What Ifs of the End of the Year and Perseverance

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 into a new year and we are covering a special topic kind of episode. I'm not going to do an interview. That will be next time around. We'll get back to an interview. This time we're getting to the, we're really like into the beginning of a year at this point. I want to talk a little bit about what ifs. As in what if you didn't get all the things done that you needed to get done during that Christmas end of the year holiday? What if you've got some resolutions that are already starting to unravel? What I want to get into is the idea of persevering, of stepping into these things that we didn't get done and instead of just punting and saying, okay, I didn't get, I missed a couple of days on my diet or I didn't work out for a couple of days or I didn't get my financial things straightened out. I spent more money than I wanted to last week or I've got some cleanup stuff that I didn't get done on my business or I've got plans. I didn't get done. What we need to do is just sort of like put that behind us. We're still early, early, early in the year. So it's easy to reset. A week or two is not going to matter at the length of a year. So if you started January 1st or you start today, by the end of the year, you're basically going to be at the same point. Does it stink that you don't already have like a week or more of habits starting to build? Okay, yeah, that's not perfect, but you can recover today and step forward. Now one of the things I do want to focus on a little bit more besides just like perseverance and saying, hey, pick your head up. Let's keep going. Let's get that next step is you're in things that maybe you missed because I think these are the things that can bite us and we get busy. Get into that last part of the year and you think nothing's going to happen. Then the next thing you know, you've got office parties and you've got customers that need something done at the last minute and you're trying to get things done right before the end of the year and things get lost. Things fall to the cracks. One of the things that it is really useful to go back and review is did you do an end-of-year budget assessment? Did you look at, and this is particularly if you're running a small business or even a side hustle, did you get some time to sit down and look at what kind of revenue are you generating? What are the things that are going out the door? What are your subscriptions? What are your services? What are your costs? And not just, yeah, I spend 10 bucks a month on this, but what are you really spending money on? Hopefully, you've got your books solid from January 1st to December 31st and just look through those things. Even if you just sort by vendor, are there some that you don't need, that you don't use, that you forgot you had, that maybe you should make some adjustments? Now, if you're like us, this is a very valuable annual thing to do because it is very common for us to say, hey, we need a product or a service for three or six months or a year. For example, we had a period where we were putting a lot of stuff out before YouTube and the way we wanted to do stuff, we were putting a lot of stuff out on Vimeo. Well, now we've moved stuff off of that for the most part, so we don't need to have the subscription level that we had. And we find that kind of stuff all the time. There's always these tools that are out there, particularly if you're building a business. They're going to be the things that you use to find images, to edit images, to find and edit videos, to make courses and things like that. Even there may be some like templates and things like that that you end up subscribing to. But now that you've got your basis or your foundation done, you don't need them anymore. You've got the piece that you need out of it, so you can set that aside. Have you spun up some demo accounts that maybe cost you a couple bucks or maybe didn't cost you anything, but there's just demo accounts that are out there that you don't need? Maybe go back and clean those things up. Now as a part of this, sort of as a bonus, flip back if you haven't, look back for last year, what did you do? What January, February, March, all the way through the year, if you're looking at your expenses, you hopefully will also be able to sort of tie those expenses to certain projects or customers or vendors. And look at those and say, hey, what did we get done? Is there somebody that we haven't talked to in a while that we need to touch base with them? Vendors are a great one that, and customers as well, customers because you're going to get the sales, but vendors are ones that I think we overlook too often. There are vendors out there that are very helpful. They have no problem putting together once a quarter, once every six months, once a year. Just sit down and talk to you about what are you doing, how are you using their products, what do you need? And a lot of times those happen even if you're not a huge customer. They like that feedback, just like you would enjoy that feedback. You would love for your customers to sit down and say, this is what I like, this is what I don't like, this is what I would love to see. And vendors are the same way. And along the same lines, there's upgrades and there's enhancements and there's new versions that are out there that it does not hurt. Yes, your vendor may step in and sell you on their latest training and their latest blah, blahs, but it's good to know that's out there. And sometimes it's good to just know there's things out there like, hey, we updated our API documentation or hey, did you know with this new release, we have this new feature? And you may say, no, I did not know that was out there. So it doesn't hurt to touch base even with your vendors and especially with your customers. And if there's some that you have not had any contact with in a while, go ahead and you put that on your list. And I think that part of this new year is that you're going to reach out and say, hey, how you doing? How is our service doing? How is our product doing? Or hey, what have you done in updates that we could take advantage of? We