Lessons Learned from Interviews

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor 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 are in the middle of, or actually at the end of, a season where we have just had a bunch of interviews. These last couple episodes, I just wanted to touch on a couple of things that were lessons learned while I went through this particular season. If you've followed all along, there have been very few instances up to this point that we have had any interviews in the Develop-a-Noor world. We do our mentor classes. Those things show up all the time. If you go over to Vimeo Develop-a-Noor or look up Develop-a-Noor on YouTube, you'll see a lot of different formats. Not necessarily as much interviews, but discussions and things of that nature. Usually to this point, it's been soliloquies or monologues, something along those lines, where we just cover topics. This season, we wanted to switch it up a little bit with the interviews, and I found it to be very refreshing, and there's a lot of information. We're very blessed by some great guests that came in that we talked to, and hopefully you have a notebook full of not only suggestions, but action items as well. The prior episode, I talked about setting goals and achieving them, and that is one of the things that I think really was highlighted in my experience of doing this particular season. The challenge with interviews is that you have quite a few steps you have to take, and they do rely on other people. To some extent, you have to find somebody that wants to be interviewed. You have to have a topic that's good. You have to set up the time with them. You have to do the interview. You have to do the editing. You have to do the posting. You have to share out the information later. It's a little different from an episode such as this one, where it's basically you can schedule it whatever works with your schedule. You go over the topic that you need to go over whatever suits your time, and you also are pretty free to go as far or stick as close to the topic as you want to. I talked in the prior episode about setting milestones, about giving yourself some buffer room to make sure that you're not essentially caught in this cram the night before the finals kind of approach that we did as children. We don't study into the last moment, and if anything comes up, everything is lost. You just don't have any room for any kinds of mistakes or issues or delays or anything like that because you're out of time. When you're doing something like this, that is important. That is key that you give yourself the time to do it right because otherwise, particularly in something like this, you've really got two options. Either you miss your deadline or you end up doing something that's not the quality that you want it to be. Neither of those are really good. Now, the missing the deadline, I do want to talk about that more. When we set goals for ourselves, I think one of the best things we can do is get on a rhythm, get on a schedule. Whether it's a daily kind of check in with that task or that project or weekly or monthly, but this goes back to the idea of steady progress. While anything that you're producing for other people, if you're doing content like a blog or a podcast or something along those lines, even weekly status to your boss or a customer, those things are providing some sort of communication to others, some sort of thing that you're doing for others. Now, it helps others to know that you are going to be doing that on a specific, regular basis. They know to check for your blog every Tuesday afternoon or they know that they're going to expect status from you on a Friday afternoon or first thing on a Monday morning. If it doesn't happen, then they're probably going to, maybe they have that kind of a relationship with you, they may reach out and say, hey, where'd this go? Why is this not here? I expect it. It allows them to work that into their schedule as well. When you're doing something for somebody else, yes, surprises are nice, but not when it is something that is a service. For example, everybody probably has had, I mean, probably the best example of this, at least in the US, is if you have somebody come to install cable or set up a phone or things like that, you often get these. They'll show up between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Tuesday. The whole day, this huge block, you have no idea when they're going to show up. All of us know that's not fun. You want it to be a lot more narrow so you know that, hey, they're going to show up at between 3 and 5 or 10 and 12 or 8 and 10 or whatever it is, so you don't have to leave an entire day open for that. Likewise, you don't want them to just surprise you and say, we'll show up sometime this week. And then inevitably, they show up the five minutes that you run down the street to go to the bank or grab groceries or something like that. And then you have to reschedule, all those kinds of things. So surprises are not always good. And the more you can pinpoint when someone can expect a service, the more likely they are to be happy with that, to be satisfied with that. Because now they can plan for it, they can plan around it, and they can work it into their schedule. Because it's not all about us, the provider, it's actually pretty much all about the customer. We want to deliver something to them when they want it, when they want to use it. Content is no different. And that's key for when I put out this podcast is try to do it as much as possible to hit certain time every week, multiple times during the week, it gets out certain time, it's available. And you're off and running. So if you have some way that you want to work this into your week, we do whatever we can to make that possible. Now when you're trying to coordinate other schedules, then that can be a challenge. But this goes back to setting milestones and giving yourself enough time. You need to be looking forward to, at this date and this time, I need to have these things done. It's called backward scheduling. And actually there's a pairing to that that's called contingency scheduling and contingency management. Which is basically you say, if I have to have this thing by Friday, and I've got these three prior steps, and each of those steps takes a day, well then I can back them up. So step three, I have to have done by Thursday. Step two, I have to have done by Wednesday. Step one, I have to have done by Tuesday. And then contingency planning is when you say, well, something may come up that often comes up on Tuesday. So instead of step one being on Tuesday, I really need to aim for it being done on Monday. And if nothing comes up, then great, you're ahead of the game. And this is that, it goes back to the buffers and things like that where you have a deadline, you have a milestone, but you need to back off of whatever that deadline is or whatever that full 100% done is and pull back a little bit and say, well, I want it to be 100% done a day early, a week early, whatever it is so that you do have some room built in in case something comes up. Now, the consistency side of this also serves us. We've talked many times about momentum, about