Productivity and Time Management

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 talking about special topics. This time, instead of getting really into some of the interviews and such that we've had, one of the things that, although we have touched about it, touched on it is the idea of productivity, the idea of getting things done. Now, we have talked in a couple of recent episodes about getting something like on a regular basis, getting that momentum going, doing that daily, whatever it is, 15 minutes of writing or coding or market research or whatever it happens to be, or talking on a podcast, recording yourself, anything like that. One of the problems that we have is finding the time. Where do you find the time to get these things done? In particular, how do we do that when we have a bunch of things going on? If we have a job that is a 9 to 5, and then we get home and then it's like, okay, we're done for the day, then we have that big block, but then we have some areas around it that we can play with. But if we've got a whole bunch of things going on, then it can be very difficult to change gears from project to project to project. Or if we have to do it in the middle of the day, or if we've got something that may require some waiting or something like that. And that is where the idea of having a, being prepared for that, having that sort of a personal backlog of tasks is a very valuable thing to do. Now I've talked about it in the prior episode about the idea of knowing, spending some time planning so you know what you're going to do next. Don't just go in and say, okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes a day, and then end up spending half of every day, you know, of that 15 minutes every day trying to figure out what I'm going to do, how do I get set up, how do I get going. Instead, have a, you know, dare I say it, like a checklist or something like that. And you can use tools like Trello or Jira or Notepad or pencil and paper, it doesn't really matter. But what you want to do is have these little things lined up that you can use to fill in the gaps. And this goes back to the old analogy of if you've got a bucket and you fill it with, you know, small, let's say, you know, balls, like baseball sized balls. Well, once it's full, you can't get any more baseball size. But then if you go back and you, let's say, add marbles that are much smaller, then you can fill it up more. You're not full yet. You still have space. And then you can go do, let's say, sand, and then you can fill more space. And you can do water and then fill the whole thing. That kind of concept works for our tasks as well. There are throughout the day, dead times, essentially. There are times that we could be doing something else and we don't. Because we're seeing they're waiting on a task. Now, if you've moved from in an office to remote, then you may have found things that are very valuable for you to get done through the day. For example, I might go, instead of just sitting there staring at a screen for 10 minutes while I'm waiting for a process to run or something to download or something like that, I may go run and, I don't know, turn on the dishwasher, throw in a load of dishes or swap clothes from the washer to the dryer or something like that, or run out to the mailbox and grab mail. Or if I've got some sort of project, I may be able to flip over that for a few minutes and go, oh, hey, I want to kick this off or I want to go write for five minutes while I'm waiting for this thing to complete. Little things like that, if you have them in place, can add up quickly. Now, the key is you have to have that in place. You have to be essentially ready to do the work. If you're not, then you'll sit there and you'll say, oh, I've got five minutes that I could do something else. By the time you have set up to do something else, the five minutes is up. So it's sort of a waste. Now, it could be that if you've got five minutes now and you get everything set up, then when you get five minutes again 30 minutes from now or an hour from now, then you can dive right in. So you may be able to do it that way. But it is even better if you already have those plans in place or those things ready to go. It could be a little bit chaotic sometimes or a little bit cluttered because it may mean that you have like an extra tab open on your browser or you've got another application open that maybe you wouldn't normally have. But those kinds of things can be useful to switch back and forth, switch the task you're on and then quickly jump into something else, write some code, write some content, whatever it is, and then flip back to whatever it is that your primary focus is. Now, are you going to be able to do high quality work in that little thing that you just jumped over in five minutes? Probably not. However, particularly like, let's say if you're writing a blog, you're doing content generation, you can create that content and get the sort of that 80-20 rule. Get it on a page, get it out there, and then you can come back later and maybe focus on it and do the grammar correction and the wordsmithing and those kinds of things. So your key here is, a little bit of it is planning, is to know that to do X, whatever my task is, to achieve my goal, these are the things that I need to do. Now this can be, this can apply to anything. A good example for myself was years ago, I was working on some dancing stuff and there were times during the day that I was sitting there and I was maybe listening to a call or doing something where I wasn't really, all I was doing was sitting there. I didn't really have any activity and people do this with standing desks and stuff like that. So I could sit there and either watch the video that was going on or be listening to the meeting or the call or things like that. I could be walking around in my office and practicing some moves and things like that. And it was very much, in that case, it's perfect because it's really a sort of mindless task. It's basically about building a habit or doing something that's just out of muscle memory. That's why some people can do a, they may have like a little jogging machine or treadmill or something like that that they can be on while they're doing a call because it's like, hey, I'm getting some exercise and I'm doing whatever my work is. So we can do those kinds of things. And people do it all the time. It's a matter