Quick takeaways 5 minutes into Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer

Interested in becoming a more effective engineer, I fittingly have started reading the very popular The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau.

Five minutes in (don’t worry, I’ll read more of the book than that!), I’m already getting a sense of where Lau will be going, and this article will summarize some of my key takeaways just a mere five minutes of reading into the book.

Working more hours doesn’t mean you’re more effective

In lots of work cultures, working very long hours can be seen as somewhat admirable in the sacrifice to one’s personal life.

Lau doesn’t shy away from saying that he once worked long hours in hopes of making a larger impact on the companies he worked for, and what I noted was that he didn’t offer a blanket statement in saying that doing so was necessarily bad for him. In fact, he mentions that it was a period of “intense personal growth” for him.

The caveat though, is that he had to endure “countless emotional roller coasters” along the way.

What I found interesting is that he didn’t just say that working long hours is bad and that he regrets it, which is what sometimes the conversations boil down to. He mentions it’s ultimately unsustainable, and the…