doing a little bit every day. The same reason that we want to provide for our customers on a regular basis is why we want to provide for ourselves on a regular basis, why we want to set that schedule so that we have this almost like a ritual or this rhythm, this momentum of on such and such a day or such and such a time. This is what we do. It is something that allows us to be a little more productive, a little more efficient and spend a little less time actually dwelling on tasks. That's why it's actually, and actually even our bodies, physical rhythms work best when we have some consistency. If you look at people that study sleep patterns, one of the things that is key is getting into a pattern where you typically are going to bed at the same time and you'll find that you're getting up at the same time. Naturally so. You can always set an alarm and stuff like that. But even then, if you've ever had a situation where you set an alarm for a certain time for many, many days in a row, maybe weeks, months or years, and then you shut that alarm off, you find out that you're probably going to wake up at the time you always woke up. You may be able to roll over and go back to sleep, but some people can't even do that. It's basically once you're awake, you're awake. So if you set your alarm for 6 a.m. every day and on Saturday you don't set it, you're probably still going to wake up at 6 o'clock, 6 a.m. unless you're absolutely exhausted. And particularly if you go to bed at the same time every night, you're probably going to get up at the same time every morning. That's just sort of how things work. Our body, our natural physical chemistry and setup work with that. We work better when we have something that's steady, that's consistent. And so we're going to do better hitting our goals and our milestones when we have that pace that we can set that makes sense. And the key there is one that makes sense. We can set something up and often this is a problem that we run into in the world of technology and particularly those that want to do side hustles. You get into a situation where you have this vision of what you want, of where you want to be, and you end up really overworking yourself to get to that point because you don't want to wait. You're not patient. And instead you want to get to that point, which means you're going to put in the work. You'll skip sleep, you'll work through weekends, whatever it takes. But there comes a point where that is not productive. You're too worn out. You've spent too much time. You're too tired and you actually end up better off resting instead of working through that. And that is where setting this, getting your momentum going is key because it's one thing to get sort of to cram for that final, but it's something entirely different when you pace that out, when you allow time for what you are doing, what you're studying to actually sink in. And I know it sounds like everybody's worst professor or teacher that said, hey, it's going to do a lot better and you're going to retain it better if you do this over time. But it's true. I hate to say it, but it's true. Same thing goes for any of our tasks. When we are steadily moving forward on them, there is opportunity to have those things sort of percolate in the back of our head. Probably most of you, if not all of you have run into situations where there's a, there's a problem you struggled with, something that was just blocking it. You could not figure out how to move forward and you walk away from it. And then sometime later, suddenly a solution comes to you or at least another option, another way to go. And that's because that's just how our brains work sometimes. Sometimes we get too focused on something and instead of being, and especially if you had stress to it, so you're focused, you've got to get it done, you've got a deadline and nothing's going to seem to work because you're forcing it. Instead, when you use that natural rhythm, you're not going to be as stressed about it. You're not going to be as tired or possibly even lack productivity. Again, thinking about that, you know, stay up all night to study before the exam. Well then you don't get a good night's sleep. You're going to be tired while you're studying, so you're not going to retain as much. You're going to be tired when you take the exam. And so that's not going to work as well. Same thing goes with all of our side hustle stuff. If you want to do it, if you decide you're going to do it, then do it. Set the milestones, maybe even talk to some people and decide that, okay, these are the things I'm going to hit and pace them out so that they make sense, so that they are doable. And don't sit there and schedule yourself to work an eight hour day, Monday through Friday, and then spend six hours a day working on your side hustle after that and then working all weekend. You may be able to do it. And so, figure out what works for you and work within that, work within those constraints instead of just deciding I've got all of A to do, I've got all of B to do, and so I'm just going to add those times together and just find a way to get it done. It's usually not going to be a path to success. You're going to be stressed, you're going to have missing deadlines, or you may just decide to punt. You get to a point where you just say, you know what, this is just too much and I'm going to go for a walk in the park or something like that, and a long walk in the park or something like that. Or I'm just, I'm going to give up. I'm going to switch to something else because you need those victories along the way as well. Those milestones give you some victories, give you some points where you can say, hey, at least I got this far. I've got something that has been accomplished and now I can move forward and build on it, or at least add to it, however that works out. I ran into this, like I said, with this, with setting up these podcasts, with setting up the interviews and having to really push myself several times to keep that pipeline open of upcoming interviews so that I had stuff scheduled out, that I had people to talk to, that I was able to move stuff around as I needed to to meet their schedules. And it's just one of the things I think it's some additional lessons learned. Every time you do something like this, you may not go into it thinking that, yes, I've run into this kind of a problem before. But when you do, it doesn't hurt to reflect on it and go, okay, well, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? And that's why I wanted to share it with you. And it also just felt like a good way to sort of wrap up this season is to talk about some lessons learned while I went through this, some specific ones, because we've talked about some for each of the interviews as we went through that. So that being said, we'll wrap it up. So as always, 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 Noir 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 developernoir.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 Noir. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noir 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 developernoir.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.