Supercharge Your Focus and Productivity - Expert Tips for Success

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 continuing our season where we are going through the developer journey. We are building better developers. We are developing or we're awesome like that. And you are part of us. That's we as a collective. My name, I'm going to go out of the royal we my name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of developer norm, building better developers, also a founder of RB consulting where we build better software, basically, we take the technology that's out there. And through integration, simplification and automation, we find ways to allow you to better use your solutions to improve your processes, and to make sure that you can focus on helping your customers and earning the almighty dollar without having as big a cost and without spending as much time trying to use all of those tools. I will start our good thing bad thing this time around. So let's see, where do I want to go with this? Good thing. We'll start with my good thing. I like sometimes you just have days that are just productive. You know, there's those days that we all have the days that aren't where we get, we get to the end of the day, we're like, what I wasted a day at work, you know, or something like that. Yesterday, I'd come back, I hadn't done anything for a while, which may be part of what was related to it. And it was just bam, bam, bam, I was knocking stuff out left and right, things were getting done, I was able to not cross them off my list within itself is always awesome. So that was my good bad today, not so much. I've like had a couple of things I've done, but then get gotten caught into some things that we're going to talk about in this episode, which is basically things like distractions, and things like that is how do you stay on task? How do you stay focused? How do you make sure that your estimates are realistic, and you're not interrupted by whatever it is, if it happens to be a toddler that comes up and bothers you read periodically, if it's your neighbor that's cranking chainsaws, whatever it happens to be, those kinds of things. That being said, before we jump into it, I do want to allow Michael his opportunity to tell me all the good and bad about his life and introduce themselves to you. Hey, everyone, my name is Michael Mellos. I'm one of the co founders of developer nerd building better developers. I'm also the founder of envision QA, where we help businesses assess their current tech stack, what software and utilities are using within their business to make sure that what they have meets their business needs. And if not, we help them find the right tools and technologies, or we'll build it for you. Good and bad. Good. Similar to you. I had a really productive night last night, I was really hammering through some requirements and building out some user stories for a customer. Kind of good and bad with that. Went and talked to the customer today and basically had a fire hose of information that hit me in the face from the questions that I was able to build from the user stories and the requirements that I defined last night. So it is good and bad. The good, you know, making progress bad. I was able to unpack a lot more. So a lot more work to do, but you know, not necessarily scope creep because we're still on task. But we'll talk about that today. And that is actually a good thing before we move into the meat of this is that this is something that we're going to talk about that is that sometimes you do need to you're hit by the fire hose. And sometimes you need to call timeout and step back and be able to absorb or digest what it is you get. This gets into some of the things we're going to talk about about like we are human beings, we are built a certain way, we have some strengths and we have some weaknesses. And one of our strengths is not being able to be hit by 18 different things at once and being able to process all of that. Maybe Bruce Lee or somebody like that can can do that, but we can't. So if you don't know who Bruce Lee is, Google or use your favorite search engine. We'll say it that way. We'll say the generic generic approach. I want to talk about and I actually I want to talk about because Michael wanted to talk about the idea of staying on track of focus of avoiding distractions where you can or working in the midst of distractions, because this is something that I think is very key to being successful, whether it is a as an entrepreneur, whether as a developer, whether honestly, even as a human being is that the people that succeed almost always, particularly if they succeed at anything that requires work, anything that's not just really simple, it's going to be through focusing and making that a priority. That was something that back in the day and I think he still says that I just haven't heard from him a while. But like John Lee Dumas and the entrepreneurs on fire, I think is what it was. It's something on fire. I know it's on fire. It's what John Lee Dumas check his stuff out. It talks about focusing about was it fine one fixed one fine one course until solved or something like that. But it's basically it is it's focus. It's we do not no matter what you think you do, whether you think you are a woman that can or a guy that can't, we don't really multitask that well. There are things that we can do. Yes, we can process multiple things at a time. But it's just like looking at something vision. If you're looking at something, it is very easy to miss things in the peripheral. Yes, you may catch them, but you also can miss them. And it's the same thing when we get into focusing. And this is where we need to if you're a Superman or superwoman and you can multitask, OK, realize the rest of us are humans. And so when we are setting stuff up, whether for ourselves or for others and by others, I'm talking