started with your product last year. What are some things that you've added that we should be aware of? Now, maybe you keep up, maybe not. It's hard to keep up because there's so much stuff out there, particularly if you're in a world of like either the Microsoft products or the Amazon products, even the Google products, there's new services all the time. So maybe take a look at what's out there. Now, granted, these guys are bigger, so you're probably not, unless you're huge, going to be able to go to Microsoft and say, hey, what have you done, First Lady? What are the new things that you have coming out? Or Amazon and say, what are the new things you've got coming out? But the good news is you probably don't need to go to them directly. It's like take an hour, take some time, go to their site, and just sort of flip through like their press releases or their new and notable products and services. You would be amazed how informative that can be. Perfect example, when we were doing the AWS services series, we went through whatever it was, 90 services, I think, during that couple of month period. And during that time, there were new ones that came up. So we were there, like checking out a service and working on it. There would be like a nice little new tag right by the new services. So it was really easy to look at that page of literally over 100 services and go find them. And I didn't have to call them up. I didn't have to be a special customer or anything like that. I just had to go look. And more than often than not, the big like, you know, your Microsofts and your Amazons and your Oracles and those kinds of places, they have those things. If you're dealing with a programming language, check out its homepage or the homepage where people go for tutorials and instruction and things like that. There may be some excellent new tutorials, how to's, things of that nature. For example, not to toot our own horn, but go check out our YouTube channel and see if there's maybe a couple of topics out there that are useful to you. Most of them are like, you know, solve this problem. So they're just quick and dirty. Not super dirty, but they're very quick solutions to a simple problem. So you don't have to get too complex. It's one of those things that may save you an hour or two if you're having to research it. I know there's more than a few of those, and it took me an hour or two to like get everything in place to build the 15 minutes or 10 minutes of a video. So when we're starting this new year, start on the right foot. Take a step forward with an idea of what is it that I have? What is the army that I'm going to battle with? To use that analogy. What is it I have? And in some cases, it can be like, what are those those lodestones that you have around your neck? Are there services or subscriptions or vendors that you're using that you really need to just end that? You need to say no. You need to stop it because it's not useful to you. Or do you have overlap all over the place? Is this year that you take your 15 different solutions and find a way to merge those into four or five or one? If you're a small business, this is probably something you deal with on a regular basis. On the RB consulting side, we deal with that all the time. We're constantly talking to customers that started out with a little organization and they did, they use like XS or Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets. And maybe they used QuickBooks or something like that. They ended up next thing you know, they've got they've grown a little bit and they've got spreadsheets. They've got maybe Salesforce or Shopify or something like that where they've got some of their data in or Magento or one of those kinds of places. And then they've got other stuff that's sitting in Word documents or CSVs or other spreadsheets or out on two or three different cloud providers or technology where they've got two developers and they've got five different languages that are used, programming languages that are used to build their in-house software and integrations. Those types of things are costly. It is not easy to have all of those solutions and have them all talk together. And of course, there's always the I've got to copy and paste data from here to there or I've got to re-enter this or all of those things that are all potential areas of failure because if I copy and paste it incorrectly, boom, now I've like put it in the wrong place and I may not know where the system of truth is. And the next thing you know, I have to track down why is this, you know, why is this account number wrong? What is it supposed to be? I don't know because I have it three different values in eight different places and I don't know which one is correct. Now you probably don't have things that bad, but it's worth a look. It's worth stepping back, review where you're at because like I said, we get busy. We get life gets in the way, business gets in the way, customers get in the way. So we have all these plans to, you know, sort of do some house cleaning or at least some sort of like corporate retrospective or review or a financial like our own little assessment or audit or IT assessment or audit. And time runs by and next thing you know, we have not gotten that done. So if nothing else, build a little to do list and put those items on there and say, I need to get to this. Maybe I can't get to it today or even this week or maybe even not this month, but put it on your list. You may end up like me and I got to the end of the year and there were things that I was checking off my list that I wanted to check off in January, but they stayed on my list and I didn't get around to them until December for a whole bunch of reasons. Some valid, some maybe not so much, but that's sort of the way we work, isn't it? We have things get in the way, we change our priorities. And the next thing you know, that thing that you were going to get done this week is something that you haven't had done for six months. It's something that's been sitting on your to do list forever. And the nice thing is it's still on your to do list. So it's still out there and it's still like poking you a little bit, nudging you a little bit to