Building Better Habits - Improving Your Focus

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 where we're building better habits, building better developers through those habits. We are Develop-a-Nor. I am Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, which doesn't always roll off the tongue real well, especially when I've only had a few cups of coffee or tea actually is my drug of choice. Anyways, already digressing. So it is one of those days, I guess, this episode that we are going to talk about improving your focus. So it's going to be perfect topic for this. I want to introduce myself a little bit more. I am also a founder of RV Consulting, where we are a boutique consulting firm. We basically help you wrangle your technology that's out there, your needs and the technology you already have. So that technology sprawl that we tend to have, just like you may have in your personal life, you've got just too many devices and too many things you're looking at, try to make a find a way through simplification, automation, integration to just focus those things down. So your technology is now your friend and your tool and not the thing that is sucking up all of your time. Also going to be some of those things will be helpful as we talk about the topic this episode. As far as habits go, really burning in the, like the Pomodoro has continued to be, I just, I cannot push that enough to say if you haven't gone, go back to that with one of the early episodes, basically walk through what a Pomodoro is. We talked about doing just, instead of trying to do them all day, but just try to have a couple of days that are focused periods. It has really helped me and it's also helped me with one of the other habits we talked about was basically doing stuff that's fun. So the things that I really enjoy is giving a little bit of time to that. And this is by doing things are fun. That's the stuff that I enjoy and work. And it's also touching some of the projects and some of the things that I need to do so that they don't just falter and disappear. And the next thing you know, it's, you know, you haven't touched that in six years and you forget where it was at. So there's a lot of benefits in those and the habits. Automation continues to be a good one. I think it really is one of those that that's just like, if you can get into that each week, look at one or two, even just one thing that you can automate that will build up and give you a nice snowball effect related to the snowball effect is my good and my bad. The good. Well, we'll start with the bad, I guess, is we just got pummeled by snow. So we're pretty much snowed in right now. It's like, I don't know, more than an inch, which around here is too much snow because they don't have clearing cleaning other than the major roads, major roads, probably fine. But getting to those a bit of a challenge. So that's, I guess, a bad thing. But a good thing is, is now that I'm snowed in for the weekend, I get to catch up on a lot of the chores and tasks and stuff like that. That was my ever building list of things that got pushed to tomorrow and then tomorrow and the tomorrow and tomorrow and coming out of a very busy holiday season, probably a real good time to have, you know, take a couple of days and catch up on such things so that my mental health can actually improve as well. Somebody whose mental health is not improving at all right now because he's stressing out because I'm about to put him on the hot seat is my co-host, Michael. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Blosh. I'm one of the co-founders of developer NERF building better developers. And I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we our entire focus of our company is to bring test driven development to improve software development within companies, be it small business, medium sized businesses, health care to take your software that is potentially having problems or user experiences are buggy. We help you streamline that whole process to make sure that when you write code, build code, it is tested. And when it gets out to the users at the end experience, they have a nice experience with the software. No bugs, no problems. And with this process, it also helps streamline development process. So your developers aren't spending as much time tracking down bugs or missing bugs because they can push a button and know if the software works before they even roll it out the door. Talking about good and bad. Good had a very productive week this week. Things are moving along on our project. Bad, like Rob said, we got snowed in. I think we got more snow than you guys. We're up to about eight inches. And I'm praying it melts tomorrow because we are going to the airport next week to so my wife can fly to California, hopefully not deal with the fires. But we'll see. Uh, habits. So I have been doing really good on some habits and really bad on others. So the Pomodoro, I started really good at the beginning of the year and I've kind of slipped. I've gotten into some bad habits where I've been kind of heads down coding. And the next thing I know, I am five, six hours in and I have not moved from my desk, uh, which also means I'm failing the taking breaks habit. Uh, so I've kind of slipped a little bit, but the good news of that is I actually got a whole lot done. Like I was so in the zone and really crank stuff out. Downside, I'm a little more burned out. So, uh, Getting back into some good habits, which kind of worked into that was I was following some good lists, checklists. Uh, I was more focused in meetings and I was actually really working on trying to plan things and schedule things. The problem was I was so overbooked that it just, I wasn't moving things forward. So back to the habits of this week is trying to get back to the Pomodoro and taking breaks in kind of like Rob said, getting to the point where we can spend time with family and friends and doing things we want. Well, that's what we're going to re as we part of the side effect, I guess, of what we're going to cover this time. And what I want to talk about is we're going to