Off the Rails in Business- Reclaim Your Time and Sanity

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. Maybe a second time if you're seeing this. Otherwise, if you're in the podcast, thank you so much for being here. This is the Developer podcast. This is Building Better Developers. This is the Building Better Business season. I am just me not building anything better right now, but I am Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Building Better Developers, Developer podcast, also a founder of RB Consulting, where currently, maybe related to our conversation later in this topic, my website is Off the Rails. That's what happens when you start messing around with a couple of themes and you get lost in a rabbit hole and you're just like, you know what? Inferpenny, Inferpound. I've gotten into this thing and so now I'm doing some revamping and stuff like that. More importantly, we are a boutique, what they call a boutique consulting company, where we have a very, you know, we have a niche that we work with and it is you. You are a customer. We sit there, sit down with you, talk to you about the business, how your business works, what's your secret sauce, what are the special things, the things that make you unique, and then we craft a unique recipe for your technology, for your plans going forward. Now that may include and often does simplification, integration, automation, innovation. We take that technology sprawl that you have in that big, sometimes very scary investment amount that you put into technology, both for the services, the systems and the teams, and help you craft a roadmap for moving forward so that you are in a great position today and in the months and years ahead to make the most to leverage the ROI that you get on your investment in technology. Good things, bad things. This time around, a good thing is that, and these are again sort of related, good thing is that we decided that because we're in a sort of new part of town, we would go to a new place that is a, it's a Japanese hot pot restaurant, basically, is what it is. And so brand new to us, I had never been at anything like this. Wife had been, I think to a couple of similar, but not this particular one, turned out to be perfect. It was a nice lengthy hanging out, chill, have a little sake, have a bunch of different lots of different food and just sort of cook it as you go. We have a little hibachi kind of grill there so we can throw stuff on there. And then we had our hot pot steam stuff. Awesome. Great place. I'll even throw out the name. It's called Shibu Shibu. So if you were ever in Nashville, check them out. It's a really good place. You could say I sent them and they'll be, who the hell is he? So actually they'll say that in Japanese and unless you understand it, you won't know that. They'll just probably say, thank you very much for inviting, for letting us know about him. Oh, so the downside to that before I get too much off the rails, see, there's like a theme going here is that part of the reason that we went was, well, one, it was Senko de Mayo and we did not want to go anywhere Mexican because it was going to be a madhouse. Part of the reason that it actually worked out pretty well is that the bad thing is that work has been going later and later and later for quite a while now. It's just one of those things. The workday didn't end until, I don't know, seven o'clock at night, something like that after actually a fairly early start. And so, you know, those things are just like, that's the bad part about it. It's sort of good when you end up, you know, getting projects done and making money and all that kind of fun stuff. But it's sort of, you know, it's sort of rough when you have to like jam all your, you know, your dinner and fun time together in a very short period of time before you're like, all right, I got to go bed, go to sleep, get up and rinse and repeat. Just like we do every episode, we are going to rinse and repeat. I do an introduction and then Michael is now going to introduce himself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mollash. I'm also one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developerner. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we build software tailored to meet the unique needs of health care professionals and small to mid-size e-commerce businesses. We do this through similar practices like Rob mentioned, through automation, innovation. But we also take a look from the lens of a QA, from the user. We walk through your business and help understand how it works and if your software is working for you. If not, we can build you a tailored solution or find something that fits the needs of your business. Good thing, bad thing. It's kind of a mixed bag this week. It's both good and bad. I'll start with the bad. So the bad, I have been overwhelmed with work, which is kind of good, but a little bad because like Rob working many early to late nights and kind of got stuck on. Sorry, kind of got stuck on a ticket, kind of got stuck in my head and kind of goes to the topic we're going to be talking about today. You know, kind of went off the rails. But with that came the light. I've actually made a lot of improvements, got really focused and have been knocking things out. Wow, it is off the rails all over. I forgot I was, I did not realize I was on mute, but it was not a very incredibly good piece of wisdom I was sharing anyways. So speaking of off the rails, we want to talk and let's roll this back a little bit and talk about what is off the rails. It can mean a lot of different stuff. And what we're going to sort of focus on this time is what happens when you get essentially overwhelmed. There's too much chaos, too many things going on a little bit, maybe getting in a rut, but it's a little bit more of like, it's closer to like the spinning your wheels kind of thing of like where you just feel like you're working your butt off and you're just not making progress. Sometimes it's just like going into pure firefighting mode. A lot of times that's what we end up doing. And it's we're going to talk about why that is not the way to handle it. Now, let's like dissect this a little bit because that's where we're going to come to the solution for this, or at least the recommendation we have. If you don't like it, feel free to pick your own because these situations pop up on a regular enough basis. That's just part of owning a business that's part of doing development is, you know, things will go really good. And then there's always some little, you know, sand in the Vaseline or whatever it is. There's a monkey ranch. There's something out there that turns our smooth running machine organization processes into something that is not so much. Now, usually the problem is in the overwhelm and the chaos kind of thing is that it's usually it's just it's more than we can handle. I mean, that's typically when we feel like we're drowning, it's because we have too many things going on. Or I guess it could be you don't have a lot going on, but the things are not, there's no progress being made on it. But again, that goes back to usually that's because you're not able to focus either on the problem or maybe on the project or whatever it happens to be. So on the in the simplest form, what is happening is we just have too much. You know, if we've got a consumption rate of, you know, let's just pick a number. If we've got a consumption rate of like one per minute and we're getting something each minute, then we're going to be fine. But now if we're suddenly having two incoming per minute and we can only consume one per minute, well, we're going to end up getting overwhelmed. And so that's why, as I said earlier, the OK, I'm just going to try to get everything done actually doesn't work and actually makes things worse. It's almost a panic response because what happens is we're saying we're getting overwhelmed, we're getting too much stuff coming at us. And so we're going to try to address everything to reduce it. And that's really not going to help us because we're going to end up doing is we're going to spread our our focus basically. And now that usually what's going to happen is that if we were consuming one a minute, now we're going to go to one every two minutes or something like that, because we're now having to deal with like the cost of switching gears, of sort of setting one thing down and picking something else up. It really does. It brings to mind the so you may not remember this, but it would be the old Lucille ball situation where they're sitting there and they're trying to like, you know, put basically put frosting on cookies and they start coming and there's more and more and more. The next thing you know, it's just complete chaos. That's sort of what we run into. And I think a lot of the times what it is, is that we and this is going to get to a little bit to the solution is that we we put ourselves in a situation where there's too many inputs. There are too many things that we're allowing to get on our radar. There's a you know, there's a classic if you go back and I think he still does it. John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneurs on Fire talks about focus. One I think it is basically it's focused on one thing until that thing is done and then you move on to the next thing. And that will allow us actually to move more quickly through whatever it is we need to move through. Now, granted, this is the thing where I think you have to like, you have to just accept that life is life sometimes. Granted that if you're getting overwhelmed, there may be something because you focus on this one to get it done. There may be something else that now has moved on or is lost or broken or something like that because you weren't able to focus on that as well, which usually we're going to say, crud, I should have focused on that. But the thing is, is that when you try to focus on everything, you have enough focusing on nothing, nothing gets complete. And now instead of one thing going by, everything goes by. And that is how we're going to find a way to get to the to organizing our chaos. But before I get any further than that, we're going to take Mr. Organized Chaos himself, Michael, and what are some of your thoughts on this? So I'll start out with an old TV show, Lucy and the chocolate conveyor belt where the chocolates came out and she had to start stuffing them down her shirt and everything because they were coming out so fast she couldn't box them. That is definitely a good example of off the rails. Typically off the rails, it can come in waves. Usually this isn't something that just happens overnight. If natural disaster happens or something is literally on fire. But as Rob mentioned, typically what happens when we're off the rails is we've got too much on our plate. We have too much to focus on. We're being pulled in too many directions. One of the traps that I constantly run into and I hear other people say it a lot. They're like, oh, I'm great at multitasking. So that could be a true statement if those tasks are small tasks that only need like a minute or two to do and you can easily change focus on. But typically when you multitask, if you're trying to multitask on two heavily complex projects or complex problems, it's not going to be easy. You could be spending an hour on one project. You shift to another. You may have to spend five, 10 minutes to get back up to speed and vice versa. So multitasking has a high cost to it if you're dealing with large or complex tasks. One of the other things that is interesting with off the rails and typically a lot of us don't notice it until we're deep into it. But one of the things I run into is when I have too many things to focus on my mind. While I'm working on a task is starting to drift to those other tasks. Oh, is this more important? Oh, is this more important? Am I really on task for what I need to do? And it gets frustrating. It gets really struggling. And sometimes you don't know for like a day or two if you are stuck doing this or you could be weeks into this and you are like really off the rails and you've got so many things on fire, you don't know where to begin. If you are a business owner, this can be devastating to your business because you could have very angry customers. Projects could not be getting complete. You could be missing deadlines or it could just be costing you money. You could actually unintentionally because you're off the rails, you could have your developers or your employees off the rails. You could be assigning tasks that don't need to be worked on right now and you're basically getting them off task. You're basically having them work on things that they don't need to be working on. So before I get into some solutions or my ideas for how to handle this, what are some of yours, Rob? Let me pass this one back to you and we can kind of bounce this one back and forth. I think there's the overwhelm definitely comes from a business point of view. I think as you said that sometimes you're I guess I'll just point it this way. I think sometimes it sneaks up on you. I think it is. It's one of those. And especially as a business owner, I think this is where our biggest danger is essentially is because we sort of have things going, you know, going along roughly smoothly. But what happens is typically now we're like, for example, let's say we're on a steady growth plane for our company. So we're we're doing a little more business, a little more products, a little more service, whatever your you know, whatever it is that you do, you're getting more and more of it. And there's a certain point where there's there's always going to be like a chunk, like a gear change or something like that within a business. It's usually things like you get to a certain point and then you need to hire somebody else or bring on a service or offset some stuff in some way, form or fashion so you can continue to grow. And that's I think that's one of the more dangerous things that we can have as a business owner is that we are we're going along and it feels right because we're growing. We're doing a little better. We're you know, it could be like, for example, let's say you're you started out and your business kept you busy 20 hours a week and then 22 hours a week and then 24 hours a week and then 30 hours a week and then 35. And then the next thing you know, sort of, and I'll put that in quotes, the next thing you know is that you're now working 100 hours a week. Now it's not a big change from what you were doing last week or the week before or the week before that. And this goes to where Michael's comments sort of like where your comment really reminded me of or triggered that to me. A lot of times that's what it is, is that you you sort of drift almost into this mode because you're getting more and more you're getting and you're sort of doing it. But then I don't think we realize that it's like it's essentially costing us more that we are maybe don't have as much time to refresh. We're not as you know, have the same energy. We don't have the same resource or something like that. We're starting to drain our resource pool. It's almost like you think about it literally like a pool. If you're pouring water in one end and it's sucking out on the other, it's fine unless you suddenly are pouring a lot more water in. And the next thing you know, it's flooding and going over. And so I think that's a having a sort of like a pulse or a heartbeat check or a sanity check or something like that of like, OK, how am I doing on a regular basis is one of the things that we can look at as a way to sort of avoid it. I think along the lines of the getting things done, the GTD approach where he says, you know, every week you come in, basically it's every week. You have a little bit of time or you look at your week. What did you get done? What do you want to get done next week? Things like that. That kind of a weekly check in allows you to maintain some perspective on what