Breaking Bad Habits Simple Strategies for a Healthier Life

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 back. It is now 2025 and we are actually in 2025 with you as opposed to the last episode if you were listening New Year's Eve, we were pre New Year's Eve, we're still here or we've just got really good images of ourselves. We survived the year as far as all of us know, and we are back to our habits. Before we get too far into that, I'm going to introduce myself because it's a new year. Same old me though. I just have adjusted. Well, for those video watchers, I did adjust a little bit my camera and stuff like that. My name is Rob Broadhead. I happen to be one of the founders of Developing or Building Better Developers and also founder of RB Consulting where we are. We're here to help you use technology better through simplification, automation and integration. We take the vast, huge internet of technology and help you find the best things out there for your business, for your specific needs, for your custom. It's your business, your customers, your unique thing that you bring to the world and your value proposition. We find the best way to take technology and help you leverage that to deliver that to your customers. We're in the habits and I'm going to talk about some new ones here in this next couple episodes that are things that I have built in at the beginning of the year. This is a great time at the beginning of the year to really, if you maybe have gotten a little rusty on your habits over the holidays, to get back into them. One of the things that I've done throughout, I did skip a couple of days of the pomodoros but got right back into them and it really has, like I said, doing like not aiming for a full day of pomodoros but just aiming for a couple of them has just continued to be very effective for me. Also the automation piece, I think just it's one of those we started with seven days and then automate something. I think that is really one that is very helpful to do on a weekly basis is just make it part of your schedule each week is to go find something that you do too much of that you can automate, that you can correct or maybe that you could just wipe out of your life. Maybe it's something that you don't need to do where you're being busy instead of productive. I found that to be very helpful to me. Those are a couple of habits that have been useful. I think another one is we talked a little bit, Michael's talked more about being tied personally to your stuff, to your code, to what you create. Been through a whole bunch of changes in the last few weeks and some releases and things like that. It's really good. I don't know if it's been, it's something I go through enough that it's not saying I've been tied to as much, but it is very, I guess energizing almost to be able to sit there and be able to sit there and say, work with somebody and say, yeah, we need to make this better as opposed to feeling like you're taking it personally or something like that. To be like, yeah, we're on the same team. We're finding ways to make it better. When you find your bug, it's a lot easier than when if somebody else points out the bug. It's those kinds of things. But being able now to say, hey, this person's a teammate and working with me has been a, it's really helping build those habits of finding more ways, more sets of eyes so that I can be a better developer, not just by myself, but so like we can be a developer, better developer with our team and we deliver better things for our customer. Good thing, bad thing. Interesting one, New Year's Eve, we had plans, we had a party, we had all this stuff we're going to go to. It was, we went to the hotel, they were supposed to have this thing. The pregame to it, we found out it was not going to be a thing. It was going to be basically a DJ and that was it. DJ and some interpretive dance. They weren't going to have drinks. They weren't going to have food. We're going to have to figure all that stuff out. So we pivoted and we pivoted to another place. We were able to Uber and it wasn't too expensive. So we're like, we're going to Uber there. So the bad thing was our initial plans were ridiculously blown up. The good thing was is that we found another place at seven, starting at seven o'clock on New Year's Eve. We found another party in Nashville, which is hard to find spots anyways, because it's packed. We found another place, found a party, got there a little early. So we managed to miss all the crowds and it turned out to be a excellent New Year's Eve and a great way to step into the new year. Also stepping into the new year across the internet for me is Michael and I'm going to let you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Moulache. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, Develop-a-ner. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help companies build software through test-driven development approaches, automation, integration testing and functional testing. Looking back now that we're kind of into 2025, kind of looking back at the habits we started last season or towards the end of the year for this season. Over the holidays, I really implemented and followed a lot of our habits that we talked about like the Pomodoro techniques, the list techniques, automation. Really kept me focused and able to get work done even through the holidays. I was able to still take some downtime, but we really got a lot of work accomplished even with taking time off and spending time with family. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, it's a new year, bills are paid, bad thing, tax season is coming up around the corner and I'm struggling to figure out what the heck I need to file for business taxes, end of the year filings and all that fun stuff to make sure I'm compliant with the government so they don't come knocking on my door. Well, I sort of teased at it and we are going to talk about, we're actually going to do, it's almost like instead of building better habits, this episode we're going to talk about anti-habits or more like removing worse habits or something like that, the opposite of it. Because I was thinking about this and it is particularly as I step into the new year and I look at resolutions, one of the resolutions that a lot of people have is usually going to be around, I'm going to lose weight or I'm going to get healthy. Usually those are related to things like I'm going to give something up or I'm going to stop something that is a bad habit. Another one that you may have is that I'm not going to spend as much time lost on social media or something like that. So it's like I'm going to give something away. And I want to talk about that because I think this is something that we don't, I think simplifying our life is something that we don't look at enough particularly in the technology realm because there's so many tools, there's so many things out there that we want to get involved in all this different stuff. We want to touch all these toys, we want to play with them and there's a lot of times that we shouldn't, that these are things that are not productive for us. They do not help us become better developers or better people in general. And so I think that what I want to focus on this time is how do we build a better negative habit and how do we break a habit? It's not just building a habit but how do we break a habit? How do we, one of them is I think this is maybe the biggest value for you as you're looking at this particular challenge we get into this is identifying what is a negative habit. I think the first thing to do is like we do with a lot of these is sort of sit back a little bit and examine your week behind and maybe a little bit of your week ahead. And I think more so maybe the week behind is like what were your plans that you had? Now if last week happened to be one of the holiday weeks you may have to go back a couple of weeks because things look different. Or maybe in the week ahead just keep track of like what are your plans when you start the week and you're fresh and new and it's like it's a whole week ahead of me and these are the things we're going to do. Where does it go sideways? Where does it go pear-shaped as they say? And what are maybe some of the contributing factors to that? Now I think some things that I'm going to suggest and some things that actually some of these are very near and dear to my heart, some aren't but one of the things that very well could be a problem for you maybe if you get into like social media, you get lost in email, other conversations or just like you know Slack or Messenger or whatever your happen your chat version of you know chat app is, sometimes you get lost in those. So looking at that it's like how can I do less of that? And it may be that there's something where you need a you need some sort of a timer or something like that that says like hey I'm going to have a timer that says hey you've spent too much time on that. There are also a lot of apps out there that will allow you to at the end of the week or or whenever you do it, look at where was your time spent? And it may be it was in a browser or on these specific tools or email things like that that I think are very insightful because you'll realize that wow I thought I spent 10 minutes in email and you realize you actually spent two hours looking at email. I brought up in the pre-show I mentioned the idea of like when these you know now Apple sends through and I think Android does too, you'll get at the end of the week you can get your screen time report and you'll get stuff where you know you think well I didn't spend that much time and then your report comes back that you spent you know 20 hours in the last weekend in screen time. Like oh maybe I can cut that down what else could I do in those 20 hours? 20 hours is a lot so it's 20 you cut that in half you've got like a extra long day of stuff that you can get things done. So I think that's what you do is look at pick something pick one thing and this sort of is in the idea of we think of the world of agile and scrum one of the things you do when you go from sprint to sprint to sprint is you pick one thing in the next sprint that you want to fix and we're going to sort of look at it this way is think of like a sort of one week sprint. What is something that is a habit that you want to break and then the goal each day is going to be to identify when that habit kicks in and to get yourself thinking that I don't want to do that and it's basically usually going to be a replacement habit and I think the key and you find this with all of the addictions and habits and stuff like that you know like smokers when they want to quit a lot of times they will go to instead of smoking they're going to go have a snack or a cup of coffee or something like that. It's the same thing and I think this is where you're this is going to very much I think help you in building better habits and removing bad habits is finding the replacement. What am I going to do instead of X whatever my bad habit is now for me one of the things that I do way too often when I'm working from home is I will take my break which is a good thing I'll take you know half an hour hour and I'll take a break of like five minutes. The bad thing is is that too often I will go like hit my little snack closet I'll have like a handful of chips or something like that is I'll just have something because it it gives me something to do that is not sitting there in front of the computer and while that's not horrible in itself it's one of those things like I I have better things I could do now I could replace it with like I'm going to go check email or something like that but I think for myself it's more of an idea of and I've done this in the past and and this is what is reminding me to get back to it is the idea of instead of walking to that snack closet for myself I will just walk right by the snack closet and do maybe a lap or two around the house go you know go look outside check out the backyard the front yard and things like that which is also very good habit from a vision point of view because now you get from staring at the screen for so much time and then you turn around and now you're standing staring at something that's in the distance and it really does help your eyes and it just helps me to get out and have even on a rainy day it's a different perspective and so it is a positive in sort of that endorphin kind of thing like hey I'm not staring at a screen and we'll talk more about like fun habits in another episode but I think it's the key here is looking at what you want to fix and think about what would be a positive replacement of that because it's usually not going to be as simple as I need to eliminate it it's I want to replace it and then it also benefits you because now you're going from a negative to a positive and this is like now a much bigger swing those are my thoughts on it and this has really been something I just pitched to Michael like right before this so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this. Hey Rob. Yeah so we're talking about anti-habits you know how to break the habit or how to break a habit and now that we're coming off the holiday season one of the things that comes to my mind especially you know after watching football and you know year end stuff just kind of finally chilling a little bit is I've noticed a lot of commercials online and I've used this app before but with Rocket Money is seriously pushing a lot of people right now because you know people need to save money they spent a lot of money during the holidays and they need to figure out you know how to cut back well what's interesting about Rocket Money and this falls right into this anti-habit is how much are we spending on things that we don't think about you know you go join a gym members or sign up for a gym membership but never go to the gym but you're still paying that membership or you sign up for multiple like trials over the holidays so you could watch your holiday shows and that and you forget to cancel them these things just kind of stack up over time and you know next thing you know you're spending six hundred eight hundred dollars a month on things that you aren't using you know you're essentially throwing money away interestingly enough I go through this every few years and not necessarily with the credit card and memberships but I do this with my bills so like your credit card companies your internet your satellite tv whatever you use that you use a lot what is interestingly enough and I had a sales guy actually tell me this is if you get comfortable if it's like oh I can afford that well over time policies and billing cycles and fees change within a service provider so what you want to do is you want to call your vendor you want to call your provider and say hey I want to talk to the fulfillment department not the sales department you want to talk to fulfillment fulfillment has access to every single deal throughout the entire company across the country or across the world wherever they're located and what's interestingly enough is the fulfillment people have the ability and typically have the go ahead to use anything in their arsenal to make the customer happy and sealed the deal so typically where you go to your local like spectrum or Verizon store and they say oh yeah we can offer you $25 a month for unlimited plan etc. You called Verizon talk to the fulfillment they may say hey we can lock you in for a year at $15 a month even though you're an existing customer we can still give you this deal now the people at the stores can't they're not authorized but fulfillment typically can be I did this one year and managed to cut $1,000 off my bills for two years locking in certain payment deals now with that being said here we are two and a half plus years later and now I'm noticing that prices have changed things have gone down and I'm actually paying more for some things that I shouldn't be so one of the anti-pat habits is don't get complacent with your bills go follow up with your vendors and say hey am I really paying the right amount for what service I'm getting or am I locked into some contract or even out of contract sometimes when you're out of contract the fees go up and you don't even realize it so just kind of one little habit to just kind of go through and just reset your current bills and if you do pay for a lot of subscriptions look at rocket money you know that might look at your accounts and say hey I can cut the fat what am I not using cancel it so that's one little anti-habit I have the other one that we kind of briefly talked about in the pre-show is we're coming out of the holiday so no it's New Year's resolutions you know everyone's like well I got to lose weight let's go get a gym membership well instead of just doing that and you mentioned this Rob you know people make those resolutions to quit smoking the problem with a lot of these goals is that people don't find something to replace the bad habit with a good habit and that can come with losing weight so one of my anti-habit goals isn't so much to lose weight but it is to stop eating junk food like Rob said or in my case stop eating Christmas cookies and that pint of ice cream that I finished off last night because it was just so good you need to look at things in moderation so one of my anti anti habits is okay what can I deduct but what can I replace it with so one of the things I'm thinking about doing this week is picking up some bags of fruit keeping them in the house so when I have that craving instead of reaching for something sweet I'll just reach for something healthy apples are very good they're very sweet oranges as well typically you can eat up to like five apples a day and you still get the benefit of the fruit because apples also have fiber and your body needs fiber so I learned that trick from a nutritionist ago so that's one way you can actually cut a lot of fat so to speak reduce a bad habit and just introduce something healthy in your life that still tastes good and then