Consistency

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are going to talk on one of our special topics this time, in between interviews. In this episode, we're going to look at consistency. We're going to look at essentially that step by step momentum building, day after day, week after week, consistency and stick-to-itiveness that is key for us to be successful, whether it's in our regular job or probably more importantly, in our side hustles. In the side hustle, I mentioned specifically because it's very easy for us to not get into that groove. Yes, we're probably doing it because we enjoy it. It's probably something fun. And usually, if you're like me, when you get working on it, you dive into it. The next thing you know, maybe you were going to spend five minutes on it and you spent 15 or maybe you're going to spend 15 or 30 minutes and you just spend a couple hours on it because you enjoy doing it because it's something you want to do. However, it is very easy for us to not get started on it on a given day or given week, depending on what our timeframes are, because we have other things going on. That side hustle almost by definition is something that is extra, is outside of our normal tasks and chores and responsibilities. Yes, there is a responsibility with it. And I think those that embrace that responsibility are the ones that are more likely to be successful because you have to go into it with your eyes wide open. And that's what we've covered a couple of times now with some of our past interviews talking about being successful, about taking a blog or a podcast or whatever it is that we are doing and being consistent, doing it on a regular basis, making it something that we have to do. For example, if you have a blog that you're going to deliver, let's say an article every week on Wednesday, which you can go back to several of the examples we have in the links on the show notes that are, hey, you need to do that. You want that consistency because that is what Google and these other search engines look for. They want to see consistency. They want to see, ideally, you want to be feeding that content engine on a very regular, but like daily would be awesome if you could do original content that way. Not sure you can. Some people do, some people don't. But whatever it is, you want to be consistent because the engines are going to like it. But more importantly, your users, your community will then be able to bank on it for lack of a better term. Think about your, if you've ever done some sort of TV show that you've watched, especially like a network TV that's every Monday at seven, it's blah, blah, blah, new episodes of this. That kind of scheduling, that kind of, hey, I release a new blog article I have available AM every Wednesday adds a lot to your community and to your followers because then they know that, hey, I can go check this out. Particularly if you do something that is a YouTube or podcast kind of thing of content production, then you're going to be able to get them to feel like, hey, every, you know, like this, this podcast comes out every Tuesday, Thursday. So they're possibly and hopefully people out there that that's part of their Tuesday and Thursday thing, maybe Tuesday at lunch and Thursday at lunch. Part of their deal is they listen to the development or podcasts because they know what's going to be available at that time. Now, this doesn't mean you can't ever change, but it does mean that you need to step into these things with that mindset. The idea that I'm going to do this and ideally I'm going to do this on this schedule for this amount of time. And this amount of time should be more than two weeks or something like that, unless you're just doing an A B test or something simple like that. If you're sitting there saying, I want to try out this service or this product, I'm going to see if I can make this a side hustle that does something for me. For example, I'm going to start blog writing. I'm going to write blogs and I'm going to embrace the tactics that have been talked about in the past. I am going to step into this thing and I'm going to do it for a year or 18 months or three years or five years or whatever it happens to be. If you go back to some of the examples they talk about, we want, if you're going to be We want you to commit to two or three or more years because they want to be able to really help you build up your community, your product, everything about it. Now if you want to do something for three months, you're probably not going to see it pay out. So step into these things for the long term. Now this doesn't mean that you can't bail out if it's a complete failure, but find a way to gauge it. And this goes back to some of the things we've talked about, about like market research and things like that. Is there a market for it? Does it make sense? What does it look like? Does it, is success 10 users or a hundred users or a million users? How does that work into your financial and time considerations? The resources that you put into it, what is it you need to get back out of it? And you need to have time to give it time to grow. And with that, you need to give it regular feed and care, however that looks. Now think about growing a garden. If you're growing a plant, it has to be fed regularly. It has to be watered regularly. You have to do those kinds of things. It's the same thing with any