talk about habits related to essentially improving your focus. And this is not just, it is a little bit the general distractions that we've talked about, whether it's your phone or your mail or some things like that, but it's also, it's really more along the lines of being busy versus being productive. It is about figuring out what is it that you actually need to do for the things that you need to do. It may seem like that's too many to do's in a sentence, but it really is. It's, we have tasks. We have things that are our responsibilities and our assignments, whether it's in personal life or more often, and which is where we're going to really focus today is in the business and the, whether it's our side hustle or our main hustle. So we've got things like we will have tickets maybe that we're working on. We will have a product that we're building or a design that we're creating or something along those lines. And there is a lot of stuff we can do that is effectively busy work that is not terribly useful to us. I mean, it's, yes, it needs to be done maybe, but sometimes even then it doesn't need to be done. It could be pushed to a later date and then suddenly just sort of evaporates because we didn't need to deal with it. Now, some people are sitting there out there maybe saying, yeah, that's why we don't have to actually document designs and requirements because they're always going to change. Like wrong. That is not it. Not talking about like eliminating everything that you don't like to do, which is effectively documentation, but it is making sure that what you do is productive and serving the goal that you have. For example, some people can write, like, say, take a weekly status and over the years, there are some developers that their weekly status is, I wrote code. Okay. Not very helpful. And so you actually, in that case, you sort of wasted your time even putting that down. It's like, you need to have something that is useful. That's like, hey, I worked on this. I worked on that. Here was a challenge. Here was something I overcome. Something that provides whatever level of insight is needed for that, for that task, that weekly status task. Hopefully your manager or customer, whoever it is, can help you refine that. Now, sometimes over communication is not a bad thing, but maybe in your status, instead of I wrote code, you have a breakdown of every hour, like how many lines of code that you looked at and what we wrote and maybe some that you've got like code snippets and things like that that you've pulled into it. While yes, that thoroughly documents what you did, nobody cares. It's one of those that it's like you're adding documentation that's not needed. It's the same idea as if you generate a report to somebody and it's got a million records in it, it is too much. Nobody's going to look through a million records of data. You need to keep your why in focus. If you're building a product and you're going to show thousands and thousands of records in a report, then instead of yes, maybe you can spend your time and now you've built that report and you can check that off and that's a function or a feature that you can say like, hey, we can do that. Maybe take a look at that and instead of doing that, what is the actual goal? What are you trying to serve your customer with with that report? And then maybe you need to make adjustments. A lot of times it's things like maybe it's a summary or maybe it's just an exception report or something along those lines. And those are, I mean, we've learned some of that. Exception reporting is sort of an industry standard. Nobody cares if you process a million records successfully. Nobody wants an email that says I processed record one, two, three, four. They may want to say, yes, I processed a million records, but that's one value. That's not a million values. Or of course, that's one ping to your phone, not a million pings to your phone that everything's going well because if you have everything going well and then somewhere in there went wrong, you've got too much information. So that's where we want to focus. We want to focus on the why. And that's, I think, the easiest part. That's sort of the easiest way to describe what we're going to have in the challenge this week is how do we get to the why? How do we figure out, build some habits that will help us do the right thing, do the valuable thing? And how do we avoid going down those rabbit trails that we sometimes do? How do we avoid losing a day, tweaking a color on a website when the color is just for us and it doesn't matter to somebody else? I mean, there's things like that. I know we've all done. And we come back and we're like, wow, I spent a lot of time on that. And it really is going to come back to was that time valuable? Was it time well spent? And so before I go to the challenge of the week, I'm going to throw this over to Micro and get your thoughts on all this. Yeah, so it's rather interesting, our conversation today, improving our focus, explain the why. A very interestingly, a task that was given me this week was I was handed a project from another team with literally no guidance other than here's some documentations and all we're expecting you to do is just stand up the code. What we don't know or what we don't have access to is we don't have access to the previous developers. So we have teams that are working with this product, but no one knows how to stand up this product. So we are literally blind and kind of going into this like, oh, how the heck do we do this? And that is a bad practice because really, you know, you want your focus to be handoff software, have another team come in, pick up the software and hit the ground running. You don't want to essentially hit a roadblock like that. So to me, a lot of times when you're focusing on your why or like focusing on, you know, what it is that we're doing to stay productive, you kind of have to look at what you're doing. Like you said, make sure that the tasks you have can be productive. Make sure that the stuff that you're working on, ask yourself, you know, like you said, is this moving