about like when we're in meetings and things like that, we need to make sure that we have the wiggle room will say or the bandwidth built within that meeting so that people can actually get what they need to out of that meeting. Meetings are probably the worst because I know too many places where it is just back to back to back to back meeting. You're just in a meeting. You're in there. You're cranking through stuff. You don't have time to think about it. And then you're on to another one. And I've been I was in a job for a while that I wasn't even a developer. I was just managing developers. And I went I would do sometimes six meetings back to back in a day, maybe a lunch break in there. And I get to the end of it. And I would spend most of the night having to try to like read, reconnect to what was all the stuff that's there. Find a way to parse through that. Look at my notes and some of it was like, what the heck was I think? I don't even remember that part. I don't want I don't know how those notes got there. Be cognizant of that stuff. There's a reason that schools and classes have a length that is typically 45 minutes to an hour at most. And if you have longer classes of two to four hours, you usually have more people falling asleep as you get into the later part of those things, because we just struggle to focus. And these days, even more so because the late the younger generations have less and less ability to focus for long periods of time, they they're used to stuff really fast. It may be phone related, maybe not. We'll never see. We'll never know. Actually, I think we all know that is why. So think about that is that when you're putting together meetings, when you're scheduling yourself for meetings, when you are setting up your schedule, and what is your availability, make sure that you have time to digest what it is you're doing. Because if you don't, you went to that meeting, if you're not able to properly digest it, then you've basically wasted that time. What's worse is you're, you're not going to miss all of it. But you're also not going to get all of it. So it's not going to be till some point down the road, that you're going to be able to find out that Oh, crud, I missed that important piece that I needed to get, particularly, and this is to, you know, to Michael's credit, like, particularly, if you're working on requirements and things like that, you really, those are the toughest ones is just like, take as much in as you can be focused on that, put the phones away for those of you that do that, and really focus on what it is you're working on. As a developer, I'll throw this one out and then pass it over to Michael is because this is a place I could talk all day. As a developer, it's the same thing is focus on one task, right? And an example I've used before is that when you're a developer, if you go grab like eight tasks at once, then you're, you're just grabbing eight tasks at once. That doesn't mean you're working all eight of them. You may think you are maybe you've coded one, you coded another and you coded another, but I could do that. I could walk through each up and put a little boilerplate that says Rob's doing this, Rob's doing this, Rob's doing that doesn't really move the ball forward. If I look at one that I'm focused on moving the ball forward on that ticket. And now you may have some stuff that is connected in some way. So I need to, I needed to work this ticket, but I also need to work that ticket because those two coincide and I need to make sure I'm thinking about both of those. Maybe they have an integration point that I need to make sure that those are done in a way that is it's easier for me to do those two together than for me to do it, Michael to do it and for us to constantly have a conversation about what does that integration point look like. But other than that, and that even then should, if your tickets require you to grab three or four at a time, then they probably weren't written right. There is something wrong about how they were done. You should be able to go work one, complete it and move it through the process so that people can start testing it. You can move on to the other one and you can move forward. If you have to hold off completion until another one is done, that's okay. But it's like, you should just don't try to fake everybody out, work one ticket at a time, get it to completion, get it to done and then move to the other thing. I think I haven't vented enough, but I think I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm going to let you throw your thoughts into this because I know you have a couple of thoughts on it as well. Yeah. So let me give you a simple scenario. You know, we were talking about developers being developers and developer focus, but in reality as humans, we typically have been told for years that we can multitask. You can do more than one thing at a time. And while you can, the true idea of multitasking is a lie. You can really only do one task at a time and you need to do it well. Otherwise you're basically putting one block down in the foundation, going over here, answering the phone, the blocks aren't building themselves. So if you sit there and you build the blocks, then you go talk on the phone, finish that call, and then you come back and maybe start the next column. If you do things in an organized way, we've talked about this before, talked about batching and different ways of managing your time. The idea is if you're constantly being distracted, either self-imposed or environmental distractions, you're never going to really be able to truly focus on what it is that you're working on and do a good job. You may do an adequate job. You may get it done, but when we're writing code, that typically leads to bugs. That typically leads to missed requirements. We don't want those things to happen. So we need to kind of stay focused, put those blinders on a little bit, and just stay in our lane and get things done. Now in reality, we have meetings, we have phone calls, we have messengers, we have distractions. Unfortunately, and I've been bad about this too, I'll get into the point where I'm too focused or it's too quiet. You get other distractions that unfortunately are sometimes self-imposed and you'll turn on the radio and, oh, now you're listening to music and you're distracted by the music and you're not really focused on what you're doing. Or you have the TV on and you're now suddenly watching the news, not working. Or you're in a meeting trying to chat with someone in the messenger and you missed a very critical, important detail about a project. So these are the things that I was referring to when we're talking about this particular topic. Because typically, again, we're told that we can do multiple things. You should be able to do multiple things. But the problem is if we're not doing the right things, we're going to be distracted. We're not going to be able to stay on task. It's going to take longer for these things to get done. In the past two podcasts, we've talked about sprints. We don't want our tickets to be kicked down the road. We don't want them to keep being pushed out. We want to get our work done. We want to get the requirements. We want to make sure that we understand it. We do the work. We get it done and we can release the software on time. It's just one of those situations where you have to have a lot of self-discipline. But a lot of times we don't know what we don't know. Either people need to point out that, hey, you're not focused on this or you're not doing this. Things like that in our professional career can be handled by our managers or by our teammates by doing one-on-ones, by doing 360s where you do the anonymous reviews of your fellow employees, your fellow teammates to see that everyone's on task. So, well, we have to be aware of our environment and we have to be aware of our tasks. There are other things we can do as teams to work together to stay on track, to make sure we're doing what we need to do and help avoid some of those distractions. And I'll tell you, one of the biggest things that annoys me is when people say that they listen to, and unfortunately, I'm going to throw us under the bus here, listen to podcasts while they work. Now, how can you focus on what you're listening to while you're working? If you're driving, sure, you can half listen, but you should be focused on the road. There are things you need to do to be safe. There are things you need to do to get your job done. And if you're finding yourself distracted or doing too many things, maybe it's time to look and say, Hey, I need to stop doing something while I'm doing something else. Wow. That's actually, there's a lot of great stuff there. So I do have to say, if you think that you can multitask and that you pull the podcasting while you're developing, listen to podcasts, like that's a, that definitely is one of those is really easy to get distracted. But if you think that that's not the case, then what do you think about people talking on the phone while they drive? That's a mic drop right there. It's like, that's proof you cannot multitask. Don't tell me that you can, because that should be almost mutually exclusive. And it's not because you have almost been hit by somebody, whoever, all of you out there have almost been hit by somebody chatting away on their phone, not paying attention or even worse heads down, looking at something on their phone and they're not paying attention to you. Some of you may have hit somebody because you were doing that same thing. Now, if you think that we are just full of it, I would challenge you. And this is something that even if you know that we're right, I would challenge you anyways, try to tomorrow or today, depending on when you're doing this, set aside, block a time, whatever it is, 30 minutes, an hour, probably can't go beyond that because we talk about, there's only so much time we can really be focused and bit the most out of it, but pick like a 30 minute, actually just pick a 15 minute slot. This goes back to when we've done a lot of these, you'll learn something over a period of days in 15 minute chunks, because it goes back to way, way back. I had on part of my schedule, I had one product I was building, this little side hustle thing. I was doing this product and I was like, I'm going to spend 15 minutes a day on it. And I was writing a book at the same time. I'm going to spend 15 minutes a day on it. The first thing I found, it is really hard to restrict yourself to 15 minutes. Once you get into anything like that is really hard. And it really is 15 is too little because it's really hard to settle in, focus, get something done and get it all done by 15 minutes. You're going to like, when that alarm goes off, you're going to be like, dang it, didn't get it done. You're going to be scrambling to get stuff. However, those 15 minutes were focused, particularly after the first couple of times I tried it. I got so I could, I was amazed at how much I could crank out in a 15 minute period. More so if you try like a Pomodoro approach or one of those where we get into something where it's like a half hour or 45 minutes or an hour, and you are focused and I mean focused, like shut off the email, put the phone away, just focus on your task. Even if your task, for example, would be something that's somewhat multitasking like I'm writing code, but I'm also having to deal with maybe I'm manipulating data. So I'm going back and forth between writing code and, and writing some SQL statements or viewing some data, things like that. Even if it's in itself, the task has multitasking built into it. Where you're having to shift gears. If you can just focus on that, I dare you because you will get done and you'll be like, wow, I got a lot of crap done. Now, if you're a manager, that does not mean that you're behind schedule and you take all your people and you say, I'm going to lock you in a room for eight hours. You're getting a lot of crap done because that's not how it works. It's still, we still have that depending on where we're at, probably, you know, 45 minutes, maybe an hour 15 hour 20, I don't know everybody. And there's studies so you can go look those things up, but there we are designed to do like work. And then we got to take a breath. Now, you know, it could be something like, Hey, I got to go drink. I go go pee. Well, if you don't drink, you're not going to have to pee. And if you don't pee, you're not going to have to drink or something like that. But there's still physical constraints. That is what I'm trying to get to is that put yourself in a situation where you can be successful, get rid of the distractions. There are lots of tools out there. There are a lot of things we've talked about. You can go search the developer sites, you can see about all the different ways that you can help to help yourself focus on that task. And I guarantee you it will in itself make you a better developer, you're going to find out that you're going to write as Mike alluded to, you're not going to have as many bugs, you're probably going to have better tests, you're going to have better flow to your code because you didn't stop and go write it at you and then pick it back up later and sort of forget where you're at. Everything is going to look better. And I say this as somebody who doesn't do it often enough. There are too many times that I get stuck pulled away from something. Then I come back and I'm like, man, I wish I'd been able to finish that thought before I got distracted because now I'm having to think back through where was I at? What did I sometimes like what code did I write? What code did I not write? What did I finish? And what did I not finish? If you can focus, it will pay huge dividends. So don't be don't shy away from that. Don't be afraid of doing things like put something on if you're a place that's run by schedules and meetings and all that, put something on your calendar. And if somebody double books you, be free to say, I'm sorry, I'm already booked. Now, if it's your boss, you may have to worry about that. But that's not that's a conversation to have is say, look, if you want me to work, this is what I need to do. If you want me to just hang out at meetings, okay, I will go to all those meetings. Now, you're going to want to say it better than that, because most people are going to take that in a bad way. They're going to be like, take a hike, but find a way you may that may be a difficult conversation you need to have. And I have seen a lot of people do it successfully. And it's basically approached as, look, I'm going to be more effective if I'm not in that meeting, if you can summarize it, if you can let me know what needs to be there. Now, if you have to be, if you're an integral part, you're an integral part of that, that's okay. But even then say, hey, I need to have time to get stuff done. So please respect my schedule when I've got something on the schedule. Don't double book me. And sometimes it's just as easy as pushing back and say, hey, I'm double booked. I need you to reschedule. Sometimes it's a little more difficult. That is obviously some things I'm very passionate about because that is the, I think that is a lot of the ebb and flow that we have as developers is that when we've, I talked about that as a good and bad, just recently, we have our good days. We're very productive and we have our bad days when we're not. And most often we're going to find that the bad days where we aren't as productive, we got interrupted. We were trying to multitask or there was something that took us away from our ability to just sit down and just like knock out a problem. And if you, if your problems are too big, if you have too much that's on the plate to be able to get that, find a way to the first problem you want to solve is how do I break this down into bite-sized chunks so I can make this, I can make that progress. That was one of the things that I was actually, I learned with doing the 15 minute approach. And this is not, I'm not writing a book on it. It's not something that I've thought about more than like in this episode, but it is something that I got out of that was particularly with my side hustle. I had a project I was building, I had an application I was building. And part of my starting every week was I looked at what can I get done in 15 minute increments through this week? I explicitly had to spend a little bit of time and sometimes you could do that. Like take your first 15, first day of the week, take 15 minutes and just break down the next hour, the next four days of 15 minutes. What can I get done in those? Because when you start breaking that stuff down, one, it allows you to really focus on it. Two, once again, now you're constraining what you have to think about. Integration, all that kind of other stuff. You're now on a very small thing. So it's a problem that's going to be easier to solve. It's just like anything else. If you wanted to melt a huge block of ice, it's a lot easier if the first thing you do is smash it into a bunch of little pieces, because now those little pieces can much more easily be melted. I mean, it's just it's a one of those things that's in nature. If we can take it in a smaller bite, it's going to be easier. I'm going to take a small but actually very large breath and pass that back to you. Because I think we've got a couple things that we've talked about. Yeah, one additional thing I'd like to add to that is be conscious of your task. What is it that you're working on? Because a lot of times we'll be assigned tasks or work on tasks that have future deadlines, like this