product or service. You need to be going back to it on a regular basis. And it's probably, I would say even harder to maintain that consistency when it is a product, when it's something that you're building. So maybe you've got a deadline. Let's just pick at the end of the year. You want to release this new product, whatever your great product idea is. If you start working on that January 1, it's real easy to punt. January 1, it's like, I'm not going to do as much. January 2, oh, something came up. Okay, I'll take care of it the next day. And so on and so forth. And the next thing you know, it's December 15th and you have gotten almost nothing done on it. And you're at a point where you're either like, okay, I have to move my date or I have to bail completely. To go into your side hustle or your main hustle, whatever it is, and look for ways before you really start it to set a schedule, to set milestones, to have some accountability. Now, we've talked of some ways that you can do that, whether it's some sort of a networking group or mentors or mastermind groups. There's a lot of things like that where you can enlist the help of other people that you can tell them about it and say, here's my plans. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's how I'm going to do it. And then have them check in periodically and say, hey, how's that going? Did you get it done? Where are you at? Are you scheduled behind schedule? Because normally we would love to be in a situation where whenever that conversation comes up, we say, I'm ahead of schedule. This is great. Things are going well. I've been pouring extra time in or however it works and I'm ahead of schedule. Great. We don't want to be that person that's like, ah, I didn't get it. I'm behind schedule. And you know, the first month I'm a couple days behind and the next month I'm a week behind and now three months into it and I'm two or three weeks behind. By the time I get to the end of the year, I may be months behind. So set that schedule and make it something. It has to be realistic with your determination, drive and value of what this is going to be because for some people they are slam, they're working, you know, 16 hour days and they, they want to do this other thing to like dig themselves out of this rut, but they don't have a ton of time. You know, you're, if you're burning 80, a hundred hours a week on your job or jobs, they're not going to have a lot of time left. So it may be that all you can really hope for is to do 15 minutes a day. And that's honestly, you would be amazed even with building big software products. I have had a couple over the decades now where I coded on like lunch break. There was one, I built this thing. I think it ended up taking probably about two years, but it was, you know, it was scratching my own itch. It was essentially, it was a game that I was playing the game probably a year into it or less. But I started from scratch, from nothing. And I would just, you know, spend a little time on this at lunch every day. I'd go eat and take maybe 15, 20 minutes in a lunch break and just write some code and build this thing out. And before I knew it, yeah, I mean, it's a year, but it's amazing how fast a year can go by. Before I knew it, I was like, wow, this thing like works. And then I was working with it and I was testing it and debugging it, stuff like that. And it was again, basically on that, whatever it was, 15, maybe 30 minutes a day schedule for lunch. And occasionally, yeah, I'd have like a day off or a Saturday or something where I could get two or three hours in on it. But you do something like that. And just 15 minutes a day, you will find progress. Assuming that your goal is progress and that you've planned that out. If you step into every 15 minutes a day, not knowing what you're going to do, you're going to probably spend five to 10 of that easily trying to figure out where do I start? What do I do? Where do I go? So beforehand, or maybe your first iterations of 15 minute chunks, think through stuff, plan some stuff out. So when you can, when you sit down, you can look at it and go, boom, this is what I'm working on right now. Or this is what I'm working on next. Remove as much as you can, the, that time cost of transitioning from task to task to task. And you want to commit to this. That's part of that commitment, I think is setting out goals, milestones, some sort of essentially project plan or product plan for your business, your side hustle, your product, your service, whatever it happens to be, put those things together, do that upfront investment so that you can basically say, here's my list of 20 or a hundred or whatever it is items that I'm going to be chunking my way through and whatever my chunks are, whether it's 15 minutes or 30 minutes a day or an hour a day or three hour blocks once a week, whatever it is, and then put those things like on your schedule. Put them in your calendar that if it's 15 minutes a day, wherever it is, like let's say every day, I'm going to work out from noon to 12 to quarter afternoon for the first 15 minutes in the afternoon, I'm going to work on this and then block that out and then just make that a regular appointment because when you'd make it regular, when you do it consistently, then it builds momentum. We've talked about this before, is it gets you in that groove even with small chunks and when you're talking about