What I Learned Shadowing 12 Senior Engineers for 30 Days

I spent 30 days following around 12 senior engineers at companies like Stripe, Notion, and Figma. Not interviewing them over coffee, but actually embedded in their workflows. Watching them code. Sitting in on their standups. Noticing when they checked Slack and when they didn't.

What I found surprised me. Successful software engineers' daily habits look almost nothing like what you'd read in a typical "10 Productivity Hacks" listicle.

Most productivity content for developers is written by people who've never shipped production code under real deadline pressure. It's productivity theater. Wake up at 5 AM! Cold plunges! Pomodoro everything!

The engineers I shadowed operated differently. One didn't open his laptop until 10:30 most mornings. Another spent the first hour of her day reading research papers with absolutely zero coding. A staff engineer at a major fintech company told me he considers answering Slack messages "the enemy" and has built elaborate systems to avoid them.

What I'm sharing here isn't theory. It's what I actually observed working. And some of it will contradict everything you've been told about developer productivity tips that actually work.

They Read More Than They Code (And It's Not What You Think)

Something I didn't expect: the engineers I shadowed read a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

Not just documentation when they're stuck. Deliberate, scheduled reading. Research papers. Architectural blog posts from other companies. RFCs for technologies they might never use.

Priya, a staff engineer working on distributed systems, spends a significant portion of her mornings reading technical papers. "Most of it has nothing to do with my current project," she admitted. "But maybe twice a month, I'll be in a design review and realize I know exactly how to solve something because I read about it six weeks ago."

This reading compounds. It doesn't show up on sprint velocity, but it makes future problems easier. Each paper, each blog post, each RFC adds to a mental database that pays off months later.

Specific reading habits varied across the group:

• Technical papers or blog posts (time varied significantly by individual, with some reading in mornings and others throughout the day)
• Code review on projects outside their team (often during lunch breaks)
• Industry news and release notes (typically end of day)

You might wonder how software developers stay organized and productive while spending hours reading. Here's the secret: they don't see it as separate from work. Reading is work. It's just work that pays dividends over months instead of hours.

[Link: How to build a technical reading habit]

Morning Anti-Routine: Why Successful Engineers Protect Their First 90 Minutes from Code

Every productivity guru will tell you to "eat the frog," to tackle your hardest task first thing in the morning. Most of the engineers I followed do the opposite.

Marcus, a principal engineer at a well-known payments company, doesn't touch code until after 10 AM. His first 90 minutes look like this: coffee, a walk around the block, reviewing his handwritten notes from the previous day, and what he calls "just thinking."

"My best architectural decisions happen when I'm not staring at a screen," he told me. "When I jump straight into code, I'm solving yesterday's problems. I need space to realize I'm solving the wrong thing entirely."

I kept seeing this pattern everywhere. Morning routines for software developers that improve focus, at least among this group, rarely involved morning coding.

• About half the engineers started with physical movement (walks, gym, stretching)
• Most had a "no screens" period ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours
• The majority explicitly avoided Slack and email before a set time

Protecting morning hours from code isn't laziness. It's strategic. Your brain needs time to context-load the actual problem before you start typing solutions.

Tuesday Deep Work Protocol: Scheduling Complexity Around Your Brain's Natural Rhythms

When do you schedule your hardest technical work? Most developers fit it wherever they can, between meetings, after standup, hoping for "flow state."

The engineers in my study approached this differently. They treated cognitive difficulty like a scarce resource and scheduled around it.

A trend I noticed: Tuesdays and Wednesdays were often treated as prime deep work days, particularly the afternoons.

Why? A few reasons emerged:

Monday is for catching up. Slack backlog, email triage, remembering what you were doing Friday. Your brain's still context-switching.

Tuesday and Wednesday are peak clarity days. Your week's context is loaded. Deadlines feel distant enough to think clearly but close enough to feel urgency.

Thursday is when scope creep appears. New requests, shifting priorities, "quick questions" that turn into hour-long debugging sessions.

Friday is for cleanup. Documentation, PR reviews, setting up next week.

Time management strategies for coders with heavy workloads often fail because they treat all hours as equal. They're not. The engineers I shadowed didn't fight this reality. They designed around it.

One senior engineer color-codes her calendar: red blocks on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons mean "I'm solving hard problems, interrupt me for production fires only."

Write Before You Code: Documentation-First Habit That Accelerates Everything

Multiple engineers showed me a habit that seems backward: writing documentation before writing code. It caught me completely off guard.

