overcoming procrastination and making incremental progress

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season. We're talking about failures and missteps and mistakes and how they were not always negative, but instead maybe a stepping stone to a future success or at least a guiding principle to avoid to avoid repeating such things as life has progressed. This episode, we're going to look at sort of along the lines of the shots you don't take you will always miss, which we talked about a couple episodes back. This one more is about the failure to take advantage of incremental improvement. It is more or less based on the idea that there's an old saw. I think it is anyways. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the second best time is now. And that's really the focus of this is that if we if we have something we want to do, have something we wanted to accomplish and we're looking at it today saying, well, I'm not there. Then the best time for us to get started is today. Start working on that goal as opposed to actually it probably would have been better to have done it a year ago because then we would be further along. But if we sit around and do nothing, then a year from now, be in the exact same situation that we are currently. Now, there's so many of these little things that I wanted, you know, I've had over my life. I've talked about situations I have sort of my to do lists in varying forms. And there is this which we all do. This tendency, I guess we'll say, to take a few of those items and kick them into next week or the next day or the next month or whatever our time frame is. Now, one of them that I did that grew amazingly out of control was converting CDs. I had old compact discs that I was trying to convert to digital and I had I still have hundreds of them. And the thing was, is everything was moving to digital. So, you know, you weren't running around and it was very difficult to run around with a pack of 100 CDs wherever you go. So you can listen to a bunch of different music. It's much easier to utilize some sort of digital player, iTunes, whatever it happens to be. And so I put this on my list and I said, hey, I'm going to just sit down and work on this and I'll get I'll get a couple of CDs done and it's just like eventually I'll get all the way through all of them. And it's a lot. I mean, it was it was a sizable amount. And the first time I put it together, I put it on my to list was going into year end. It was a year end where I was going to take a couple of years, a couple of weeks off at the end of the year and just, you know, catch up on stuff, relax a little bit towards around the house, just the kinds of things that are not work that would also allow me to recharge a bit and rest. And didn't get it done. Ended up each day. I was like, I'll put it was on my list on a daily to do list. And then each day I say, no, I'm not going to get to it. Not going to get to it. So I got to the end of the the time off that two week period and I was back into work and I hadn't done a thing. So I started probably beginning in December, having it on my list, got into January, still on my list, still no progress. At that point, I think it was maybe I went into January, but not too long after that, I put it on a sort of like, well, sometime this quarter, I will get started on it. Flash forward ahead the next year, the same kind of thing. I had another where I had a situation I was going to have a couple of weeks off and I was going to try to catch up and put it on my list once again, didn't get it done. So now we're a year into this thing and I've made zero progress. Not a not a thing. Haven't even I don't even touch digital stuff other than I think at that point I was doing podcasts and I don't because I don't have anything available there. And I don't have I haven't burned a CD to digital. So we get to the end of the second year. And again, I've got some time and this time I was like I was more serious about it. So as we got into November, early November, I said, OK, somewhere in the holiday period, here this holiday season, I'm going to get some work done on these things. I'm going to make some progress. And I get to New Year's and guess what? It was still a New Year's resolution. And I'm going to get this thing done. So now I've gone through two years of this thing being on my to do list. Get to the end and it stuck around, got to the end of the third year. And finally, I got into and I think this one is probably even. Yeah, it's probably about the same time. So it's before a few weeks before Thanksgiving, probably it's early November. And I just said, OK, I'm just going to I'm going to put a stack on my desk and I'm going to put in and all I needed to do was basically put a CD in, you know, hit record or whatever it was. It wasn't a very complicated thing, but just basically put it in and let it run. And I put a stack and it was just that was my family. And it was just that was my family. OK, each day I haven't made any progress in three years. I'm just going to each day I'm going to put a CD in at least, you know, at least one. And started, I got it started. And by the end of the first day, I think I had three or four done, which put me way ahead of where I'd been for the previous three years. Next day, now I've got, you know, a little bit of a like, hey, I've made some progress kind of feel so when in the next day and did a few more the next day, did a few more. And then I got into the, you know, my time off that two weeks off and I started really cranking through them because I had, you know, I think 14, 15 days where I really didn't have a lot I had to do. I was just hanging out at home doing stuff. So I was able to burn probably a dozen or more a day. And I get to the end of basically December, I get into New Year's at this point. And I was I wasn't done, but I'm pretty sure I was into the light as in the 250, 300 or more that I had burned. And now, you know, because I've been doing this a little bit each day, even it was just even if it's just one or two, just every day, put one in, you know, even if it's simple, it's like when I got up in the morning, I just throw one in or I just throw one in. Or, you know, during lunch break or whatever it is. And so I had this momentum and a habit of doing it. And so it didn't take that long. And I think it was by the time I got into January, I had done it. I had everything, thousands and tens of thousands of songs, digital. And of course, because it wasn't that complicated process and it's a pretty intelligent process, it knew album names and artists names and song titles, all that kind of stuff. It wasn't perfect. I still have some. This is I don't know, this was decades ago. It's probably 15 years ago that I did this. There's still some that I probably wouldn't hurt me to go back and clean up some of the assignments of who the the artist is and some things like that, because it chokes on those occasionally. But. That's another, you know, incremental thing at some point I could probably deal with. And it turned out that, you know, after three years just starting, it still took a while. It took me, I think, you know, from start to finish, I think I probably spent