am I doing? Is this more than I did last week? Is it less? And in either case, is this now trending towards something that I need to be concerned about? What do you think about that? Yeah, that's a very good point, because especially our energy, everyone's energy is different. And as we start stretching ourselves thin or we work more hours, those anything little that detracts from that means we got to work more. So like you said, we have less energy and that happens a lot. You know, for a while you can chug that caffeine and you're good. But after a certain point, too much caffeine in your body is not a good thing. I can attest to that. I'm almost off caffeine completely now because I've abused it for too many years. One of the things when I figure out that I'm in that firefighting mode or when I'm overwhelmed, sometimes you don't see it. Sometimes someone has to point it out to you. It's like, hey, you know, are you all right? Or are you getting things done? Or you need to just stop and say, pick one thing, get it done. It might not be the right thing, but it's something. Typically what I like to do in these or what I try to do in these situations is I'll stick, go back to my little list, because usually when I'm off the rails, I'm not doing my list. I'm dealing with emails, dealing with tickets, dealing with whatever is in front of me not sticking to my list. And that's the first thing I'll do. The second thing I'll do, which I've done recently again, is turn off all the distractions. Turn on those Do Not Disturb apps, turn off the apps, turn off your phone. Sometimes even when things are on fire, you have to do that. You have to pick a lane and pick a communication point. If you have a business and you have a customer that is unhappy, they have your phone number. They can pick up the phone and call you. Your phone, in that situation, your phone is your only tool that you are going to use as a distraction. If they call you, you answer to the customer, see if you can address the problem now, get them off, finish the task that you're on. Try not to task creep. The other thing I've really had to do recently is I've literally turned off email. I've turned everything, I won't even open these apps anymore. They are off for the next few days till I get caught up on things because I've had so many things going on. I'm running to a deadline and something's not getting done. I'm putting all my time and effort to that one thing and nothing else. I've turned off music, I've turned off anything that could potentially be a distraction. Unfortunately, I can't mute my dogs, but I've muted everything else possible and basically created a quiet place to work. For some people, quiet isn't a good thing. Quiet can actually be a distraction because your thoughts will drive you nuts. You could be one of those overthinkers, which leads to this kind of overthinking, critical, off the rails kind of issue as I go off the rails here. It's one of those things though that you do have to be cautious of. All I can say is look at your environment. Eliminate anything that is a distraction. If literally you've got a big monitor and you have a lot of things open, pull out your laptop if you have a laptop, go back to your laptop and that forces you to a smaller screen to have fewer things open, fewer things up and then that will force you to work on what you need to be worked on or at least what's in front of you. And those are just some of the suggestions I have. The other thing is get some sleep. When we get off the rails, I find this personally, sleep becomes a problem. Even if I do get eight hours of sleep, I'm still thinking about work in my sleep. That is another strong indicator that you are off the rails, overworked, overwhelmed or you have too many tasks because if you're thinking about when you're sleeping, you're definitely task-creeped. You have too much on your plate. Eliminate and reset. What are your thoughts on that, Rob? I think that's really what it is. Think of it as like a car that's been revved too far because that's sort of what you're doing is you've gone beyond your redlining yourself essentially. And so if you're in a car that's overheating or something like that, one of the things you do is you reduce the speed, maybe take your foot off the gas for a while, let it coast, let it cool, things like that. And that's really what we can do as well is instead of pushing harder to get more done, sometimes it's going to be better. It seems counterintuitive, but it is actually better to cut back a little bit, go back to more sane schedule and then focus on one thing and get it done. It's like the evil villains often you'll see in a movie where they make the hero choose between one or another. And usually what would happen is if you... Some of the movies, the hero manages to get them both anyways and everything's good. A lot of times they choose one and the other one is a loss. But if you try to do both, usually you're going to end up losing both. And so it's hard to accept that loss, but sometimes you need to take the L and move on. Take the loss. Okay, I'm not going to get that done. And then now I can focus though, but I've freed that up so I can focus on the things that should be more important. You're going to take your high priority is not what you're going to give up. Your lower priority things