lastly you know the other thing with the anti habits you know with the holidays especially New Year's we don't know about you but in our household we spent a little too much drinking champagne over New Year's and the holidays so one of the things to cut back on that isn't so much to stop drinking wine or stop drinking spirits but to cut back so instead of that full glass of wine maybe just pour four ounces have one or two of those you now equal one glass one you still have a couple glasses you're still enjoying it but you're doing it in moderation you're not doing it in excess so the anti habit here is to just reduce a little bit of what you're doing in excess and you should see a positive outcome come from that what are your thoughts on that Rob those are excellent I think the one of the things there on this the latter part is the we talked about momentum and I think that's one of the things if you can cut back like I've known several people that have gone from like energy drinks and sodas to pure black straight coffee and part of the way they do it every almost everybody I've talked to one of the ways they do it is they you know they go to coffee and initially they have a lot of sugar and cream in it and they start cutting it back and cutting it back and eventually get to the point where they just they're happy having it straight take a lot of sugar out of their their life and things like that another thing is I do I do think that it is useful to your habits like Michael talked about with it's like you know like for me this is something that was actually very near and dear to my heart because mention I got married this year brought somebody else in I've had all of these habits and all these automated things that I did and a lot of them are related to it's it's things like you know it's my cell phone bill and insurance and some of those kinds of things that had been that I periodically look at them but had just gotten in the habit hadn't looked at them in a couple of years and she comes in and says hey you know what about this and I'm like I don't know like give it a shot let's see it's probably I was like usually my answer is like I think I talked to him six months or a year ago but give it a shot and it's usually like yeah I haven't talked to him in three or four years because time does that and there was there's a lot of stuff that we got on this like cell phone in particular we were able to drop we were able to boost stuff around add another phone get a new phone and still cut 50 or 100 bucks a month off of our bill I can't remember it's one of those saying like insurance was insanely different there's just a lot of things like that and part of it too is because we you know life moves on you have different situations but like I I think we've talked about this before but Michael said it is very useful to periodically at least I would say once a year every two years go back through your your long-term kinds of relationships your cell phones your insurances those kinds of things that even like memberships and stuff like that and just see like what's a better deal because it's amazing how often which almost every time I think like I was an AT&T member for years and years and years and I think every time I called them it was every 12 to 18 months I would get a better deal they would they would make some changes and I would get a better deal out of it so definitely you know look at the habits and just examine them as well because it may be where you can refine the ones you have and just make those a little bit better it takes us to the challenge for this one the challenge is I really set this up beforehand the challenge is one identify a negative habit identify something that you need to change what is something in the week ahead pay attention each day and is there something that is not healthy that is not productive or something along those lines or just something you don't like to do something that makes you feel icky something that you just you know are not a fan of that you want to find a way to not have that habit not have that a part of your life and then at the end the challenge is to choose a replacement habit and then in the next week to start in implementing that habit and see how that goes for you and I'm really interested as we come to the end of the you know end of a year and starting a new one I'm always going to throw out the sell it send us an email at info at developernord.com but I really want to hear like what are your resolutions and maybe what's really fascinating to me when I have is what is a resolution you made last year that has stuck and I would love to see if the email is I couldn't I didn't make any of them that's cool too because it's just really interesting is I think everybody talks about how they haven't kept their resolutions and I'm always fascinated by the people that have and I'm always very proud if I've had something that has stuck with me to be like hey I'm bucking the trend as it were you can also reach out to us on x you can reach out to us on Facebook developerner.com we have contact us forums wherever you see podcasts out on YouTube you can leave comments you can leave feedback of any sort we love to have that particularly looking you know this kind of time where we're looking ahead to the year ourselves and making plans and things like that it's always good to have feedback because we do this for you and we want to make you help you be better developers and however we can do that we definitely look forward to that get those information and we have another season coming up in the next probably you know couple months and we'd love to have some ideas and thoughts on where you would like to see us go in the next couple of seasons that being said we're going to wrap this one up so go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you and a great year we will talk to you next time thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast you can subscribe on apple podcast 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 so