Planning

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-newer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things, looking at the positives that come out of our annoying kinds of tasks that we deal with on a daily, weekly, maybe even monthly basis, depending on which they are. These range from minor headaches to things that could be labeled the bane of our existence, the things that really bother us. But even in the worst cases, there's a bright side. There's something that we get out of this. And so we're going to try to take a look at the silver lining for these very bleak and black storm clouds that we run into as part of our job, the things that make our otherwise pleasant job work. This episode, this one is not as cut and dry as some of the other ones we've covered. I think some people actually enjoy this part of the work. Myself, I think this was probably something that does not bother me as much. And that is planning. Now we've covered meetings and we talked in there about what the things that make developers for the most part feel productive, which is creating code. That's just basically the way it is. Even I think, I feel even at the architect level, there's just something more satisfying about having a framework code or something like that. That's a code, source code that's been generated than a nice pretty document. Not to say that it's not rewarding to have that nice architecture design document done and all of the nice pictures and graphs and tables and whatever we put into it. But source code is sort of our, for a lot of us, I think it's our happy place. If we're coding, that's what we're meant to do. So we enjoy building that out. Planning, that's not a coding exercise. So I know for some people, this is very frustrating. And this one really is a topic that goes beyond IT and technology. Some people are planners, some people are not. And there are arguments for and against planning actually. There's some people that will argue that there's no sense in planning because you really don't know what's going to happen. The further out you plan, which is not untrue, the further out you plan, the more likely it is that you more or less, I mean, they're going to say wasted your time planning because the plans are not going to unfold that way. Think about just recently, you can look back at the global shutdown that was caused by the COVID crisis. If somebody spent a lot of time planning a vacation that went on while their destination was shut down, all that planning was essentially for naught. You can't go, you're shut down, you're locked down wherever you're at. That vacation planning, maybe you can salvage it and do it another time, but for that particular event, didn't happen. So your plans were, it could be argued, wasted. Now that's where the first positive is that I want to address, which is actually that planning time is wasted if the plans don't come to fruition. And I think that is incorrect because I think like every, really every exercise we do, it helps us get better in a certain area. So every time we plan, I think we get better at planning. And it is in of itself. It's a practice, practice, practice kind of thing. And honestly, I don't know that anybody's out there that can plan perfectly because you just don't know what's going to happen. But in doing so, when you see that plans, they're not executed quite the way you thought they were going to be, I think for most of us, if not all of us, then we adjust moving forward so we have more flexible plans. We have plans that take into, we have contingencies and they take into account exceptions and changes in schedules and all the other things that can screw up plans. And so we do it in a, we'll say less risky fashion. We actually, I think, get so that we plan a little more loosely and we try to hit the high points rather than go too deep into the detail and realize that it's a train wreck. A good example for that would be somebody that wants to plan out their work week. And let's say you want to plan out the month ahead. You get to the end of a month, you're about to plan out the month ahead. What's your work week going to look like, particularly if you want to get very detailed? What tasks am I going to cover? What am I going to do? Check email. When am I going to go to lunch? When am I going to take a break? All of the things, not just a big block of time, but trying to actually schedule out every day for the next month or even for the next week. When you do that, it's real easy for that to get broken because when you have these hard schedules in there of I'm going to be at this place at that time and that place at this other time, if you get one off, it may actually throw everything off almost immediately. So at any given moment, you can shift stuff around, but then maybe then what if one thing takes longer or less time? All of the kinds of things, again, that can make a plan go wrong. Well, instead, maybe you do that for a month and you realize, okay, I spent too much time, got too much into the weeds, didn't work. So maybe the next time you say, okay, I'm going to keep it looser. This time around, I'm going to say I'm going to be at work from eight to five every day and I'm going to take a one hour lunch break, let's just say, or one hour worth of breaks, if you want to put it that way. That's even better. So now, in the weeks ahead, Monday through Friday, you've got eight hours of work with an hour break that's going to go on. You could say that I'm going to schedule it out, be there at eight, leave at five, or you could loosen it up a little bit more and just say, okay, I'm going to get 40 hours of work in this week. Then between Monday to Friday, or you could loosen it up more and say, I'm just going to get 40 hours of work in this week. So if something comes up, I can spill over into Saturday. These spillover into Saturday is exactly how I tend to do my scheduling. I try to get everything done Monday through Friday, almost never do, and so it spills over into Saturday. So I use that as my slush fund of the day to be able to push the hours or the time to the tasks that need to get accomplished. So you learn as you plan, and particularly as we often do when the plans go wrong, we learn from our mistakes, or at least we should. So when