are the things that you push out of the way. And that is sort of a little bit to Michael's no distractions. It's like finding a way to take the things that are starting to suck up too much of your time and to find a way to simplify those down, reduce those so that now you can focus on what you need to focus on, get a completion, get a win. Usually you're going to get a little bit of an energy boost because it's like, hey, I got that thing done. And now you can move on to whatever your next thing is, which is different from, I worked a little on two things. Yeah, I made some progress, but neither one of them is done. So now it's actually a negative because I didn't get it done. And now I'm worrying about it yet another day. And this goes to things like that affects your health and things like sleep because you're going to end up worrying about it. Now you wake up in the middle of the night. You're like, all right, got to get up, got to work on this thing. And so now you're working when you're already tired, you're not very productive and you're not getting any sleep. So you're just, you're choosing that's bad decision after bad decision after bad decision in this place. Now solution wise, like I said, it comes down to simplify is it's and Michael probably gave us the easiest simplest solution is let's get back to a list. What am I going to get done? And you could start this today, tomorrow. If you're overwhelmed right now, you could get up tomorrow morning and say, okay, I'm not going to worry about everything. That's like overwhelming me. Those are problems for another day. I'm going to figure out what can I get done today or what do I want to focus on today? Then you build a list and it needs to be reasonable. Don't put 4,000 items on your list. Make something that like, you know, you can, you can basically get it done in whatever normal day was. I would actually say if you're being overwhelmed, actually go a little shorter, be much more pessimistic. If you think you can normally get four things done, don't go beyond three things on your list. And this goes back to the whole, we've talked about this before the eat the frog approach is take the thing that is the one you really don't want to do, but need to get done. Maybe it's the one that's most scary and put that at the top of your list. Go to that one first, focus on something you don't want to do first, because now you get even extra bonuses because when you're done, you could say, at least I'm done with that thing. I just, that was scaring me that I didn't want to do. And a lot of times too, if there was some sort of an overthinking or anxiety around it, you get done here. Like, oh, it really wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Now it could be sorry, life psych that sometimes, but sometimes it's not. And a lot of times actually it's not because we make things bigger than in our head than they usually are. So once you get that done, now you've got like that extra bonus of I got something done. I got something I don't want to do off my plate. And now I get to go on to something that I do want to do. You may even want to do like a little alternating thing is take something you really don't like on the list and then go to something you really want to do on a list and then something you don't like keeping it short, of course, but focusing on, I want to just like get through my, you know, this is a list I'm going to do. And the first couple of times you do it, you get to the end of your day or you get to the end of that list. Stop. Don't keep going. Don't add to the list. Don't keep, you know, piling in. Now, I guess if you knock all your items out in five minutes and you've got a whole day, fine, add three or four more. But you want to keep it simple. You want to keep it so that you have bandwidth to, to, to work with this stuff. Now that you have some time to think, you have some time to regenerate. You have some time to relax. The challenge this time around is wherever you're at, do it and do like a quick assessment, do something along the lines of how am I feeling? Where am I at? Check in with yourself. How were you last week? Maybe even do like a little journal, little notes, something like that and then say, okay, well, here's how I feel this week. So that you can then next week compare and give yourself sort of a running tally of how am I doing? How are things going? Did I, were my days longer? Were they shorter? You know, things like that. There's a lot of things that can come into play that can wear you down. And I think doing this check-in will help you quite a bit. Another thing that will help you quite a bit and give you all sorts of endorphin rushes is to send us an email at info at developernoor.com. You can also check us out on x at developer noor Facebook. We have a developer page developer noor.com. We've got tons and tons and tons of content. We have a back catalog of all of our blog episodes. You can check us out on the developer channel on YouTube and we've got years and hundreds of episodes of that as well between podcast episodes, interviews, mentor sessions, training sessions. We got a lot of stuff out there. 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 next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the developer noor 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.