How to build, run and maintain an A+ engineering team across multiple projects with nothing but Google Sheets and a 10-minute closeout rule.
Lucie Nurdin, PhD. Lucie is the Reactor Lead Engineer at Terraform Industries where she leads the team building solar-powered reactors that turn atmospheric carbon dioxide and green hydrogen into synthetic methane and methanol. She holds a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of Calgary and climbs alpine routes in her non-work time.
Terraform has opportunities for MechEs, EEs, ChemEs, technicians, and others!
It is 6:30 PM on a Friday in Burbank and my week is over. My inbox is empty, and next week is already planned. So is the week after that. So is three months from now, and six months from now. Same as every Friday.
For two decades, I’ve run my life on what I describe, without irony, as a game of chess against myself. I already know the endgame. I’m always two moves ahead of my opponent: the next meeting, the next pivot, the next hurdle.
We are living through a productivity crisis. The tools designed to organize us, Slack, Notion, Asana, Jira, have become the thing we need to be organized against, and the prevailing advice is to do less: quiet quitting, slow productivity, the four-day week. My approach is the opposite.
I lead the reactor team at Terraform Industries, a clean-energy startup building solar-powered Terraformers that capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into synthetic methane and methanol. I manage engineers across multiple projects, run hiring interviews, handle customer sales, and own logistics. I also do my own IC work: thermodynamics and kinetics of our reactors, design doc reviews, test campaign planning. Outside of work I climb in remote alpine places that require federal permits booked six months out and enough technical skill to stay alive. Ideally, a little more than the bare minimum!
I don’t feel behind. If everything is planned, it’s one less thing to worry about. Being on top of everything is what lets me juggle chemistry, engineering, project management, sales, hiring, and operations without any single one of them dropping.
For me, organization isn’t “a professional skill” that I switch on at work but rather just how I operate, and I apply the same chess logic to everything outside work too.
The same system, applied to climbing
Most of the best outdoor climbing in California requires permits from recreation.gov, which open either six months out or two weeks out. Checkmate is a permit for the exact weekend I want. Two moves ahead means phone reminders set for the moment each permit window opens, and if the six-month window doesn’t hit, the two-week reminder is already queued. The prep work, which permits cover which area, which regions are open based on weather, how snowpack shifts the plan, what gear I need, runs in the background. I update the calendar every time an input changes.
Identify the goal, reverse-engineer the dependencies, automate the reminders, stay flexible when the inputs change. I use the same system at work.
Close everything on the spot
The single most important habit in my system is what I do in the last 5-10 minutes of every meeting. I don’t leave a meeting planning to deal with it later. I close everything before I move on.
“Who is doing what by when?” Admiral Rickover.
Action items get written down the moment they’re decided. Calendar reminders get set for anything date-specific. Stakeholders get emailed or tagged immediately. If it was a hiring meeting, notes go to the hiring committee right then. Action items get pasted into next week’s meeting notes so future-me already has the agenda.
I do not defer these tasks. Deferring is where organization goes to die. The ten minutes I spend closing out a meeting saves me hours of “wait, what were we supposed to do about that?” later in the week.
Plan the next meeting before you leave this one
Every recurring meeting (weekly, monthly, whatever the cadence) has its own Google Sheet with a template for the agenda, shared with the relevant stakeholder. Take my weekly 1:1s. I already know what I’ll talk to each direct report about, because I know what they were working on the week before and we ended the last meeting on the next steps. Those next steps are already pasted into Monday’s notes.
So at 6:30 PM on Friday, I know exactly what I’m telling my team on Monday morning. I know how it ladders up to my Q2 priorities, and I know what checkmate looks like: by the end of Q2, the methane reactor is built and shipped to the field test site, the methanol reactor is scaled up, I have a signed purchase agreement with another customer, and I’ve also successfully onboarded two new hires.
Own your calendar
A lot of people hand their calendar over to Calendly or other platforms. I don’t. When I need to schedule with someone, I offer three specific time slots. In 95% of cases one works, and if none do, I ask for their availability and set it up myself. It takes an extra 30 seconds, but being in charge of my calendar is non-negotiable as the calendar is a critical part of the system.
I also know myself. I know how long things actually take, and I budget accordingly. A 30-minute meeting gets a 5-10 minute buffer after it for personal reset and note cleanup. A 1-hour meeting gets 15-20. People might look at the buffers and see wasted time, but they’re actually the whole reason my system works.
Triage everything, aka Eisenhower’s method
Every task that lands on my plate runs through the same filter. Important and urgent, I do now. Important but not urgent, I schedule. Not important but urgent, I delegate. Not important and not urgent, I delete.