Not extensive documentation. A quick document, sometimes just bullet points, answering three questions:

1. What problem am I solving?
2. What approaches did I consider?
3. Why did I pick this approach?

"I know it sounds like extra work," one engineer told me. "Writing it down forces me to realize when I don't actually understand the problem yet. I've probably saved hundreds of hours of rework by spending 15 minutes thinking before typing."

I've noticed something similar in my own work on design systems. When I'm building a new component, my instinct is to jump into Figma or code immediately. The times I've forced myself to write a brief spec first? Implementation goes smoother almost every time.

Documentation-first serves multiple purposes:

• Clarifies thinking before expensive implementation
• Creates artifacts for future team members
• Reduces review cycles because your reasoning is already explained
• Builds a personal knowledge base over time

Looking for step-by-step productivity routines for programmers? Writing before coding is honestly my top recommendation from the entire study. Even just five minutes makes a difference.

[Link: Documentation best practices for software teams]

15-Minute Daily Review: How Top Engineers Compound Learning Without Burnout

At the end of the day, what do most developers do? Close their laptop. Maybe push one more commit. Context disappears into the void until tomorrow.

Many of the engineers I followed do something different: a structured daily review, typically around 15 minutes. It's like a personal standup, but for learning instead of status updates.

Format varies, but a common template looks like this:

• What did I actually accomplish today? (Not "what was I busy with," but what moved something forward)
• What did I learn? (Even small things: a new CLI flag, a gotcha in an API)
• What's blocking future me? (So tomorrow-you doesn't rediscover the same obstacles)

A physical notebook works for one engineer. Another uses a dead-simple text file. Format matters less than consistency.

Why does this actually work? Your brain consolidates learning during rest, but only if you've flagged what to consolidate. A daily review is that flag. It tells your subconscious: "Hey, this was important. Keep it accessible."

So how do 10x engineers manage their time? Not by cramming more into each day, but by extracting more learning from work they're already doing.

Time-Boxing Communication: Managing Slack, PRs, and Meetings Without Losing Flow State

Slack destroys more engineering time than bad code reviews.

The work habits of 10x engineers almost universally include aggressive boundaries around communication tools. Not in the "turn off notifications and ignore everyone" way that's become trendy. They time-box. Specific windows for specific communication types.

Rachel, a senior engineer at a productivity software company, structures her day like this:

• 9:00–9:30 AM: Email and async communication triage
• 11:30 AM–12:00 PM: PR reviews (batched, never one-off)
• 3:00–3:30 PM: Slack catch-up and quick responses
• 4:30–5:00 PM: Meeting prep and follow-ups

Outside these windows? Notifications off. Status set to "focus mode." Do not disturb.

"People get used to it," Rachel explained. "When you respond immediately, they expect immediate responses. Respond in 90-minute windows, and they expect that instead. You're training them either way."

Communication isn't the enemy. Unpredictable communication is. When you know you'll check Slack at 3 PM, you're not anxious about what you're missing at 1 PM. Your attention belongs to your code.

A few engineers also mentioned batching PR reviews. Rather than context-switching every time a review request comes in, they do all reviews in a single 30-minute block. Better feedback, faster turnaround, less mental fragmentation.

[Link: Managing communication overload as a developer]

What I want you to take from this: the daily habits of successful software engineers aren't about optimization hacks. They're about protection. Protecting attention. Protecting learning. Protecting the cognitive space where real engineering happens.

You don't need to adopt all twelve engineers' habits. Find what works for your brain, your team, your codebase.

Want a starting point? Try this two-week implementation plan using habit stacking, attaching new habits to existing ones:

Week 1: Foundation

• Day 1–3: Add a 15-minute daily review (stack it onto closing your laptop)
• Day 4–7: Protect your first 30 minutes from screens (stack onto waking up)

Week 2: Systems

• Day 8–10: Time-box communication into two 30-minute windows (stack onto lunch and end of day)
• Day 11–14: Try documentation-first on one task per day (stack onto starting any new work)

Don't add everything at once. That's how productivity systems die. Stick with one habit at a time, attached to something you already do, until it's automatic.

And look, some of these won't stick. That's fine. Remember the engineer who reads papers every morning? She tried journaling first. Hated it. Those afternoon deep work blocks? They took one engineer three months of calendar warfare to establish.

Perfection isn't the point. Deliberate experimentation is. Stop hoping productivity happens by accident.

Because here's what I learned in 30 days with these engineers: the gap between average developers and exceptional ones isn't talent or IQ. It's systems. It's habits. Boring, consistent choices that compound over months and years.

You can close this article and forget it by tomorrow. Or you can pick one habit, just one, and try it this week.

Your call.