we have something that goes wrong, we can take a look at it, assess it, say, okay, here's where I made a few mistakes, and make changes moving forward. So even plans that are never actually implemented do have a value to them. There's something useful in there. There's something that you can learn from that process. Another positive in planning is very similar to the idea of why design is so valuable. It goes back to that whole idea of measure twice, cut once. When you plan, you sort of play out, I think, most people, and it's a little different. I'm sure how everybody does it, but roughly, you play out how you think this event or series of events is going to work out. How is that going to flow? What's going to go on? What's the reaction of various people? How are they going to deal with it? What are they going to be doing? What are the tasks that they're going to be assigned? All that kind of stuff. Let's think of something that's much more structured than maybe the average thing we would plan. So for this example, let's say a fire drill. So if you're planning for a fire drill, and let's say it's a business location, well, there's certain things that are going to be part of that planning. Of course, this event starts with a fire alarm goes off. Well then, part of the plan is certain people need to be told that they are, usually that's how it works, that they are leaders or something like that. Their job is going to be to get up and start directing people to the appropriate exit, assuming there's multiple exits. That's usually how it's done. And if you're a fire inspector or something, I'm sorry, I'm not. Please don't hold me to the details for this example. So there's going to be some people who are going to be directing people to exits. There are going to be a person or people that are essentially tasked with a sweep through to make sure that everybody has exited the building. There may be some other things. There may be certain things that need to be locked down specifically or shut off or turned on depending on where you're at. If you're in a bank, maybe you need to make sure that the vault gets shut if it's open, things like that. So in going through this plan, you're practicing, you're pretending that this event occurs. Now, as that goes on, much like in design, you can find gaps in your plan. You can find areas just by going through the planning process where you can say, oh, wait a minute, what about this situation? I don't have that covered in my plan. I need to make sure that that gets addressed. And so it's almost like looking at requirements where you're going to find out that, oh, my gosh, here's a requirement that we didn't cover. For example, let's go back to the fire drill and let's say it's a bank. And you get to everything and somebody says, after looking at the plan, they're like, that's awesome. What happens if the safe is standing, if the vault is sitting open at that point? Did we burn the money? Does somebody get to just walk in and take it? What? And so you'd say, oh, well, we need to make sure that we assign somebody to that. So it's a way to test run your solution, your approach to something. So planning has got that positive as well. It's a way for us to think through things. I think another value of planning that is it's not necessarily planning per se, but this case, I think we learn how to better manage our time and direct ourselves and others. Now, it's a little bit related more to it. It's a little bit more about experience, about going through something, thinking it's going to go a certain way, finding out it doesn't, and then adjusting as you move forward. But the thing about planning is it's almost like documenting something beforehand or even measuring something beforehand, or at least providing, I guess, the structure for the measure. Because you're going to do a plan, and when you get done, so let's say you plan your week ahead. When you get done with that week, you can look back at the plan and say, did that work? Did I execute the plan as I thought I did or was going to? And if you didn't, then you'd be able to look at it and say, okay, well, I didn't do this. This didn't come out the way I thought it was. This thing came up that I totally forgot about. I didn't even put it into my plan. These things that I planned, I never got to because I realized they just weren't that important, or whatever it is. A plan gives you accountability to some extent, especially when you write it down. Even if you think about it, if you think through it, most of us will somehow go back and judge our plan versus what actually happened. But if you write it down, that forces a little bit more accountability. It doesn't force it, but it's more likely to provide some accountability for you. If you sit there and you start every week with a little to-do list, plan out your week, this is what I'm going to get done. Week after week, you'll be able to look at it. As you get to the end of the list, you're going to see whether you really want to look at it or not, what got done and what didn't. Particularly as you get towards the end, most likely you're going to be looking at that list and asking yourself, okay, what can I get done that I wanted to get done? So you're going to have this accountability, this record of what you thought you were going to do. I think that pushes most of us, particularly those of us that are here that want to be better developers. That's one of the ways that we get better. This is a life lesson beyond just IT. It's how we use our time. You go through a week, sometimes you're going to look back and you're going to go, how on earth did I get so little done? What was going on? You may or may not jump to some solution. Sometimes it takes a while. You may find that, oh my gosh, I spend 10 hours a day on Facebook and I thought I spent a half an hour. Or I spent a lot more time reading news articles than I thought I did or watching TV. Or talking to coworkers or whatever it happens to be. This is something that I think is valuable. I think it's very valuable for us to understand how we spend our time and to be, I think that's probably the greatest skill is to be a master of spending your time, we'll call it wisely, in a way that suits and fits your priorities and what you want to do with