Getting Things Done and Reducing the Cost of Shifting Gears

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer 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 get another special topic episode here between interviews. This time we're going to talk about getting things done and doing it with a plan and with a schedule. Now we talk a lot about being intentional, about thinking things through, about planning, but there is a follow up to it as well, which also sort of falls into those lines of having some sort of accountability, at least to yourself. Now the thing with getting things done and whether it's just the full words or if you're thinking the GTD, it's really about making sure that you put the right things in the right place and get them done and that you actually follow through. And it is something that you're going to cycle through it over and over again. It is a repetitious process because things change and because every week we've got a new task, we've got things we complete, and we've got things that we need to do. Now one of the biggest things that we will find if you're looking at somebody that's productive versus somebody that's maybe not so productive is going to be wasted time for lack of a better term. And that a lot of times boils down to shifting gears. The time between doing task A, settling it down, shutting it down, whatever it needs to be, and then spinning up to task B and being productive. If you look at it, think of it from a very physical point of view, and then we'll figure it out from the mental point of view. So let's say from a physical point of view, let's say you've got two meetings back to back and they are in two different rooms. It doesn't even have to be a different building. So let's say they're just rooms right next to each other. You finish the first meeting, pack your stuff up, and maybe it only takes you 30 seconds, maybe you just have no paper and pencil or something like that, but usually it's a little more than that because you may think of it as, I'm just going to grab my pencil and paper, but what do you actually do? You get up, you're sort of like socially saying goodbye because nobody just, well, not nobody, most people do not just get up and leave. They don't just walk out of the meeting as soon as it's done, just like that, and then run into the other room. They get up, say your goodbyes, your pleasantries, things like that, walk at a, you know, probably a leisurely pace to the room next door. Let's assume it's the room next door, and then you find a seat, you have some pleasantries, you settle in, you get your notebook open, you get your pencil ready, all that kind of good stuff. What does that take? I'm going to bet you, now you may say, I can do it in two minutes. I'm going to bet you it's typically going to take you 10 to 15. And this is just from somebody who is not, I am not the most social person between meetings if I've got back to backs. I tend to travel light and be able to move very quickly, and still it's typically going to be, even if I got a room, go to the room next door, it's going to probably be 10 minutes, maybe 15. And again, if I have to go, if I have to catch an elevator or go up and down a flight of stairs or go to another building, that's easy, five to 10 minutes. So think about that time as if I have a two hour period and I have those two meetings, I did not get 120 minutes worth of meeting time done. I probably got 100 minutes. And let's just say, you know, let's just, you know, sort of rounding stuff up, but let's say 15 to 20 minutes, and let's just say 20 because it makes it easy. So out of every hour, if I'm shifting gears, I probably lose 10 minutes to get to, you know, to do that shifting of gears. So, it's honestly not much better. Think about any project or any task you're doing. Let's say you're sitting down and checking email. Actually, let's not because that one's probably the worst time criminal that there is, is when we check email and there's always like that one more and then there's that one other thing we need to do. Let's say that we're sitting down and we're writing a proposal or writing code and we're going to sit there and we're going to write code for an hour on project A. And then we're going to go to a meeting and then we're going to come back and we're going to go back to code on project A. So there's a little bit of a physical change there. So actually, let's even make it simpler. We're going to go from project A to project B. And let's make it even simpler. Project A and project B, we use the same tools. So same IDE or combination of IDEs. And let's just, to get really geeky and into the details, let's say we're doing a Java project and we're in Eclipse and we don't have any other tools we're using. All our database stuff, all that stuff, all of those are built into Eclipse or Visual Studio Code if you want to use that. So you're sitting there and you get done with your first hour of coding. Well, what do you need to do? It depends on how you do it. You could just like shut the window and go to the other one, but that's probably not what it is. Usually what is what's going to happen is you're wrapping up to some extent. So you're going to save your work. You're probably going to commit your changes to some extent, whether it's an actual commit with a comment. You should be doing that. Or if you're just a little more lazy and you're like, OK, I'm just going to save and sort of close that window off. And then you have to open the other project. You have to find the window that you need for the code that you're working on. And