Scheduling: Managing Your Time for Success

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Welcome back. We're continuing our season. We're talking about mistakes, errors, missteps, and ways that we either learn from them or they prove to be steps to future success or something that we could build on. This episode, we're going to talk about scheduling, essentially. Now, this is something that we, like a couple of the items that we've brought up, the moral of the story, if that's what it is, is something we've talked about before in prior episodes. Now this particular instance that sort of set the stage for this goes back quite a while. I was early into my career, maybe a couple of years into it, if that much. This is like literally, I think in the first one or two years, maybe three years. One of the things I did is already at that point, although I didn't know what it was called, I was looking for side hustles. I had sort of side hustle things that I did, which were basically, it was creating software, various applications, learning new languages, again, some of those things that I've talked about in the past. But within those learning new programming languages were side projects, were little utility type things that I was working on to make it, basically apply the knowledge while I was learning it. As part of this, I scheduled stuff out because that's the kind of person I am. The way I did it was I had a work schedule that ran sort of all over the place. But then a couple nights a week, I would essentially pencil in, but I'd essentially schedule time each week. Actually, I think it was at that point, I think it was like Monday through Friday, and it was, I don't know, 10 to midnight, 8 to 10, something like that. It basically worked out to be, I had this schedule of two hours a day that I was going to work. And then on Saturdays, I worked, I think it was from like 8 to noon, so I had a four-hour block that I had scheduled for Saturdays. And then I put together this nice little project plan of how I was going to get this stuff done based on those hours and how everything was going to work out. Awesome. Got that. I mean, the book's ready to go. However, like most things, it didn't work out exactly the way it was planned. Within the first week even, things started to get a little bit off schedule. And I had something, let's just say, make it easy, I had it from 8 to 10 on Monday through Friday. Monday worked out great. I got started at 8, I wrapped up at 10, all's well. Tuesday, things ran a little bit late at work, took a little longer to get stuff settled down. So I started about 8.15, 8.30. Wednesday, same thing. And I didn't have both times, I was just like, all right, I'll wrap it up at 10. And then because I wanted to be able to settle down, get some sleep, get rest for the next day, and I'm like, I'll make it up further down the road. Well, by the time I got to Thursday, I was already like an hour and a half in the hole, behind what I had scheduled. And what I wanted to complete, essentially, was also, was behind already. And so looking at it, I said, well, I can make it up like Saturday. I've got that block, I can always bleed into Saturday afternoon if I need to. Or stay up a little late on Friday. Well, so I get to Friday and I said, all right, well, one, I didn't start till later, but I stayed till later. So I think I flipped it to like nine to midnight. But now I get up Saturday morning and I'm tired. So I didn't, I over slept a little bit, essentially. So instead of starting at eight, I started at like 8.30. And then I ended up just exhausted from the week and ended up wrapping it up at, I don't know, 11.30 or something like that. I said, I'll figure it out. I'll catch it up next week. Flash forward, I never caught it up. Each week, the problem was I always lost time. And the reason I did that was because there was no, there really was no wiggle room. If you looked at my schedule, you know, if you look at those little blocks, you're like, well, that should be easy. That's not a big deal. But when you look at the rest of my schedule, it was solid from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. I didn't have any buffer or wiggle room or anything in my schedule. What's worse is I started worrying about the fact that I wasn't getting these things done that sort of sad in a sense because these weren't even critical things. I mean, they were they were side hustle things, but they were there was a level of importance to them. But at the time, it was not really going to change my lifestyle or anything other than it was an investment I was making in the future in my career. But in doing so, I was sacrificing far more than I needed to because. Put it simply, my schedule was unrealistic. There was no way I was going to be able to maintain that schedule on a regular basis because too many things could happen. And once it happened, there was no real way to recover. And I could, you know, I guess I could do stuff on Saturday. And there were times that I would get up to try to sort of catch it up because this went on for months. Sort of catch it up. I would get up at Saturday morning. I do stuff. I'd take a nap Saturday afternoon or whatever. And then once it got to Saturday night, then I'd turn around and jump back in and work from nine to one or two a.m. or something like that to try to make up some of the hours. But throughout the week, because I was behind, I was stressed. It was something that was always sort of in the back of my mind, at least if not in the forefront. And that drains you. That's what I'm saying. If you've got this worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, then it's going to tire, tire, tire you out. And it ends up being something where. You have this you have this goal that is unrealistic