Writer's Block, Personal Debt, and Technical Debt
One step back, two steps forward.
It's been quite a while since my last post here. The blank space was due to a "writer's block", but also a deliberate pause to reorganize other areas of my life. As engineers, we often talk about technical debt—in many ways, my life had accumulated its own form of "personal debt" that required focused time to address.
I have a huge problem when it comes to writing: I always want to say something meaningful. But sometimes I don't have a special thought to share. So I just keep saving and stacking app ideas, blog post ideas, and general thoughts in my Notion basement.
Personal Debt and optimizing yourself for work
My life has always been navigating between cycles of: Low productivity → Good/Healthy productivity.
With time I learned that the low productivity cycle comes when I have too much "Personal Debt" to deal with and that causes me a huge cognitive load. Sometimes it's easy to avoid that by just dealing with one thing at a time, but sometimes things can "build up". So I learned a hack from my grandfather to help reduce the cognitive load to "organize my personal life":
Go outside, do a weekend travel, go to the beach, whatever, but don't go there to have fun, just be there, take things slow and THINK.
Then after you think, you will point out the first most important thing you have to deal with. When you go back home, you should know what to do. After the first thing, you will have more energy to face the others.
I cannot say how much this has helped me. After "organizing your home", you immediately feel more energized to do more stuff.
Then it's time to improve your work productivity again, and for that I have a very simple system:
Less tools: you only need a task manager/todo list, a calendar app and an alarm
Plan your overall week based on the work you need to deliver this sprint/week
Plan each day by choosing one important thing for the day, and block time on your calendar to achieve it
The other items will flow with your momentum
Use your calendar as an ally to block time to focus and plan personal things on your week
Set up an alarm to do pauses, stand, walk, talk, drink water, and go back
Don't scroll social media between pauses and/or work cycles, schedule time on your calendar to do that later
Dealing with Tech Debt
Working in startups has taught me much about the duality between speed and sustainability. Many companies, especially early-stage startups, operate with a constant pressure to ship new features quickly. This eventually leads to neglecting technical debt and optimization, which can create cognitive overload on the team.
What I've observed in successful engineering teams is an intentional rhythm: periods of rapid feature development followed by deliberate technical improvement sprints. These improvement cycles aren't just about refactoring code—they're investments in future velocity.
But you can ask me
"How can I have time for that if my leaders think it's a waste of time?"
Well, in the startup world everything is about tradeoffs and that's part of the journey. Time to market and competitiveness is critical to decide if the startup is going to succeed or just die as the majority of them do.
Part of the engineer's job is to understand the company moment, the features that will need to be built in the near future, and educate stakeholders on the long-term benefits of addressing bottlenecks and technical debt. The most compelling argument is always concrete data showing how these improvements ultimately accelerate feature delivery.
Be a constant learner
Another random topic I wanted to touch on here is how important my recent readings were to deal with both personal and technical debt. So I want to encourage you to always seek improvement as a person no matter in what aspect of life.
I'll list some books that helped me recently and other resources:
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - Book by Greg McKeown
Nonviolent Communication - Book by Marshall Rosenberg
and now some great engineering blog recommendations I've been reading lately: