Taking Breaks to Boost Developer Health and Productivity

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor 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 when we are building better habits, we are building better developers. We are Develop-a-Nor. I am Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor and I am also a founder of RB Consulting, where we go out there and we take your technology mess and all of that stuff that's out there, that sort of like junk drawer that you have of technology. We help you figure out what you have, how to use it, how to leverage it, integrate it, automate it, simplify it and make it run better for you so you can get the most out of your investment and make the most out of your time and productivity there from your technology side. Good thing, bad thing. This time around, good thing, as we record this, the elections are over. So I have not had a single thing on my, maybe I had one. I think I've only had one text today that said I need to give money to save the world or something like that. So that is a good thing. Let's see, bad thing. Bad thing is it is November. The year is almost out and there are so many things I want to get done this year that were like on my list. It's been one of those years that has just been a train wreck of stuff. So trying to get everything done in the last little bit is going to be a little bit of a challenge. Speaking of challenges, I cranked up, in the last week I've cranked up my Pomodoros. Initially the challenge was do one a day. I do two a day and found it to be very helpful. I tend to do them almost back to back. So I'll just do one, do a quick break, do another one and it has worked out very well for me. I've had times that it's just, I need that little bit of time to just focus and get something done because otherwise the day gets very distracting very quickly. See on the other ones, I am still, I've got on my to-do list, which is one of those lists. I'll talk about lists in a second, but I still, I need to figure out my automation. I actually have two or three things I want to automate. I just got to find some time to do it because hey, that's how life is. As far as lists go, I've found that it has been very valuable to me. A little bit of a tweak on what we had talked about is I start with about three to four, five items depending on the day. Usually it's three that I try to keep it to that are my work related stuff. Then I have a separate little list that is about four or five items that is my life related stuff. Now some of those are things that I do every day, like for example, my Pomodoro type thing to make sure that I knock a couple of those out. But it's a nice way to sort of distinguish between the things that I just want to get done today and the things that are more important that I have to get done today, as we will say. One of the things I have to get done today because otherwise we'll run out of time is pass this on to Michael so he can introduce himself. Go for it. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Mollos. I'm one of the founders, co-founders of Development Nerve, Building Better Developers, and I'm the founder of Envision QA where we essentially take development and put testing first. We do test-driven development. We help small and mid-sized companies build software that meets their needs through essentially use cases, user stories. So you are essentially getting what you need and there are no surprises at the end of the race. Good thing, bad thing. I'll start with the bad thing. Had a major water leak at my house. Literally today just spent about the last six hours with the plumber digging about a three-foot hole. Finally found it. That's the good thing and it's finally fixed. On top of the bad thing, I now have to go to the water company and try to recoup some of the costs from about a hundred gallons of water that got washed away through this wonderful leak in my hydrant. As far as challenges go, I've been cranking the Pomodoro. Loving it. It's actually, I started feeling bad because the weather is kind of getting cold so we're stuck inside more. I've been using it to make sure that I get up from my desk and I go for a walk. I get up, I move around in between those little breaks. So I'm stepping away from the computer a little bit more than I used to, which is good because there could be weeks where I end up essentially staring at a computer screen for 80 hours a week and don't move and your body doesn't like you when you do that. Moving on to some of the other challenges. I've been building onto my kitchen sink app. I've been working on some more Dijango, Python, kitchen sink kind of tools. I've been building up some HTML templates, which are going to be very useful and I haven't really done too much with the automation simply because I have a project coming up that really is going to require a lot of automation. So I'm in the prep work for that, but I haven't started it yet because I'm just waiting on some features and some information to come in before beginning that. And with that, I'll pass it back to you, Rob. So as he mentioned, one of the things that is important is getting up and moving around. We can like sit there and we can have really muscular fingers from typing, but that doesn't really help us in the grand scheme of things. So what I want to talk about this time is taking a break. Is finding a way to within your day, find some ways and some tools and some ways for you to stay halfway healthy, at least, even if not. Yeah, maybe developers are not known as the most healthy people, but some of them are. Some of them do really good. Now there's a lot of things out there and it has become, it's definitely become almost its own little industry is finding ways to stay healthy, to stay active, even if you have a sedentary type of job. Now, some of the things that come to mind are there are situations where you can have a, you know, some sort of a bike underneath it or something along those lines. Standing desks are very helpful, especially if you've got one where you can sort of move it around. So maybe you sit part of the day, maybe you stand part of the day. If you do, if you have a lot of meetings, it may be very helpful for you to walk around a lot to maybe, you know, stand up there and do a little bit of movement during that meeting. Those are kinds of things that typically you may be just sitting there drinking your coffee or whatever. If you just add a little bit of movement, it makes a big difference. Now one of the other things that is very helpful is literally just going for a walk. Now this is one I really want to, I'm going to sort of like zero in on because it doesn't take much time at all. You can take five minutes, for example, at the end of a Pomodoro, you can take five minutes and go for a walk, whether it is a walk around the building, if it's a small building or your house or something like that, or if it's a walk to the kitchen, if it's on the far side of the house or just walking a lap inside your, you know, walk around your desk a few times or something like that. Just spending a few minutes, just getting up, moving and walking. Now the benefit to this is actually more than just the health kind. Part of it is from a vision point of view, getting up and not staring at a screen for a little bit is very helpful for your eyes. It's going to help you, like, especially if you can go look outside or distance things, look out a window, those kinds of things are going to help quite a bit. Another thing is it helps you, it helps you think, it helps you reset, it helps you sort of step away from the environment you're in. And particularly if you're in a situation where you're like struggling with something is it helps your mind resettle a bit to get that different, the different visuals, different point of view. And they end up in a situation where you are now, like I said, mentally reset, able to maybe take a different perspective on that problem you're trying to solve. And a lot of times I've found that it will help you work through that problem. There have been many a time that I've gone on a walk and I'm not, sometimes I want to go to 15 minutes walk, three minutes later I'm like, I got to hurry back because I just solved that problem. Those kinds of things do help and quite often. And so it's, and part of it is, it's a benefit of just like getting the blood flowing and not getting too sedentary, but it also is going to keep you a little more healthy, a little more awake. And in the long run, it's going to make you a much better developer by itself because a healthy developer is a happy developer is a better developer. If you're laying around, if you're in pain, if you're sore, if you have sick days, all that kind of stuff is not going to help you out. So take a little bit of time and literally it's not a lot of time to do this and get a little bit of exercise. Thoughts on that? Yeah. And I'm also going to kind of zero in on the Pomodoro a little bit here because one of the problems I've had, which has led to my stagnation, which is why I love the fact we're doing the Pomodoro and I'm using my breaks actually to walk is because sometimes our jobs get us stuck in meetings where people block meetings for an hour. They always run over and you have another meeting right after that. You got to run to one of the things you can do with your Pomodoro, which will help with your walking or exercise to make you feel better is schedule your meetings to either start five minutes after the hour or end five minutes before the hour. So you get a little break between the meetings and you have to kind of work the meetings a little bit to get that five minutes in so you can get up and step away, take a walk. The other thing I'd like to kind of build on what Rob said is also when you get up and go for that walk, leave your phone at your desk. Do not take any digital devices with you. Use that time as a break. Step away. Walk away. It's not just for your physical health, but it's also your mental health because if you're walking away, like Rob said, if you're not looking at something, you're just walking around, you start to think you can think about a problem. You can think about something else that's going on. And maybe you trigger another thought. It's like, oh, hey, I looked away. I figured this out. The other thing is walking around the building. If you have other coworkers, if you're not remote and you're in an office, the other thing you can do is a buddy system. So if you have a team of developers or you just work with some people in the office you like, work with them, you know, kind of schedule time with them to dedicate. Hey, let's go for a 15 minute walk every like maybe four hours or like every two hours. Let's get up, maybe go get coffee if it's on the other side of the building, have a little water cooler chat and then come back to your desk. Use those times to get up and move around. But you can also use those time to communicate on non work specific issues. And that is the thing is it's it does go back to being able to just like get out of, you don't want to escape, but it is, it's, I guess, sort of getting out of your right, getting out of your lane for a little bit, changing gears. While we do talk often about the cost of switching gears, of going from one project to another and those mental costs and the little spin up and spin down that we have mentally to go from project A to project B to project C and how batching things together can be very productive. There is also a value in not getting stuck too long on something is that we start getting a little bit myopic, we get a little too focused. It's just like if you stare at a spot on the wall for too long, suddenly like, you know, colors will change, it gets all trippy and there's all kinds of like the stereograms and stuff like that, that you can go look at. And it's because you're focused at a single place for too long that if you can't get away from it, it sometimes it can cause you to not consider some of the things that you should, but also it can be a little bit unhealthy because then you end up a little too focused, a little too stressed and it's sometimes a little better to just take that step back, take a deep breath, change gears and then you're able to like, you know, come back and refresh and step back into it. Just like, you know, if you get to end of a long day and you're just about to solve that project and you end up staying up an extra eight hours instead of get some sleep, come back the next morning, get it done, you have the same kinds of things. And it does have it. There's so many, there's studies and research and stuff like that there that just doing simple things. Just like 15 to 20, 30 minutes of walking, not running, not carrying weights, not climbing mountains or anything like that. Just that will help immensely as far as mental health, physical health, blood flow and all of the things that all do help you become a better developer. They are more healthy than just slamming sugar and caffeine. Trust me. And you'll be a better looking developer because you'll be able to lose weight and all that kinds of other stuff. And you can be like, you know, super studly, just like a Bill Gates or something like that. Okay. Maybe not a good example, but still that being said, another way that you can be super studly and have all of your friends love you and just say, you are so awesome is if you let them know that you have sent us an email, send us an email at info at developer.com. Give us some feedback. Even if all your friends don't say it, we will, we will be more than happy to sing your praises, not literally because you don't want to hear us sing, but to give you as many, you know, boo-yahs and kudos as possible. Because we want to hear from you. We want feedback. We want this to be a community that feeds into not just what we are looking for, what we see, but also to you guys give back to the community and give us some good feedback so we can help, you can help us help you get better. You can also check us out on our Facebook page. You can check us out on X. You can, wherever you get your podcasts, you can leave comments, you can leave feedback of any sort there. You can go out to the contact form on developer.com. You can also check us out on youtube.com out in the developer channel. You can see this in prior episodes and future episodes if you wait long enough. And you can also go back and see stuff from some of our training, some of the tutorials we've done, some of the mentor class examples that we've had from over the years where we've covered a broad range of topics. Some of them so much that we've actually covered them multiple times as those technologies have advanced. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up, let you get back to it, 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-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.