Pacing

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. Well hello and welcome back. We're continuing our between season one-off episodes. This time we are going to talk about pacing. As we get to the end of each year, particularly when we start looking at holidays and vacations, and we do this actually, honestly, throughout the year, summer vacations, you get to the winter vacations, we talk about how to, I guess, reclaim some of that time and how to that to get ahead. How to maybe catch up a little bit, how to maybe pivot a little bit on some of your skills, and maybe switch gears to go from whatever your day job is, let's say you're a C sharp dot net programmer, and instead to do something that's a little different and go pick up Python or do some Java or do some just simple web programming or something like that. These cases where there are things that you want to do, but your day job sort of prevent that. However, doing that, keeping that steady pace that we want to keep, that getting a little bit better, making a little progress every day, getting that momentum, also can be exhausting. There needs to be, I think, and I think you can see a lot of people can, including scientific studies and stuff like that, can prove that pushing yourself all the time is not necessarily the most productive approach. There needs to be a pace set that is maintainable by you. Pushing yourself to 100% is eventually going to burn you out. That's anything you think of. If you go jump in your car and drive and just punch it, that's going to cause problems. Eventually, even if you don't hit anything, it's going to run at a higher capacity than it was really meant to do, and it's going to probably end up burning out faster, things like that. You see that in race cars where they have to regularly, very regularly stop and change out tires to avoid the things just wearing out completely because they're running them at a speed and generating more friction and heat than is normally expected for those. We're the same way. We have a certain amount of energy or however you want to look at it, a capacity for doing stuff on a daily, weekly basis, and it does vary from person to person. Some people are very comfortable with a couple hours of sleep and they're often running. Some need a lot more sleep. This is where we get into the, there's some personal things here. This is not to try to provide you some sort of blanket. Here's what you should do to set your pace because everybody's pace is different. Instead, it's some things that I have learned that have worked for me over the years in varying times and seasons to help protect the pace a little bit. Now, this sort of goes back to two concepts that we, well, one that we've talked about a couple of times and one that I don't know that we've talked about as much, but that is an age old concept. The first one that we have talked about is the Pomodoro technique. That is where you typically, I guess the default is that you set a little timer or set of timers where you work 25 minutes, focus, heads down focused on task, and then take a five minute break and then do another 25 minutes, take a five minute break. That can be adjusted and a lot of people do. I know a lot of people that have mentioned their Pomodoro timing that instead of doing the 25 and five, they'll do maybe 45 and 15. Just in a given hour, they'll sit down, they'll work for 45 minutes and they'll take a 15 minute break and work for 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break. I think at least in the, I don't know how school works around the world, but in the that actually probably fits pretty well. When we were in grade school, most classes were 45, 50 minutes long. You'd have a little break where you'd go from class to class and you'd jump into the next one. That's probably a pacing that, I don't know, maybe a chicken and egg thing. Maybe that pacing that schools picked up was done so because it was the most common, sort of the common denominator of pacing for people or maybe because we grew up with that, that became our pacing. I don't know. That's sort of beside the point anyways. It doesn't really matter how you got to that. It's what's comfortable for you. The Pomodoro technique builds in at least periods of rest or periods of not focused work. The point would be that if you do 45 and 15, that you go heads down for 45 minutes, you focus, you don't check mail, you don't hit social websites, you don't answer the phone even, don't answer texts, don't get chatting with your friends on Slack or whatever it is that you focus. Then when you're done, you can go do something else. Now the other concept is on a grander scale and it actually goes back to essentially ancient, I guess you could say ancient Hebrew Jewish Israelite type approach of what they had, they called the Sabbath, which is you would work six days and you got one day that you don't work at all. So Sabbath approaches, and we see this in now there's other places that have adopted this. You can see some businesses, Chick-fil-A, and it goes back to their Judeo-Christian background. They're not open on Sundays. They work six days and they're off on Sunday. That's their day off. And traditionally, I guess in the US, Sunday is considered sort of the day off. If you go back, and probably now it's a few decades, but you go back 50, 60 years, especially and even I think now, if you go to some of the smaller towns, it's hard to find stuff that's open on Sunday. Everybody takes a day off, at least a day off. Now we've adjusted a little bit so we have the weekend, but the key is if you've got your goal that you work Monday through Friday and you take Saturday and Sunday off, that at least one of those days, because we are doing extra work, and we've talked about that where we set aside some time to do a side hustle or something like that, and side hustles can easily consume a weekend. It's easy to burn through Saturday and Sunday and then be back to work on Monday or more