you have to figure out what is the task that I'm working on. Because I was just working on this task on this other project. For example, let's say I was building a login screen and the related functionality on this project and now I'm over on this other project and I am doing the middle tier coding to link the database to the front end. Very different stuff. So I've got to figure out where am I? What am I doing? I probably need to do some sort of wrap up to sort of like, you know, note where I was in the project I'm leaving. And now I need to go find the note. Where am I on the project that I'm getting to? If you're really good, five to 10 minutes. If you doubt me, try the Pomodoro approach, which is the default in a 30 minute period. You work 25 minutes, take five minutes off, start your next Pomodoro. So essentially go project A, 25 minutes, five minutes, and then go 25 minutes on project B. See if you can do it. See how many iterations you can do that. Most people, and this is dealing with lots of different developers and things like that, most people cannot shift in five minutes. It's usually going to take at least 10. And that's with the little 25 minute thing. Now more likely, and what a lot of people do, is they'll do an hour long Pomodoro where it's 45 to 50 minutes and then 10 to 15 minutes to shift gears to the next one. Because there's also these other things that we sprinkle in. Because when we're shifting, we're probably going to go fill our cup of coffee or get some water or go to the bathroom or check email or check our phone or all these other things that every one of those expands the gap between project A and project B. So why are we talking about that? Let's get back to that point. If you want to be productive, you want to be able to batch stuff together. You want to find ways to do it with two goals really. One is you want to be as productive as possible. The two, there are things that have to be touched. There are things that you have to work on on some sort of a regular basis. So you can't take a project and work on that entirely for a whole week if you have multiple projects because the other customers probably are going to say, hey, what about my project? And if you work all week and then you don't work on that project all next week, people are going to say, hey, wait, you were doing great. And then why no work here? You may be able to make that happen, but probably not. And so there's two things we want to do. We want to batch where possible, but also we want to do what we can to reduce the cost of shifting gears. Now if you just batch, you will find out that it will save you a lot, even in just purely mental stuff at work. Now if you wanted to say something physical and it's things like, hey, I've got to go to the grocery store down the street. It takes me a minute to get there and a minute to get back. And I get my groceries three at a time, three items at a time. Think about it. That's going to take a long time. However, if you batch it together, let's say you get 100 items instead of just, and just let's pretend that you actually, it does only take you a minute to get there and a minute back and then you're just magically, no other time is lost, which would be the time walking from the car into the grocery store and checking out and all that kind of stuff. Let's say you had two minutes. Well, if you've got three items at a time and you have a hundred items, that's over an hour of time that's just the transitional time. Now granted, this is like a, you know, that's an extreme case. However, the mental stuff is so easy to get in our way. The okay, I just finished this. Now what am I doing? Mental process is very costly because even if you don't have ADHD or anything like that, we still have that squirrel effect to some level. So we're going to check a phone or check email or check a website or whatever. It is amazing how much stuff can get in between project A and project B when we're trying to shift gears. So what we want to do is one, we want to be able to reduce the number of shifts during the day, the transitions from point A to point B, project A to project B we'll say, but also we want to go into the day knowing more or less what we're going to do. Now I say more or less because you can plan stuff out very detailed or moderately loosely and probably all of those plans are going to go awry. Something's going to come up, somebody's going to interrupt, all that kind of stuff that happens. That's okay. But one of the tricks that you find from the very productive people is that either the night before or the morning when they start their day, they have a essentially like a game plan for the day. What am I going to do? When am I going to do it? How is it going to flow? Now that doesn't mean it's going to flow exactly like that, but it does mean that if you have a, let's say a roadmap for the day, it says I'm going to go A, B, C, D and E, then regardless of how compressed or extended that roadmap is, you know when you're at A and you're done, you're like, okay, what am I going to do next? I'm going to do B. What am I going to do next? When I'm done with B, I'm going to go to C. So you're not sitting there going, hmm, I'm done with B. Now what am I going to do? You know you're going to go to C. Now this helps in a wide range of ways. It's very valuable just from time, but also because then you can get your priorities in, you can try to make sure that you do things like the whole, the old, you know, eat the frog where you take the thing that is the most difficult, painful, that you just dread. Just get that