and in failing to make it, you make it worse on yourself because now you're instead of being happy or. Confident or content with the progress you're making on this goal or this project, you're actually stressing out. I remember this is all extra. This is bonus time I'm investing into my career. So at that point. Even an hour or two a week would have been an investment that would eventually pay off. It's like saving. If you put ten dollars of money into savings each week, then you're saving up money each week. That's better than zero. And yes, it's not as good as 20. But. If you don't save 20, but you do save 10 and you're sort of beating yourself up over the fact that you're only saving 10, then you're adding essentially inflicting pain on yourself for doing a good thing, but not doing good enough. And this is where the perfect can become the enemy of good, which one of those things that we've talked about as well. As you get this into a situation where your your perspective, another area we've talked about, your perspective is sort of skewed. So instead of looking at what you've done as a as a plus, as making good progress, you have a negative view of it because it wasn't the progress that you just penciled in. Even though what you penciled in for yourself was not realistic. Now, the interesting thing, if you worked for a manager that did that to you, you would say nothing but bad stuff about him, because I don't know anybody that I have worked with over the years or situation I've been in where a manager has made unrealistic demands and set unrealistic schedules where the people have said, that's right, we need to be better. They always say, no, that's unrealistic. That manager needs to recognize that we're working our butts off for them and they need to accept that. They need to look at it as the positive that we're working harder for them, as opposed to a negative that we're not working as much as they would like us to, particularly because they're setting this unrealistic goal. Now, in this situation, this is a personal, this is a personal thing. It's a personal goal, personal schedule. The whole, every bit of it is owned, in this case was owned by me. So I was setting an unrealistic schedule for myself. And instead of looking at it and saying, wow, I am mismanaging myself. I looked at it as, wow, I am not stepping up to the challenge that I need to step up to. Now, I don't want to take it away from when you do something like this, when you schedule away or plan a thing out for yourself that is intentionally pushing yourself and trying to do more or get better. But there is a, there needs to be an aspect of reality that comes into it. And with your schedule, this is, this is something that's very easy to miss out on or to not understand until after the fact, because on paper you can look at and say, OK, I go to work and I drive an hour to work. I leave at eight. I get there at nine. I work for eight hours. I leave at five. It takes me an hour to get home. I'm home at six. I can turn around and work for two hours and then at eight I can go do some other stuff and blah, blah, blah. Well, it doesn't leave any wiggle room. If you get caught in traffic, it takes more than an hour to get to work. Then what do you do? If you get home and it takes you a couple of minutes to settle down, put your stuff up, settle in. You've lost five, 10, 15 minutes, maybe more. Let's say you've got a pet or somebody that lives with you, a person that talks to you or the pet wants to go for a walk or whatever. There are distractions in life. And if you try to schedule your life down to essentially the minute, it is going to fail. There's just too much life out there that will cause that, that tightness schedule to snap. It's like anything. If you don't allow for things to move, if you don't allow some give, then when there's any pressure put on it, it's more likely to just snap. That's why when, when people build, when architects and designers, engineers go in and build a big building, that's why there's like sway and stuff like that built into it. Because if it doesn't sway, it breaks. So it's got to be able to do some level of moving and giving in order to allow for nature, allow for life. Your schedule is the same way. So the solution in my case would have been maybe to run this, you know, just pencil in my schedule, try that for two weeks or a month or whatever it is. You know, some, you don't want to go too long. Probably in my case, three weeks would have been fine. And then look back, how did things go? And then based on that, adjust my schedule moving forward. And eventually I did. Unfortunately, it was not three weeks later. It was probably three or four, maybe six months later. I'm trying to remember when that, how long I suffered through that. But basically what ended up happening is I got to a point where I said, OK, and this was early on when I first started doing half, half year sort of reviews, insanity checks of my schedule and what was going on, where I was at, what I want to do, plans, all of that good stuff. And I looked at it and I was like, wow, I have not hit my mark for the hours that I wanted to, that I projected that I was going to work and the hours that I did work are there's a big difference. I think it ended up being like I was projecting about 15 hours a week and I hit like 10 hours a week. So, you know, 33% less than what my target was. So that's a, that's a failure basically. That's, you know, that's a, if you're hitting, I guess not. That's a D. If you're at about 66% of your, your target, that's definitely not good. And it threw a lot of stuff off and it changed because of what I thought I was going to be able to put into that, Tom was going to be able to put in, it changed what I was working on and made, it made me really