say, hey, take care of this. So let's go into this new year saying, hey, I didn't get everything done that I wanted to at the end of last year. But there are a couple of things that I need to do. They provide enough value to me, to my company, to my employers, to my customers, to my vendors or whoever that these are things that do actually need to be done. And those are the toughest, I think, the ones that they don't really have to be done today, but they do need to be done regularly enough. It's like changing the oil and oil and oil filter in your car. On any given day, you probably don't need to have it done. But as time goes by, you more and more get to a point where you do need to get that done. Otherwise, other things go bad. And there's a lot of stuff in business in the same way that you've, yeah, it's like touching base with a customer. If you touch base with them regularly, then it's just something that's normal and expected. If you touch base with them, you know, let's say every other week for a couple of months and then suddenly you stop and you go three weeks and four weeks and five weeks. And the next thing you know, it's been six months. Then it's like, now it's awkward because one of the things you have to do is say, I know I was calling you every two weeks and now I'm not. It's like, you know, maybe you don't do that with the customer, but maybe you did it with your mom and dad or your grandparents or your siblings or your kids or whoever it is. Those kinds of things that when we let them sit, sometimes it's really bad and those things will sit and fester. But more often than not, it's not really the festering. It's just they sit and then they become more and more awkward or difficult to restart. This is why we so often preach that momentum, that take a step every day, just step by step. Just do a little and keep it moving forward. Get that momentum going. Have those little habits, those atomic or micro habits if they have to be, that will get you moving in the right direction and have that momentum so that it's just, it's easier to do it than it is to not do it. And that is the message for this kicking off the new year. Let's make sure that the things that we really needed to get done last year, that we get them done now. Like bump them up in priority. Let's make them something that, you know, maybe like by the end of this month, all right, I didn't get it done by last year, but I really needed to get done. So my target is I'm going to have those things done by the end of January this year, not January next year. And if it's something you can't get done that fast, at least get the wheels in motion. Get started on it. So that when you get to the end of the month or when you're sitting here in the middle of February or March, you can look back and say, hey, I did make some progress. Hopefully by then you've made a lot of progress. But let's get out there. Get those things that, yeah, you don't have to get them done today, but get them in some sort of a special list or some sort of a cycle or something where you make sure that you do periodically go touch those things. That you do get those things done. It's like if I've got five cars and I need oil changes. Okay, I can't get them all in oil change this week. I mean, let's say, let's say I can't, let's say I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to do, but maybe like one oil change a week. Okay, set up one car, get the oil change this week, and then next week make sure that you may have the time to do an oil change for another car and the week after that for another car and the week after that. So yeah, by the time you get to that, if it's five cars, five weeks from now, you get the fifth one done. Yeah, it was a little late, but you got it all done. A lot of this is about projecting yourself forward to the end and being able to look back and say, yes, I got it done. As opposed to here where you look forward, you're looking forward and you're saying, oh my gosh, I don't have the time or the resources to get this done. That change of, hey, if I get started today, I'm going to really thank myself in the future. That mind shift is one of those things. If you read just about any successful person and their healthy habits and all that kind of stuff, that's really what it boils down to is let's make some progress. Let's make sure we make progress. The things that block us, then get help or find a way around it. It's oversimplifying in a sense, but it's not because if you have that momentum, then you're going to be more likely to say, hey, I'm going to dig in. I'm going to invest or whatever I need to do to get through this thing, to address this problem, to achieve this goal. If you can start this year with that, the other resolutions will start to fall into place. As we're wrapping this one up, I just really want to point back. If there's something you really needed to get done last year that you haven't gotten done yet, get her done. Get on it. Get that thing moving forward because you don't want that to just wait and wait and wait and wait. This is coming from someone who I had tasks one year that one time that I got done and they had been sitting on my little to-do list for three years. Now, granted, it was going to take some time to do it, but it was just like punnet, punnet, punnet, punnet because I didn't want to start it. It's just like, no, it's too much. It's going to take me days to get this done, so I'm not even going to start. Where I could have had it done years earlier, I didn't because I kept pushing it off and pushing it off. It was during like a Christmas end of year vacation thing. I was like, all right, I'm going to get this done because it's been on my list too long. Don't get to that point. Don't be a me. Go out there, make some progress on your task, and you will thank yourself later. I guarantee it. Now it's time to get going. Go out there, have yourself a great day, a great week, a great year, and we will talk to you next. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor 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 check out school.develop-a-nor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make us all better developers.