. This is a very long post that is meant to help you throughout your engineering career, so please bookmark this page. I have also created the following table of contents to make it easy for you […]
Five Must Do’s as a Project Manager in the Engineering Industry
This is a guest post by Githal Pathirana. Managing projects in any industry is a challenge. Project managers must have the ability to listen thoroughly, think quickly, and delegate properly, all while tracking results and making necessary adjustments. To say it requires a level-headed person capable of organized multi-tasking is an understatement. A project manager in […]
How is Technology Affecting Engineering Career Development and What Should We Do About It?
In one of my last posts I talked a lot about how everyone is in a rush these days between the technology and tight budgets; everyone wants everything to be done yesterday. The point of my post was that this fast-paced approach has placed an inordinate amount of stress on all engineers because they are […]
An Effective To-Do List Can Both Increase Productivity and Reduce Hours Worked in Your Engineering Career
Through our Institute for Engineering Career Development, I have worked with many engineers on a one-on-one basis providing Engineering Management Instituteing and guidance, and the two things that almost all of our members ask for help with are time management and work-family balance. Hence in this post I am going to share with you one […]
12 Rules of Zen Monks that may Help You Reduce Stress and Improve Quality in Your Engineering Career
Like many professions today, engineering can be a stressful profession due to the project deadlines, shrinking budgets, and client demands. In this post I want to provide some principles that Zen monks follow, and how you might apply them in your engineering career, to help you reduce some of the day-to-day stresses, and be more […]
Time Leadership
Unlike money or aptitude, time is the one commodity that every person on earth has the exact same amount of each day. Most expend an amazing amount of effort trying to expand this non-renewable resource. Multi-tasking, out-sourcing to another (a.k.a. using a secretary), and back-to-back scheduling are undertaken to cram as much as possible into […]
Warning: Too Much Internet Use May Reduce Your Productivity and Negatively Affect Your Work-Life Balance
Too Much Internet Use May Reduce Your Productivity. In my engineering career, I have always tried to be as productive as possible. That’s what we are taught as engineers – always optimize! Recently I have been doing a lot of traveling for my Engineer Your Own Success (EYOS) book tour and it has helped me […]