something that's a some sort of content producing thing or something where you have customers expecting results from you, output from you, this is critical because you're going to be able to touch that in quotes, but basically touch that product or that service or that customer on a regular basis so they know that you're working on it, they know there's progress and sometimes that's all it takes. It doesn't have to be a ton of progress. It just needs to be something that they can see, something that they can look at and they say, yes, from the beginning of the month to the end of the month, they made progress. Here's what the progress looks like. So that helps set and put some value into expectations. It puts some basis, some actual facts behind expectations. So it's not just, hey, we're going to deliver this on a monthly basis and you're going to see some features roll out. Now they're going to have a track record that says for the last several months, they have every time at the end of every month, they released an update. They had new features. This is awesome. We love them. Let's keep this going. Those sorts of things are invaluable in moving forward, but that means again, let's roll it back a bit. That means you got to step into it with that intent. I think there's a lot of side hustlers that are out there. They're like the, they're like the kids at Christmas that want a new pet dog or cat or whatever it is. And then you get into the middle of January and they don't want anything to do with it because it requires work and they have to go take it for a walk and feed it and all that kind of stuff. And like, no, let the parents take care of it. We do that, I think with our side hustles. Now, if it is, if it is needed, if you're in a situation where you start a side hustle and you're working on it and your life goes out of control and you need to stop, then make that choice. Don't allow it to keep like dragging you in, but don't halfway do it. Now, if you've got something that you've been building it on, building momentum on, so you've got a, you've got a blog or you've got a podcast that you've been cranking stuff out, there needs to be a way for you to maintain consistency. Cause once you launched it, once you have listeners in a community, you need to build that and we've talked about that before. Yes, there are podcasts out there, including this one, occasionally that takes breaks, but that disrupts the flow. You will almost assuredly lose some of your following, your customers when you take a break because they may take a break with you and not come back. So if you're building, building, building, and you're really looking forward to building and you see that momentum growing, then you suddenly stop, you'd be amazed at how fast that can turn stuff around in a, in a not good way. And then you have to really work to build it up again. So that goes into the idea of really, you're never ahead of schedule. What you're doing is you're building buffer so that you can survive the ups and downs of life. That's why with the podcast, a lot of, you can go to all these different places. They'll recommend a ton of stuff, but usually they want you to say, at least have weeks, if not months of material before you launch actual, like recorded, basically ready to go. So usually if they do it right, somebody launches a podcast, that first episode, when that hits the, you know, the internet, they have probably 10 other episodes, depending on what their release schedule is, they could easily have five to 10 other episodes that are already ready to go. They could drop all of those on day one. Sometimes people do that. Some, I've seen some that they drop like three or four episodes as they're sort of like launch and then they move forward. But trust me, and tons and tons now of conversations with, with podcasters. There are some that are, it's more hobbyist and they don't really stick to any kind of a schedule. They really don't care. That's it's very random. It's like, you know, Hey, it'll show up, you know, three times this week. And then maybe one time next week. And then maybe you don't hear from them for two weeks and stuff like that, which those probably aren't going to grow unless there's some sort of, I don't know, captive audience or something like that. But if you talk to the people that consistently do stuff, they talk about all the time about how far ahead they are, where their schedule is. And it's interesting because you'll talk to these people and you'll find out that they, you know, maybe they have a typically a two or three month buffer, but they may even complain, it's like, Oh, normally I have a two month buffer, but right now I'm like really short and I'm trying to get ahead again and you'll like, you won't see it because you're just a, if you're just listening to a podcast, but if you're part of their team, you'll see that they may something go through, you know, maybe they only do an interview a month. And then suddenly you see them go into a flurry and they've got 10 interviews in a week because they realize they're getting too close. Their buffer is not enough. And so they want to build that out. Blogs are the same way. You should be, if you're on a schedule to crank crank out a blog or a YouTube channel, if you've got a shows like that, you should always be way ahead of your production schedule. And just, I have had things that I have