ticket, which should maybe take an hour isn't due till Friday, and we're picking up on a Monday. One of the biggest things I see is people fill all that time between Monday and Friday to get that ticket done. The other flip side of that is if it's something you don't want to do, or you dread doing, or just something you don't have fun doing, you tend to kick that down the road you you procrastinate, you find things to do to avoid doing that, which leads to this distraction. So you're essentially giving yourself permission to be distracted, because you don't want to work on this ticket. My recommendation there is work on the least, basically your least favorite task first, get them out of the way, preferably earlier in the day so that the rest of your day you're going from a less happy mind frame back to a happy mind frame so you don't end the day unhappy and take that into your personal time. So just a lot of the things we talked about here and we've talked about before in tools is, again, focus on what you're working on. If you find yourself filling that time because you don't want to work on it, get it done. Move it to the top of the list, get it done. If you find that you have tasks to do that aren't due for another day, well then get them done now, or don't take them on till you get closer to that date. Work on something else that's more pressing. Prioritize your time. We've talked about batching, batch your processes. If you have to be on the phone three, four, five times a day to call people, do that all in one time frame. If you're having to call the same person three, four times a day because they're not there, but you typically find out that almost every person you need to call is by their phone between like two and three, move all your call times to two to three so that you're calling people and not doing that wasted task of calling, hanging up, leaving a message, calling, batch, organize your tasks so that you can stay focused and stay on task. There was a lot of great stuff in there. That is all incredibly important. I do want to go back to the first one. It's the idea of eating the frog is doing the thing that you dislike the most first. Make that your highest priority and get that thing done. I will just add on to that because Michael did a great explanation of it is think about when you've had something that you didn't want to do, that you dreaded, that you were stressing. This could be difficult conversations as well as maybe a difficult task or a not fun task. When you've gotten those done, think about how you felt because that always is in itself. Like that's a better win. If I get to the end of a day and the only thing I got done was the one thing that I dreaded, my day is great. If I still have that thing I dreaded and I got 4,000 other things done, spoiler alert, probably 399,000 of those or whatever was totally useless crap that I didn't need to do, but I'm not going to feel as good. It's embrace the discomfort of getting that thing done so you can embrace the glory of getting it done and off your plate. It reduces stress. It does so many good things to you on a physiological level that it is a very valuable approach to take. You can go look up, go search eating the frog and you will find a lot of productivity gurus that that is one of the things they talk about. That is very often one of the things, however they look at it, take the things you want to do least first, get them out of the way and then it frees you up as Michael said. So now you have a happier day and you're not getting to the end of the day going crap, I still got to look at that tomorrow. I got to think about it like just get it done and get it out of the way and you're ready to have a happier life through all of that. We would have a happier life if you would take that thing that really isn't that hard. Just send us an email at info at developer.com and let us know what it is that you would like to hear from us. What are some of the topics you'd like us to cover? We still have a little bit of time before we're done with the developer journey season and so if there's something that you would like us to talk about in the developer journey or something you think we've missed because we have sort of progressed our way through it as we're going, shoot us an email, let us know. We would love to do that. We'll even give you credit or leave you anonymous, whatever you want to do to say, hey, we got this great idea from Bob and Sheboygan or from some anonymous person that's not Bob and Sheboygan. We'll do a better job of being anonymous than that and we would love to just like take that information and use it for our whether it's this season or future season and future topics. You can also check us out on developer.com. We've got a lot of information out there, a lot of places to go. We even find that often useful to us. We will search it and use it as reference material. You can check us out at school.developer.com. You can also leave us over any kinds of comments here, whether here is the YouTube, whether it's the podcast stuff, the developer is the channel on YouTube, podcast, it's developer building better developers, actually specifically the advertiser or the name, wherever you're going to use it, wherever you podcast. If you go to one of those lady in the boxes, we won't say their name because sometimes that triggers stuff. You can say, Hey, I would like to listen to the building better developer podcast. And guess what? They are going to fire up the most recent episode. So there's things like that that are available that, hey, it's the technology we've found a way to use. So it helps you help yourself better. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. We will return. We are not done with this season. 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 to develop a newer podcast. 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