Most people only use the first bucket and let everything else pile up. The delete bucket is the one people forget exists, and it’s the one that protects your bandwidth the most. I ask myself what’s actually important for me to do today, this week, this month, this year, and I reset hard when I catch myself slipping into task-mode with no purpose. Everything should ladder up to the big picture.
What a day actually looks like
I don’t do time-blocking or themed days. Because I’m organized at the root, I can context-switch without friction, and honestly I like it that way. Here’s a realistic day.
8:30 AM, 15-minute stand-up, then 5 minutes to write out the day’s key action items. 8:50, 40 minutes on big-ticket items: review a design doc, send five important emails to get things moving, maybe a call or two. 9:30, hiring interview. Template ready. I log in three minutes early, skim the 30-second candidate memo, run the 30-minute call. After: write notes, decide next step. If it’s a yes, send notes to whoever owns the next stage, set a reminder to follow up, schedule the email to the candidate. Close everything.
10:00 AM, block for reading a design review. 10:15, someone needs something right now. Fine. I jot a quick note on the design doc so I know where I stopped, drop my first round of comments, and go deal with it. If the interruption can’t be resolved in 25 minutes, it goes on the to-do list and gets processed properly: root cause, then is it a people, time, or money problem, then prioritize, then action plan, then action items.
11:00 AM, empty slot on the calendar. Back to the design doc. Close it out, write my key points, follow up with whoever owns it, make sure it moves forward. 12:00 PM, 1:1 with my direct report. Template ready, five minutes beforehand to add anything I’ve been thinking about. 12:30, meeting done, five minutes closing action items and prepping the next one.
2:00 PM, check on the team: are we blocked, is there a decision I can make right now to let us move forward faster, safer, cheaper.
5:00 PM, scan the rest of the week and tomorrow. Anything I need to prepare for? Everything is under control. 6:30 PM, I bike home feeling like the system is working.
Automate your future self’s memory
Calendar reminders are mandatory. If a vendor says I’ll get the tracking number on Friday, I drop a reminder to check that Friday. Sometimes I add a second one a few days before: a nudge to email the vendor and confirm we’re still on track. If I don’t hear back, I pick up the phone. Often I pick up the phone first.
Sometimes I go further and draft the follow-up email in advance. Vendor said the PO would be ready Friday? I write the Wednesday-morning email now that sounds like this: “Hey, you mentioned the PO and tracking would be available by Friday. It’s Wednesday, can you confirm we’re still on track?” and schedule it to send itself. Never assume someone else will remember to do the thing. You’ll never lose by being too organized.
Decide fast, communicate clearly
I make fast, decisive calls. I can’t afford to dwell. If I don’t have the authority, I go straight to the source, usually our CEO, Casey Handmer. If I do, I make the call and communicate the reasoning behind it. I welcome feedback, but I rarely reverse a decision. I go with it.
I probably make 20 decisions a day. Some are huge: what price point do we sell methane at, which nearly decides the fate of the company. Some are small: do we need to order another gas analyzer for $1,000? Both get the same treatment. Decide, communicate, move. If you dwell on small decisions, you run out of bandwidth for the big ones.
Why this reduces stress instead of adding to it
People sometimes assume all this structure must be exhausting. It’s the opposite. Because I’m on top of everything, my brain is free to hold the things that actually matter like the big strategic questions, the engineering problems, the people dynamics. The admin, the note-wrapping, the scheduling, the reading queue, all of it is on autopilot, handled in small closeout windows, never piled up.
If I weren’t in charge of my time and genuinely ready to give 100% to whatever needs my attention, I couldn’t be this proactive.
The cost
I’ll be honest about the one real cost. I’m not built for last-minute chaos. If something blows up with zero warning, like a truly last-second change of plans, I have to force myself to adapt. I can do it, but I don’t enjoy it. Nothing is worse, to me, than a plan that doesn’t get executed. A system this tight makes you phenomenal at anticipated variance and slightly worse at pure improv. I’ve decided it’s a good trade, but your mileage may vary.
For me, a few minutes after every meeting and a few seconds to schedule a reminder is worth it. Compare it to the alternative: hours trying to keep up, constantly feeling behind, reacting instead of acting. If you always feel like you’re reacting, you’re not playing chess. Or you are, but your opponent is the one two steps ahead.
My System and the takeaway
No Jira. No Notion. No fancy productivity stack. Google Calendar, Gmail with scheduled send, Google Meet with AI note-taking and transcripts, and Google Sheets. That’s it. The simplest system is usually the best one, because simplicity is what you actually maintain.
Everything I’ve described breaks down into single, granular steps. That’s the point. Good organization isn’t about adding complexity. It’s about adding structure, clarity, and a strong sense of ownership to things you’re already doing. Close out every meeting. Own your calendar. Schedule the reminder. Triage the task. Make the decision. Move. Build the discipline to run this system.
I’ll update this in six months with changes I’ve made by then.