done where I, you know, you get it done and it's like, boom, it's like, I get it done just at the nick of time. And I've had those where I've had a solid buffer, the gist in the nick of time stuff kills me and I'm pretty sure it would be able to speak to something will come up almost all the time. And the next thing you know, you're waiting to the last minute and then something goes wrong and now you're late. And that's what you don't want to do. Same thing with your, if you're building a product. It's like I said, you don't want to wait till the night before and cram for the test. You want to do that with a product. Well, if you start scrambling and cramming stuff in and trying to slam at home and trying to hit a deadline and, but you're now behind because you didn't put the work in, you didn't have that consistent effort quality is going to suffer. There's just no question about it. So when you step into something, when you're thinking about stepping into something, start with that plan, what does that plan look like? How do you step into that in a consistent basis so that you can deliver or produce on a regular basis, whether it's visible to everybody else or just to yourself. And if it's just yourself, what can you do to hold yourself accountable? What can you do to make sure that when you have that bad day and you're like, I'm just going to let it go, that you don't, because you know, you have to work on it. It's just like getting up to go to your, your regular paid job. There are days we all are like, I don't want to go to work. I don't want to fight traffic, all of that good stuff. And we do because, Hey, I want a paycheck. Hey, I don't have any PTO or whatever it is. And like your job, if you've got it, you know, as a career, as a, if you have a job like that, build in the idea of PTO or days off or vacations and stuff like that. And that's part of where you need to be ahead of schedule. Make sure that you can work on that schedule and still take some time off and not end up having to work through your vacation or your holiday. And you still are on track and you're still hitting your milestones. You're hitting your targets. You're hitting your dates. That is key. When you step into it with your eyes open, you step into it with a plan. You say right away, this is what I'm going to do. Here's how I'm going to lay out my tasks. This is what I'm going to go to. A, B, C, D, even if you don't, even if you're swapping orders somewhere along the way, if you swap priorities, that's okay. As long as you've got a list of when I finish a task, I'm going to go to the next task. If you've got a list of when I finish a task, here's one of three tasks that I can go to next. I'm going to pick one and I'm going to do it. Because when we're doing this whole side hustle thing, when we're trying to just steal a little bit of extra time, especially if it's just a little bit, we really need to make sure that we've put ourselves in a position where we're not spending most of that little bit of time changing gears, trying to figure out what we're doing, and just essentially being unproductive. If you get that short period of time, find a way to make that as productive as possible, whether it's blocking out the rest of the world for 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is, or whatever you need to do, and then put it on a schedule. Find a way for you to just feel like every day or every week, however you schedule it out, this is my time to do this. And that's it. I'm not going to allow other than, I don't know, war, pestilence, or whatever, or some major act of God kind of thing, I'm not going to allow that to move. Just like you get up on Monday and you go to work because you have to be at work at a certain time, or you at least have to be work on Monday or something like that. Same thing with your side hustle. Because at the end of the day, it is still a job of some sort. You are still, there are responsibilities, there are expectations. And whether it's just responsibilities and expectations you put on yourself, it's still, they're out there and you want to respect those and properly fulfill them. I think that will do it for right now. I just want to get that out there because I know that we've talked about this a few times and it can get sort of like lost in all of the other content out there. Because there's a lot of stuff out there that's about once you're in it, and how do you do it, and how do you build it, and how do you get successful. But one of the things that we have almost like, you know, sometimes glossed over is that you have to start and a strong start is going to help so much. And if you go into it and you're wishy washy or you waver, then that can really hurt your start or kill your product before you really get it going. So go into it intentionally, set your schedule up, and then right there, your odds of success, or at the very least completion, are dramatically better. We'll come back next episode. We're going to have another interview, but we'll continue mixing these up. Just try to, you know, we'll change the pace here and there. 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, the Develop-a-Noor 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. Please allow me to take 30 seconds of your time to talk about one of the things we're really excited about for 2024. 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