the ball forward? You know, you don't want to spend a day working on a color, but if your task is to build a dashboard, you do need to make sure that some functionality and features of that dashboard work. You know, you want to make sure that the user inputs are there. You know, that is important. The look and feel may be not as important at the beginning because what you want to do is you want to make sure that the feature is functionally complete and then you can come back later and add all the bells and whistles and make it look good. Now, there is a caveat to that because, you know, yes, sometimes look and feel may not be important, but those actions, those controls are. However, you don't want to spend like Rob mentioned, you don't want to spend days on a dropdown list to make it like cross-functional, make it, you know, look all nice and pretty. But you do still need to make sure that it meets the requirements of the user. So it kind of our why it kind of goes back to those requirements or maybe lack of requirements is what is it that they want? How do they want to implement it could be loosely interpreted. But essentially what you need to do is you need to make sure that you get it functionally complete that, hey, this works the way it's intended and then kind of move on from there. You can come back and apply focus later. Interestingly enough, that can also flow to those status emails or the end of the week status updates like Rob was talking about, because as you're building something, as you're working on your tickets, yes, you're writing code, but you're working on requirements, you're working on functionality and features. So when you go to write those status updates, depending upon who your audience is. Yes, it can be very technical. However, if you're dealing with customers, nine out of 10 times, they don't care about the technical, they care about that functionality, they care about the requirements. What is it that you're doing that is giving them quality or the quality of the code? What is it that you're doing to the code that they will see that they will understand? So you need to make sure you essentially can talk to that functionality. Hey, I was working on building you this dashboard for this functionality. Within that dashboard, these are the features I worked on this week. You don't have to get real technical with the code, but you might want to specify or highlight features that may be featured complete or are still in progress. So as you're working on your why, as you're working on your focus, think about these things and also think to make sure that you're working to get to that feature complete. Not, oh, this is a nice bell and whistle. Hey, look, I did something. No, nine out of 10 times what we do as developers is never seen by the end user. They just see software that works and that is all they care about. So be careful trying to show off and make sure that you show up and make sure that your software delivers what you're trying to do. And that's really like the focus is that there is a, I think we over, we exaggerate how impressive our software is to people, to our end user. There are a lot of, most often your end user is going to be impressed when the software works. If you've got like a nice little, you know, spinning wheel that shows up at certain times or you've got a certain color that's just like been, you know, scientifically proven to be soothing or whatever it is. And there's all these things that we do that we don't necessarily need to do that we're actually, in a sense, we are actually being bad stewards of our time of what our customer is paying us to do, our boss or employer is paying us to do, because they're paying us to solve problems mostly. Now you may be in a situation where the problem you're solving is a marketing problem so that you have to appeal. So, but that's then the focus, the design, the pop or whatever it is, the call to action. Then sometimes it is very valuable to spend that time because that is your goal. That is what you want. So in that case, maybe the content and the presentation are number one, if you're at the top of a funnel. But when you get to the end of the funnel and you're giving a product that somebody's purchased, then it's like, you need to, you walk through that funnel and you're like, you walk through that funnel, you built up that story, you built up all those valuable, the value proposition, so you now have to deliver on the value proposition. At this point, the value proposition is not smoke and mirrors. It is not prettiness. It is nailing the requirements that you have laid out for the customer. And with any product, that's what it is. For example, you can look at, spreadsheets are great. That's a good example of this because really what you want with a spreadsheet is you want to be able to take a bunch of numbers and stuff and present them in a way that you can see a lot of information at once, and then you can do a lot of wheeling and dealing with it. You can do calculations, all this kind of stuff. You don't need, generally speaking, you don't need like really pretty cells and stuff like that. You just need a grid and you need the ability to put as much crap on the screen at a time as you can, basically. So it's very functional. It's very specific in its function. And a lot of what we do, I think we overcomplicate and think that we should provide more than we should. So that's where I want to get to this is it's really, it is busy versus productive, which really comes down to, is this functional or is it pretty? Am I essentially just trying to present this in a better light than it is, or am I trying to make it better so I could, the goal would be that even if it's the ugliest presentation, the functionality is so good that it's still compelling, but then pretty it up as well. And one of the wasted time things is what Michael touched on is the idea that get the functional first. You can throw something out there that's visually okay. You don't want people to like, oh, my eyes are burning after they see your interface, but they don't need to be like, they don't