so. When you're doing that, particularly when you get into those periods where you have long stretches of time where you really don't rest, you really don't have a day off because every day you're doing your day job or you're doing the side hustle, you're probably maybe up early, stay up late, putting those extra hours in. There is a, hopefully, there is a energy generation that comes out of that. There's an excitement or a positive that you get out of it so you don't feel, generally do not feel drained because this is what you want to do. You're high on the endorphins and the promises and the vision that you're building in this side hustle or this extra work you're doing, or it's just stuff you enjoy doing. So it is not a net drain on you. However, there are physical limitations. It's almost the idea of having too much fun. We still need to make sure we build into our schedules some time that we rest, that we or just do something that is not work. It's not that work. It's not that side hustle. It's not those things that we do on a daily basis because it allows our bodies to rest and recharge. And it even allows us to do so. We're going to be, particularly when we enjoy what we're doing, if you take a day off, then when you come back, you're chomping at the bit to dive right back into it. But that allows you to rest. It allows your body to catch up a little bit with maybe your mental desires. And I think about this as someone running a race. If you're running a marathon and you decide at some point during the marathon that there's a couple of people ahead of you that you really want to get ahead of them. And so you crank up the pace. So you sprint for half a mile or a mile to get ahead of them. Then you're going to have a lot harder time the rest of the race because you're trying to rest a little bit, regain some of the energy you burned in that period of sprinting. But you're also still needing to maintain the pace that you set for that race. And so you end up in a situation where you're really not allowed, you're not really able to rest to recover from that period of sprinting. And that's what our, I mean, life's a marathon. We're moving along. There's things we have to do. We have a day job. We have family commitments and other outside of work commitments. So we have this pace that is mandatory, I guess, that is mandated for us unless we're sick or something, which doesn't really help. If you get sick and maybe you're down for a couple of days, stuff doesn't stop piling up usually. So when you come back, then you've got a pile of work to catch up on. So instead of putting yourself in a situation where you do have to stop, it's key to understand what your pacing is and to maybe break up what you're doing a little bit to some periods of rest, of doing something different. Now part of what prompted, I guess, this topic and this portion of random topics is actually sort of flashing back to what I did when I was starting out early on when I had a day job and it just kept me busy. And usually that plus some of the stuff that just social life or whatever filled my Monday through Friday. My weekends were the time for me to do side hustle stuff, to learn and enhance my skills and things like that. And I did. I had projects I worked on. I had tutorials and training that I would go through. And typically that was Saturday, Sunday kind of timeframe. That's stuff I would do. But in order to not turn life into a blur, I would basically do sort of a Pomodoro kind of approach, except for what I did is I do two hours on, one hours off. And when I did the hour off, it was usually, the goal was go do something fun. And I was a gamer. So maybe play some games. Or maybe I'd go for, if I'm, this point depending on the weather and that, maybe I'd go for a jog or maybe go treat myself to go eat out or whatever it was. And I could also shift those around a little bit. But I tried to do a, it was basically like a two thirds work, one third fun in a day. So which sort of eventually grew into my Saturday mornings being a block of time because then I could get four or even six hours of work in and then have a few hours in the afternoon to go do something. And then I maybe come back and do a little at night and do a little more work at night. I did that on Saturday and Sunday and that filled my weekend, but still allowed me time to just do something fun. And by fun, it's any of your hobby stuff. Maybe if you read, maybe there's TV shows you want to binge, whatever. But something that's not work, that allows your body to recharge a little bit and allows you to keep that pace, hopefully forever, you know, almost until you die, I guess. But to keep that pace for a long period of time so you don't end up in burnout or making yourself sick or something like that where you actually are down for a while. And we see this a lot in the Western world. The Eastern world is a little different because there is, I think, built into a lot of the beliefs and things like that. In the society, there is these moments of peace and things like that, even though there are still very hectic schedules there. In the West, we seem to just want to move faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster, which is fine to some extent. But also we have to recognize what our pacing is. Otherwise, you know, like that race car, if they push it too many times and don't change the tires, they get a blowout. You know, you got a flat tire. Now you're not moving at all. Now you may be either out of the race or you're in a situation where you have a lap where you're crawling along on the lap to try to get to the pit to get fresh tires and all that kind of stuff. So pacing is key. And particularly as we go into this period of time where we could look at it as taking advantage of holidays and vacation time and stuff like that as a way to catch up on work. And I've done this many times where you maybe have a week, particularly, and you have a week off and you say, OK, well, the first couple of days I'm going to just catch up on work. And so then the last few days I'll be able to actually relax. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, particularly in this connected world that we have. It's real easy to get halfway through your vacation. Then suddenly some emergency comes up and you got to you're on the phone or you're logging into Zoom meetings or you're doing whatever. And the next thing you know, your vacation's gone. You work through the whole thing. And that doesn't help anybody. Now I know we all have our work ethic that says that, hey, we need to be available. We need to make sure that when we go on vacation, we are not slowing down the company or negatively impacting others. On the other hand, if you are in a situation where you've got PTO, personal time off days, or holidays, vacations, stuff like that, those are days that are part of your compensation. That's the deal. That's the contract that is part of your employment is that those days you do not work, that you have days off. So it's one thing to work through a weekend. It's another thing completely to work through vacation. Now if you use your vacation days to go do a side hustle or something like that, that's different. But in particular, and this has helped me, so maybe it'll help you. You are basically, if you're working during a day that you took off, then you're basically giving money that you were paid back to your company. I don't think, I think most of us would not do that with our paycheck. We're not going to turn around and say, no, I'm going to give some of that money back to the company. So don't do that with your vacation days. They are there for a reason. They are there actually to help you not burn out. And so that's, again, that's another piece of this is if you use your vacation for the side hustle, you got to make sure that you're not, that you're pacing is such that you don't during your vacation time, essentially burning yourself out so that your employer suffers for your side hustle ambitions. There's some balance here. And part of that requires us to rest at time to pace ourselves a certain way. That's why we talk about the daily momentum type tasks that we do, keeping it very short. You know, maybe 15, maybe 30 minutes a day, that kind of stuff is very maintainable. At least that's, that's what I've found. I've had for several years that I would start my day, the first hour of my quote workday or whatever, which was before I headed off into work, I would take, I had an hour block and I'd take 30 minutes to work on one thing, 15 minutes to work on another, 15 to work on another. And I don't even remember what the projects were, but those, those things kept moving forward in five days a week. Cause I would get up every day and that was my first hour of my day. I hit on those couple of things, kept moving forward and did everything I could to limit the time to 30, 15 and 15 for those items. And if something ran over, then maybe I wouldn't do it the next day. And then I'd get to the weekend and then I'd, you know, I had my little Saturday morning block of a few hours that then I could spend a little more time on whatever it is I wanted to spend more time on, whichever of those things I felt needed some, a little more tender loving care, a little more hours thrown at it. An hour a day is not much to add in a lot of cases, but if your day job is already burning up 14 hours a day, particularly, you know, even if you include in the commute time and stuff like that, you may be getting to the point where you, you're going to have to adjust some stuff. It may be that your day job is too much for you to maintain that pace. And instead you'll have to say, Hey, I'm just going to, I can't do it on a daily basis, but I am going to on the weekend when my daily job doesn't cut into stuff. You know, maybe then you take an hour or two and work on your skills, your side hustle, stuff like that. We can still use six days a week. We work 40 plus hours Monday through Friday, get in a, you know, you could easily get in a four to even 10 hour day on Saturday and still have Sunday off to do whatever. And really it's that whatever should be the stuff that you should be living life at that point, you know, travel, see a show, go for a walk, whatever it is. It sort of gets into the idea of the four hour work week where he talks about having these many retirements before you get old. You don't wait till you're, you know, you get to a retirement age and go do stuff. Take some time and do some stuff when you're healthy enough to do it. And that's the pacing that we want is to be able to have opportunities to live and enjoy life while we are keeping up this pace that we're setting for ourselves. I think I'll cut it off there and let us get back because, you know, I try to keep my own pacing through all of these challenge of the week. What's your pace like? Take some time, five, 10, 15 minutes and just think about what is it that you've been doing? What's your pacing? Where, how are you feeling? Are you tired? Are you exhausted? Are you feeling good? Are you pumped? Where are you at? And if it's in a place that you don't need to be, you know, that's pointing you in the wrong direction, it's taking you towards burnout, change your schedule. Make some adjustments. Do something to help reset or adjust your pace to try to avoid getting to that burnout point because burnout is never fun. It's never planned. It seems like it's always at the worst possible time. So the best we can, most we can do to avoid it, the better we're going to be. And that being said, hopefully you are on pace and you go out there and 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 Noor 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 developernoor.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 Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead 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 developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.