of us saying, okay, what are the things that are my primary test during the day? Where are there potentially lulls or dead periods? And then how do I take advantage of them? Now we've talked before, you can go far more advanced, we'll say, into this because what you can do is you can have like maybe a tablet or your phone. So when you're sitting in a line at the grocery store or at the bank or whatever, or maybe if somebody's driving you somewhere, then you can do stuff. There's all these waiting things that we have in life. And if you want to, instead of taking a breath during those or just trying to de-stress or whatever it is, or just embracing the not doing stuff for a few seconds, minutes, or however long it is, you can flip right over and be very productive. You can be working on whatever it is, whether it's, again, you could be creating content, you could be researching something, you could be writing code, you could be answering emails and contacting customers. There's all kinds of things like that that we can do to keep ourselves busy, essentially. But it's not just being busy. This is about being productive. So it's not just a matter of, hey, I've got some tasks. It's looking at what is the primary task I have. What is the thing that I'm doing during my day? And I'm going to work on that. However, I'm going to have some gaps. And so within those gaps, I want to determine how do I make the most use of that time? And this is where intent becomes very important or intentionally putting these things in place. Because you not only need to think about, like plan what are the tasks that I need to do, but plan, we'll say, families or classifications of tasks. Because there are some things that we can do in certain environments or in certain time periods, frames, contexts that we can't in others. For example, if I need to write or type something, I probably can't do that while I'm running on a treadmill, let's say, or going for a walk. However, if I need to read something or watch a video or listen to something, that I can do while I am in motion. I may even be able to do that while I'm doing things that are loud, like, I don't know, mowing a yard or something like that. There are definitely things that we can do that are intermittent in a way. So for example, you could do, if you're, let's say, listening to something, but you're also trying to take some notes and maybe use that as a, like a source for some content where you're consuming for a little bit and then you think about it and then you are generating content. Those kinds of things work perfect, for example, for like, I don't know, cooking a meal or something like that where you're doing something and you're listening and you can be thinking and processing it while you're thinking and then you have like a little bit of a break while you're waiting for something to cook or something like that and then you can create your content. So you can do these things around your day, but the key is making sure that things that you, those like bits of sand or those little marbles that you're using are ones that it is okay, they're self-contained enough to do it within that area, that timeframe, that context. While this is sometimes considered a form of maybe like batching or something like that, it is a specialized form of it. And if you think about this when you talk to or listen to any of the other, really like the productivity gurus and people like that out there, there's a lot of times that they will refer to batching things together so you don't lose time in transitions. For example, mail. You don't need to go get your mail every day. So you could, whether it's your mailbox or a P.O. box or something like that, you could get your mail, they all go somewhere. Once a week you pick it up. That saves you the back and forth over and over and over throughout the week. And if you don't have something where you have mail that comes in that is critical for you to address it right away, which honestly not many of us do, then it makes sense to just say, you know what, I'm going to put everything to this place and I'm going to check it once a week. Or maybe even less often than that. It just depends on what your needs are. Particularly now as things like, I'm going to get on a little bit off the beaten track here, but you know, think about things like, you know, used to be you needed to know when your bills were coming up and things like that. But now with automated stuff and online pay, a lot of that stuff, you don't really have to worry about it. You can just, you know, your mail, it's not going to come through your mail. It's going to come through your email. So you just go at it that way. We can do the same thing by essentially batching things up and working through that specialized, that classification of tasks when we get the opportunity. For example, if I'm going to a coffee shop and I know that I'm going to go, I'm going to place an order. It's going to take five minutes to get, you know, or 10 minutes to get it there. Then I'm going to have to wait for something to cool down or something along those lines where I don't really, I can't really get into a mindset where I can do something highly, you know, a lot of mental, a highly mental task, but I can do something that's less mental, like maybe like some proofreading or article reading or scanning for like, you know, say I'm looking for projects so I can maybe, you know, go through that or I can scan mail. I can go through email, those kinds of things. Those are essentially, you know, tasks that I have to tackle at some point. And so I can look at my day or my week and say, Hey, I'm going to be in this situation at this time and these tasks are a good fit for it. So I'm going to save those until that. And this is really valuable when you're planning your day. If you've got some level of control around your day, and even sometimes if you don't is get there at the start of your day and or the night before, however you want to do it and look at what is it I need to get done today? And then look at where you're going to be or what you're going to do and see if there are some of those tasks that make more sense at certain times. A good example that's even outside of that, you know, that some places are better than another do the work is if there are requirements like a prerequisite. Good example for this would be you need input from another team member and you