done first. So put it at the top of your list. And then if there's something that you have to get done today, put that towards the top of the list. If there's three things you have to get done today, that is A, B, and C. Pick your order and do it. The bonus is, is when you pick your order beforehand, there is, you can look, there's an opportunity there to find better ways to organize those or order those items. For example, let's say that during your day, you've got three major things you're doing. Two of them are coding in a specific IDE. And the third is writing something up in Word or Pages or something like that on a word processor. So what you probably want to do, probably, is do the IDE stuff back to back because then it's like this stuff's up, you know, things are up and it's a little bit less things to start, things to close. Now, yes, if you've got a big computer, it's got a lot of memory, you can have all those things up and then it's just switching tasks. But still, there is, you know, there are some costs there. Now I said you might because the other thing you might want to do is that you might find that you are more productive going from coding to, I will say, content production in this case back to coding. That you work that in there because it specifically gives you a break. It means that when you come to that second coding session, you are fresher, maybe. But that is, that's where the key is. It's not just building our list. It's building our list and ordering it in a way that makes it useful from day to day to day. And that also means we probably need to start each day, whether it's the end of the prior one or the beginning of today, start with our game plan. That also means probably each week, take a look at where we got. You have to think out the next week because all of these work together. If you get to the end of the day, or let's say you get to the start of every day and you haven't really thought beyond yesterday because you have a roadmap and you did your tasks. Now you may have a task or two that is spilled over so you know you're going to deal with that. But other than that, if you haven't really thought through stuff, then you're going to have to spend some time going, okay, now what do I do? And planning happens to be one of those things that can suck up an insane amount of time if we let it. It is amazing how often we can sit there and start analyzing and planning and thinking through things. And the next thing you know, you've wasted an hour talking about something instead of doing something. Now not all of us are wired that way, but a lot of us are. So that's where one, know yourself, know what your weaknesses are, and then two, address those in your approach. Find a process that works for you that allows you to really focus on getting stuff done when you want to get stuff done. Which I mean by that is like if you're, whether you are working from home or you go to an office, when you sit down to work, you want to have a minimal amount of time from when you sit down to work to when you start becoming productive, when you're writing code or writing content or reviewing mails or responding to emails or whatever it is. And then when you're done, you want to have a minimum amount of time that you shut things down and you leave, that you walk away from it. Because those are effectively dead times. And they're not totally there. It's not dead. It's more like thrashing around times because you're not really productive. You're getting there. You're moving towards being productive. But there could be a better use of that time. Sort of like if you have to drive somewhere. Drive time, you're not really getting that thing done. Yes, it's part of it and you have to have it. And that's like the cost of doing business in a sense. If you can reduce that, then that allows you to have time freed up to either be more productive in other areas or have some free time and go live your life. So getting things done is not just a list. It's not just putting things down and saying, here's my stuff. Here's what I have to do. It is putting that down. It is ordering that and prioritizing that. And also, which we'll talk about another time, it is yanking stuff off of that list when it doesn't need to be there. It is being ruthless with your to-do list. And that's something we will cover another time because I don't feel like I'm not really in a ruthless mood today. And I think we've covered enough. This alone, if you can put together a list, prioritize it, plan it, and do that and make that a regular habit, you will find time suddenly opens up. You will have more time to get stuff done or you will get more done in the time you were allotted before. Your productivity will improve. It just requires some practice and requires being intentional and accountable to yourself. It's like, this is the plan I wanted. This is the plan I put to it. So I'm going to, this is what I'm going to try my best to stick to. And if it doesn't work, make your adjustments. Figure out what, and if nothing else, you will see where your time is spent. You will figure out what your distractions and time thieves are and you'll be able to look for ways to address those. If one of your time thieves is listening to a podcast, then we're going to save you a little bit right now. We'll wrap this one up. Next episode, we're going to come back. Another interview. Chugging along with those, working our way through season 20 of all things here at Develop-a-Noor. 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. 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