two or three months just a little bit each day, but I got it done. Same thing. And this is one that's probably more. Useful to most people out there, because. To most people out there, if you because most people these days just have digital CD stuff. Very similar thing I ran into was email filters, particularly at the time I had to. I had Gmail that I used and I had Apple Mail that I used. And I was just I was frustrated because I was spending a lot of time every day looking through emails and I keep all my emails. So I was basically filing them away because a lot of these I have need to go back and refer to them later. And it was just it was time consuming. So what I started to do is on a weekly basis, like on a Saturday morning, I'd sit down, I'd look at what was usually a pretty big inbox because it would grow over the week. And I'd work through the inbox. And instead of just dragging and dropping emails into folders, I would at least I would took it. I'd look at like a bulk of them and take, you know, whatever the largest amount. So I say I had 15 emails relating to X, whatever that happened to be. And instead of dragging and dropping them, I would spend that time. I would create a filter that said if it was this or if it's from these people or whatever it is, I would create a little filter that would then assign those, you know, those things out to whatever their appropriate bucket was. So they go into the correct folder based on who sent it topic, whatever. And I did this for probably a year that it was a regular thing where I would just instead of doing the the brute force method of cleaning out my inbox, I would start building out filters. And I didn't have to I didn't go like completely filter out everything each week. I would take a few. I'd create I can't remember what my goal was. It was like maybe three filters said I'd get at least or at most three filters. And then I move on to the next week. And it was always at least one. So one to three filters a week flash forward a year later. And I had by then because I'd gotten into, you know, I'd broken my three rule a couple of times. I want to say I had hundreds and maybe not. It wasn't quite that. But I read it was I would scroll through screen after screen. I couldn't even remember some of the filters I had. But it did allow a lot of stuff to just filter out. So it just goes somewhere. So it's it's captured. I can look back on it if I want to. And a lot of this is things like a recurring bills. I had a whole bunch of different school related stuff for kids. And so it would go to different places depending on what it was related to there. I had all my different my normal bills. So this like the car loan bills would go one place. The house bills would go another. The electricity bill would go another. Bank statements would go to another. All this stuff. And this is as I was converting. So most of the things that in the past had been, you know, snail mail had been built like written paper based billing and notification I get. Now I'm flipping stuff over to electronic documents. And I've got this little sorter basically of filters and rules that I built both in. And I were somewhat the same, but I had some in Gmail. I had some in Apple now. And those things would just sort places, sort them to the places they needed to go and saved me to this day. I mean, I still use a lot of a lot of kick in and I don't I can't even calculate the amount of time it is saved. But it all started by just saying, OK, I'm just going to write. And it was one Saturday. I had a whole bunch of emails. I said, I'm just going to build a filter for these couple of things because I can see that there's a dozen emails I'm about to shift into this one folder. And instead of doing that, I'm going to write a filter and then I'm going to do it. And it's done. And then the next time all those things come through, they are already, you know, the filters applied. They're already where they need to live. So rather than let this thing dog me for a while, which is its own, you know, stress when you've got this thing on your to do list, it just never gets done. Then every time you look at the list, it's there. And so it can be a little bit bothersome. But more importantly, if you don't make progress on it, then guess what? Tomorrow, you're in the exact same place. You haven't made any progress. And so tomorrow you're going to feel just as defeated as opposed to if you do some, even if it's two minutes of work, you're two minutes further along. And at the end of the day, you can feel like, hey, I at least touched that project. I at least did something. And the next day you can say, hey, at least I'm further ahead than I was yesterday. And there are, as I've said, just countless situations where I've done some of these things, because I do procrastinate at times. And, you know, I change around a little bit because I do also try to, like, knock out the things that I really don't want to do. Try to get those done early, out of the way. So they just are off my plate. You know, they call it eating the frog. Take the thing that you want to do the least, get that done first. And it's out of the way. And then at least that's out of the way. You don't have to have that thing bother you or weigh you down. But the flip side of that is just getting things done has that momentum. It has an incremental build. And it's one of the examples I use in the episode or that I'm going to use in using the the blog post for this is the idea of push ups or sit ups or any physical exertion where, you know, maybe right now you can't do one push up or you can do only one push up. So if today you do a push up and tomorrow you do a push up and the next day you do push up, maybe, you know, after a week, you say, All right, I am going to I'm going to stress it this time. I see if I go to two push ups. And so then you do two push ups a day. And then week later, you go to three push ups a day. If you did that over a year, you would be not. You would go from zero push ups to 52 push ups a day that you'd be knocking out. You know, if you add one per week, the same thing is like savings. It is amazing if you look at the numbers around, if you just save $10 a month and let that go over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, that stuff all grows. And then you can just you can pick all kinds of different things like that, where it is really frustrating sometimes to look back and say, man, if I had just done this thing. Ten years ago, 20 years ago, when I wanted to do it, I would be in this incredible position now. So the moral of this story is don't do that. Don't be that person in the future. Help out your future self by making a couple of steps today. If you do so, you will thank yourself. Your future self will thank you. I guarantee it. But that being said, I think my future self is going to be happy that we knocked this thing out and wished all of you guys to have a good time. So 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 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. One more thing before you go. Develop a new podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. 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