know that that team member usually is going to get into their day. They're doing a couple things. They're probably not going to get back to you till midday. And don't even bother with the task that is waiting for them until the afternoon. Just assume that you're going to get other things done until the afternoon and then you'll be able to hopefully by then have the information you need. And now you're not trying to rush ahead and work on that that thing that your teammate is going to be required for. And then of course, you know, get into all the momentum of it and then realize, oh, I don't have what I need, so I'm going to stop instead. Wait till later until you know that the or you're more comfortable with the, you know, the idea that your teammates, your coworker will be around. They'll be able to give you what you need. And now you'll have everything you need to move forward as opposed to, which is something we do a lot actually, I think as developers probably more often than we should and it bites us at times is we're like, oh, hey, I'm going to work on this until I'm blocked. And then I'll come back to it later. Well, you know, you're going to be blocked if you know, or if you know that there's a high likelihood that you're going to be blocked, move on to something else. Now, this can be difficult if the blocker is your boss or a customer or something like that and you want to show them some sort of progress. But I think it's much better to say, hey, I'm waiting on you. I was blocked. And so, yeah, there's probably a couple of things I could do, but I was going to get blocked. Now, if it's a week or something like that out, okay, maybe you can make some progress on it. But if not, then or if somebody's not going to be around that you may need to have some interaction with, shift your schedule or shift the task within your schedule. Shift it to a place where you're working on it while they're available. This is really useful if you're doing side hustle stuff and you're trying to plan out when are you going to work on some of your side hustle things. Because if you're, you know, if you've got a nine to five, then you may need to either push all of that side hustle into like your lunch break if people are only available in the middle of the day, or you may have to make sure you get it done at the beginning of the day if that's when people are around, or in the evening if that's when people are around. So look at your task and sort of game plan those out a little bit as far as what should I do, when, where, why, and how. And not only with them as a sort of as you know standing alone as an item or you know that task is an island, but thinking about it as okay, if I do task A, B, C, and D in that order, is that going to be a better order than DCBA or BCAD or something like that? Because there are also tasks that are very much they contribute or can interact with others just in the way they're done. A good example of this would be if I'm going to be writing a lot of code and one of the things I'm going to do is end up writing a lot of code and then kick off a long process. Then what I may want to do is say okay I'm going to do that and then if that like ties up my machine in a way or ties up certain resources, like let's say it does, say it really ties up my main my desktop machine to do that. So other tasks that I would be you know I could do on my desktop, I'm not going to do those. I'm going to do those before or much later because I don't want to be running that long running task and have that slow down or stop me from progress on my other task. So maybe I'll do that code, kick that off and then I'm going to go answer some emails or you know maybe I'm jumping on another machine where I can write documentation or it's things like that is spend a little bit of time and it's I make it's literally taking more time for me to go through this and it should you on a daily basis to just sort of look at your tasks and do a little prioritization or sequencing of them and you will find improvements. And then as you have this in your mind moving forward you'll actually get better at it. You will realize that there are certain things I can do at certain times and things that I maybe thought I could but I can't and vice versa. And the next thing you know you're getting a lot of stuff done in the same you know same length of a day, the same 24 hours in the day and maybe not only getting more done but getting them done with a higher productivity and you suddenly find that your dead time is disappearing. Now granted that could wear you out because if you don't have that dead time it can make it an exhausting day. However, if you get to the end of the day and you've gotten all that stuff done, that in itself may be enough of a lift to more than overcome that you know that tired at the end of the day. Sometimes it's okay to be exhausted when you cross the goal line because hey you cross the goal line. Just a little thing there and we have talked about it here and there we've talked about some of the rhythms and patterns that we have and even like biorhythms and things like that so that we do the match the right tasks to the right time and I'll have some links to some of those prior interviews but really just wanted to get you thinking again about hey if we're going to do this let's be intentional about it and see how that works. If you've got any suggestions or feedback of any kind as always just an email at info at developernoir.com. I'd love to hear your suggestions and comments and maybe some ways that you have found to be more productive doing essentially the same stuff but just doing it in either you know with a different mindset some sort of shuffle things of that nature. We'll wrap this one up we'll come back next time we're going to have an interview next episode and then back to special topics. Just keep going back and forth to try to keep everything fresh and let's just mix it up a little bit but as always go out there 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-Noir 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. We are going to bring back our masterminds and you can check out technologymastermind2024.com or you can check out our mastermind at developernoir.com. We're going to get our groups together we've got applications open today there is an early bird discount jump in there take a look at what we've got and make 2024 your best year yet.