need to go and like say, I have to go smoke a cigarette after seeing the, you know, your interface either, because the functional thing needs to be complete. You're going to, you may add buttons, you may remove buttons, you may add fields and remove fields, you may move fields around, you may have validations and communication of some sort, like notifications and messages and all this kind of stuff. That's all going to be part of completing that functionality. Now, maybe you know exactly what it's going to look like from the start so you could do all those things at once, but normally that's not the case, because there's going to be things that we're going to get into that is an unknown. And now we've implemented the functionality. It's like, oh yeah, that's right. We need to do this differently or we need to change that. And that means anything that you've changed it, if you spent time beforehand putting it up and trying to make it pixel perfect, then you've probably wasted your time because now everything else around it maybe has changed. And so this, again, it comes down to what you're knowing where the value is. And that's the habit I want to sort of look at. That's the challenge is this is much like taking a break. It is on a given day, because we've already, we're building lists, we're doing all these things, is maybe look at what's on your to-do list for today or tomorrow when you're putting your list together. And with that, when you put your list items on there, think a little bit about what does it mean to check that off? What do I need to do to check that off? What is the goal of that thing? What is the why for that checklist item? Because I can be working on that checklist item all day and maybe not make a lot of progress until the last five minutes. And then it's like, boom, I'm done. So you just wasted all day minus the five minutes. So that's what you want to look at is it's sort of like performance tuning your to-do list. Maybe that'll be the title of the podcast. That's actually a pretty cool idea. But it's really, it's looking at your to-do list and saying, what is the, essentially what is the most efficient way for me to get this thing done? It's a little bit of design work on your to-do list before you get into doing your to-do items. It's thinking about how am I going to approach this? How am I going to work with this? And this is something that actually you can actually benefit from as well. The idea of maybe there's some ordering to that to-do list. Maybe we've talked about like batching things together and things like that. So maybe it makes sense to do these three tasks and then these other three tasks because they are very familiar. Or it may make sense to do this task and do this very different task because it allows you to switch gears. It forces you to take a little bit of a break. So think about your why on your to-do list. And that's where I want you to do is for the next week. There's a challenge is every day when you build your to-do list before you dive into it, take just a couple of minutes and think about each of those items. Maybe you add another level of detail to your list or some notes or something like that to remind you what is it that I really need to accomplish to get this done. And then at any time during the day if you're sitting there and you're just like I'm heads down and I'm cranking through stuff maybe periodically or put a reminder alert or something like to say am I actually doing the things I need to do? And this I think will help you with some of the other things we've talked about like meetings and if you're walking around the office and people start talking to you and you just get sucked into you know water cooler talk or whatever because you can say wait a minute I got to get back and do this thing. I think it's going to help you stay focused. It's going to help you first personally to avoid rabbit trails but then also when you're dealing with other people. And I want to throw that to you Michael give you sort of last word on this. Yeah so it's I kind of like where you went with that. So the other thing with that is you know don't be busy be productive. You know don't be the person running around the office with your cell phone on making it look like you're busy you're talking to someone. Be at your desk, be present, get your work done, stay focused and you're going to see probably an improvement in productivity and a decrease in distractions. So one of the things that's very productive that you can do right now is write us an email send us an email at info at developinure.com. You can also contact us out on Facebook at the developer nur site. You can check us out on developer nur.com there's contact forms there you can provide comments and feedback on any of our content that's out there which is literally over thousands of articles out there between podcasts and videos and blog articles and all kinds of stuff. A wide range of technologies that we cover everything for beginning developers and there's even some more advanced topics in there as well. Love for you to check that out. You can also find a lot of the video stuff amazingly enough out on YouTube. We've got lots of stuff there on the development of our channel old mentor sessions and presentations of varying sorts and then a lot of these you may even be there hello to all of you there in the YouTube audience because we also do the podcast. We have a video version of that as well every actually every couple of days when we put these things out. Feel free also leave us feedback on wherever you listen to podcasts because there's so many of those out there the pod catchers that are out there. We'd love to get feedback from you whether good or bad we just want feedback because we want to know how we can serve you better. We want to build the better developers but we're also building a better podcast in doing so at least that's our goal. That's our why. So now I'm going to let you to continue your productive day go out there 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-Newer 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.