your life. The more you can do that, the more you can spend time the way you want to spend time, I think the happier, in general, the happier you're going to be. And so it's worthwhile to take a look at this kind of planning. A slight side note on this is if you are, if you're trying to figure out lost hours, I highly recommend the Pomodoro technique. I think sitting there, even just the default 25 minutes on, five minutes off, going through Pomodoros, going through a cycle and figuring out how many of those cycles you get in a day, in particular like an eight hour day, I just about guarantee you're not going to get 16 cycles in an eight hour period. I don't know anybody that does. Now those are very highly productive times, most likely, if you do it right. But you also will see, I think it really does a great job of highlighting where your time goes. You're going to be a lot more sensitive to disruptions and interruptions and side conversations and tangents and all the other things that just sort of suck time out of your day. And I think you'll very quickly understand that there is a lot of truth to the idea that the theory or whatever, however you want to look at it, that in a typical eight hour work people don't get more than five to six hours of work in. The really productive ones can get six hours of work in in eight hours of a work day. So planning is a way to measure. It gives you a metric for that most valuable asset of yours, which is time. Now you can, like I said, you can get too far. You can go deep into the weeds. You can spend a lot of time planning stuff out and then it really doesn't provide enough. The ROI, the return on that invested time is not high enough to make it worthwhile. And that's why I always have recommended start simple. Start with a simple list and just about everybody will tell you that. Keep the list as simple as possible. I think for a lot of us, particularly think Western society, the whole idea of being busy all the time and I've got all this stuff to do and I'm very productive and all that kind of stuff. I'm one of these people. I'm not saying that this is pointing a finger at everybody else, is that I think we put too much value on being busy, on filling every second of our day with something productive. I think when we want to build a list of what am I going to get done today, it is our tendency to go beyond reasonable. You should have a small number of items that you're expecting to get done. You have three to five, something like that. Now you may have a lot of little things that you put on your to do list that you just know are going to be part of your day or things that you want to touch. So for example, on my list on a typical day, there's a lot of times that I'll have dishes or laundry or take the trash out or something simple like that. That's really not a lot of time. It may be because the laundry may just be I'm going to throw something in the wash and then move it to the dryer somewhere at some point during the day because I'm working from home so it's easy to do that in a few minutes. You may have something simple. So it may be something as simple as a reminder type tasks of, oh yeah, don't forget, you need to drop that letter in the mailbox or you need to pay that one bill or whatever it is. So you may have some minor things and it may get to be a list of a dozen or 15 or 20 items, but there are a lot of really quick hit things where half of those things you could get done in a half hour, an hour if you just wanted to like just knock them out. That's okay. But I'm talking about the larger, anything of real significance, keep it small. But if you're planning and you find yourself constantly having a lot left on your to-do list or that doesn't get done in that period that you planned, then that should be a subtle hint that you need to adjust your expectations or you need to make better use of your time. So planning has got a lot of different positives that can come out of them and some of them are the, like I said, of the most valuable sort where they help us live life a little better, make the best, most use of our time. Challenge of the week. How do you plan? Take a look at your plan. If you have it, if you don't start it, that would be like the one B of the challenge. Just do a simple start, very simple. This week I'm going to get these five things done. You can get all kinds of other stuff done, but just pick a couple of things that you're, you say, okay, I want to get this done this week. If you do plan, take a look at your recent plans. How did you do as far as assigning yourself tasks and getting those done? If you always had too much left undone, maybe you need to take a look at how your time is spent or maybe you need to drop some of those things off of your to-do list or adjust them accordingly so you can get stuff done. Another neat little side challenge to that one is if you find yourself regularly not filling your day where most days you get all your tasks done and you have time left over, what do you do at that point? You celebrate and take advantage by using that free time, however, in some fun way for yourself or do you go back and throw extra items on your list? It may look at, you know, maybe an interesting thing to look at to see where your why is and maybe you need to adjust it a little bit. Part of that getting to me, part of putting that list together is when it's done, stop. Take the rest of the day, enjoy some free time. You can always try to get ahead, but unless you really know that's going to be something you have to do, don't. You never know what's going to happen the next day. You never know with that stuff that you get ahead on. You're not always sure that's really going to happen. So let it go. Take some time. Rest. Let that to do list work for you. That planning work for you and not just against you. And that being said, however your day goes, whether it's to plan or something completely chaotic, hopefully, no matter how it goes, you have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer North podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer North. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer North site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Broadhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.