put me in a situation where I was doing a lot of things that I wasn't going to complete versus doing lesser things that I could fully complete and do so in a way that I would be content with at least if not proud of the work I'd done. And so I changed it. I went back and I adjusted and I looking at the hours I was doing, I switched everything. So I did, I think I did like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then Saturday. And that allowed me two nights a week that I was not planning anything. So if I needed to catch up, I could. And then eventually I even changed that around. So it was just hours and I would just get them in where I could. And during the week, so it was like, I think it was like six hours. I wanted to get done during the week. And I had sort of like penciled in. It's a way that you can make some of these things work. I had penciled in on Thursday nights that I would just quote, do an all-nighter. And it wasn't an all-nighter, but it would be a late nighter. It would be a night that I intentionally was going to be, you know, have it stuff set aside. So I would stay up till two or three AM and longer if I was in good, you know, if I was like cranking through something. The thought being that then I could get, you know, sleep a few hours, get up Friday, stumbled through Friday work. It probably wouldn't be that bad. And Friday's usually weren't as bad anyways. And then I could, you know, I had the weekend to recover. At some time, much, much later, I switched it to Friday. Then I had all day Saturday to recover, but that also causes you to lose Saturday. So it was always a give and take involved in these kinds of things. But the moral of this story is when you are planning a schedule to, and this, whether it's yourself, whether it's for a team, you've got to have some space within it. And another good example that I've seen many times is a schedule that somebody has for work where they have meetings, eight to nine, nine to 10, 10 to 11, you know, 11 to 12, 12 to one, one to two all day, no gaps. Now, if you're remote, that's a little bit doable. But if you have to go from a room to room, that there's no travel time from room to room. If you're back to back like that, there's no time to, I don't know, get yourself a cup of coffee, go take a bathroom break, get sane again. And with things like that, I found years ago as talking to a counselor type person that did, I don't remember what kind of counseling he did, but basically he did, I think he did one hour sessions. And then the way he worked his schedule was he would do a one hour session and he would always have 45 minutes before he would do the next one. And the way he handled that is he gave himself about 15 minutes afterwards to just, you know, get a drink, go to the bathroom, whatever, just sort of, it may be take a couple of notes based on the session he had just had, but basically just to rest, to get some things done. So there was some buffer and then he figured about 30 minutes. And I may be flipping that it may have been 30 minutes of rest and then 15 minutes, but the other part of the time was prepping for the next session so that he could, he could hit the ground running with that next session. Now, if you think of meetings, that's huge. If you were to put even 30 minutes between meetings, you could spend 15 minutes winding down and 15 minutes doing things like gathering your documents, checking your emails, making sure who's going to attend, maybe a checking email to make sure that it hasn't been canceled. A lot of those little things that if we don't have that buffer, we end up doing it during the meeting or we're late, which is almost worse because now you have everybody else in the meeting is waiting for you because you're late. And of course, what's, you know, everybody has to accept that you come in and say, I'm sorry, I'm late. I just got, I had a meeting that ran long or I had a meeting that just finished and I had to go use the bathroom and I had to go, you know, get a drink of water or whatever it is. And yes, the people in that meeting accept that we'll call it an excuse, that explanation, but also that just wasted all of their time. And the reason it was is because of the scheduling. That's why there are some tools out there that when they schedule meetings, they actually have included like buffer time around a meeting so that you are not, when you're doing the scheduling, sometimes you're not allowed to do back to back to back to back to back meetings, or maybe you can do like one back to back or something like that. That's part of the, one of the features that those tools provide. So I think I've belabored this point enough. I've beat this horse just a bit. And, and, but it is such an important thing. I think we do a lot. Those of us that schedule anything, those of us that plan, we, I think pride ourselves in filling that schedule in avoiding gaps, but that white space, that pause between events or activities is actually very important for us to be able to stay sane, but also to fully participate or be attentive in that event or that activity. So maybe scheduling more will allow you to have a higher quality of attendance of meeting of activity that you're working with. And that being said, it's time to wrap it up and let you get out there and enjoy your day. Hopefully where there's some restful gaps between all of your meetings and things on your to-do list, but 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 to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from building better developers to develop a new podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying Alexa enable building better developers and we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. 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