Daily Forward Momentum: A Simple System to Break Plateaus

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are starting a new season. This is season 27. Bente Sete. And apologies if you don't understand that because I speak bad languages. I don't even speak English well, but this is Building Better Developers. This is a Developer podcast. This season we're going to talk about really it's about getting unstuck. It's about forward momentum. It's about moving towards your goals and getting yourself closer tomorrow than you were today to where you want to be. The first I need to introduce myself. My name is Rob Redhead. I'm one of the founders of Developer. Also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you leverage technology so that your business can work more smoothly. That includes AI now because everybody wants to know how do I use AI? Well, we can help you assess where you're at and where to go with it. Good things and bad things. Good thing is in the pre-show and the green room, I was able to figure out how to fix my camera that was auto adjusting on me and doing things that I really didn't want it to do. Why people add new features and automatically turn them on is really annoying to me. That should be a lesson to those of you that are developers. Good thing, bad thing is it really is not. There's not a bad thing. My life is going so well right now. I've gotten through a week of being the digital nomad. I've gotten a lot of stuff done. I'm very happy camper and here I am to kick off another season. I didn't even know this was going to make past 20 episodes when we started this and now we're almost a thousand episodes. We're 27 seasons in including some really long honking seasons along the way and we've got a lot to look forward to. So let's get moving on it as Michael introduces himself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Mulatch. I'm one of the co-founders of developer building better developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we create and test custom software that solves real problems. That way your business can run better and scale smarter. Good thing, bad thing. We finally got rain. We've gone a couple weeks without rain and things were getting a little dry. Granted we're in winter and that but we still need rain occasionally to keep things growing. Bad thing, not too much bad. Just we're good actually. I'm getting resetting and working on the business more and getting things growing. And that's a really good segue into our season here and what we're going to talk about. Everybody's got a I got stuck. It's like I was the old behind the music where there was always like every rock group was always like it was great and then they had the drug years or alcohol or something and then they came back. Every business is like that where it's like I was going good and then I got stuck and then I got unstuck and then I moved forward. And that's like that's part of it as you we always call it stuck but a lot of times I prefer to call it plateauing because that's really what it is. You grow to a certain point you get to a certain point where you're like okay I've made some progress and now I'm not progressing anymore. Now I'm back to where I'm like I feel like I'm not necessarily like in a rut but I'm also not growing. And so you've plateaued and now you say you're stuck. And so how do I move on to that next level. So it may be just getting started and getting that forward momentum but it may be where the forward momentum is not doing what we think it is is that it's like I'm not getting the results that I want. So how do I instead of just insanity of repeating the same thing and hoping for a different solution or different outcome how do I do things different so I can change it up and I can get moving forward again. Everybody has that story and I think we're going to see a lot of good ways to think outside of the box. Sometimes it's going to be literally thinking inside the box. For my example I have iterated now multiple times over the last probably 20 years as I've been building actually I guess almost 30 years as I've been building this company and multiple companies that around it. Different times where it's like okay there's this growth period there's a building period there's the marketing period and trying to get all those things going the working in your business versus on your business and is really easy to get stuck working in your business especially when the paychecks are rolling through and all that and you're like this is great I just want to like milk this thing but everything comes to an end so you've got to make sure that you are working on growing your business otherwise you're never going to get where you need to. That's where we're getting started so I think we're going to have some great story it's going to be really a good story kind of season it's going to be the kind of thing like what is something that that you know a struggle that you had and you went through and I think we'll start with like you know Michael your thoughts on this season and maybe a struggle or something that maybe that you're working through right now that you're you're getting yourself unstuck with for example that you're like hey starting the new year and you know at least starting with some forward momentum. Sure so first of all for motion it's kind of funny given our industry right given that we're developers and most startups a lot of developers like that high pace high intensity of starting the business it's like oh we're growing we're building it's building something new but then when we always seem to hit that wall or we start to get slow use and we start to lose focus when we get past that point when we get to oh I have to actually work on the business I have to actually do marketing I have to actually do the things to make this a business not just hey I'm building something all the excitement around that you start to lose that momentum because you lose that excitement because that's not exciting to you that is why you hire marketing people and things like that but when you're starting out you don't have that capacity you have to do it all yourself or at least enough of it to keep the business growing. So forward motion to me is trying to keep that excitement to keep that energy of hey I'm doing this I have an idea I'm going to make this work and keep that momentum keep that energy going and not let it die or not let it fizzle out. So getting started you know like we said our season is going to be focused on forward motion getting started on your goals so we're going to start focusing on goals so this year I have started resetting my goals to focus more on growing the business than just staying in the business because the last year and a half it's just been not a slog but I've just been stuck doing more working in the business writing code trying to get things accomplished getting projects across the finish line and I have not been able to stay focused more on getting new customers finding that next thing growing where am I going with the business you know am I in is my business still focused in the right lane and you know when I started this when I rebranded in vision QA I wanted to be more of a test driven automation company and like all companies we sometimes take the first few customers that we get and they may not be our ideal customer and I've run into a situation where I've been working on projects that are not my ideal customer so I'm kind of outside my comfort zone so my goal for this year is to kind of reset and try to get back into that forward motion of getting back into test automation building automated testable software for companies and help them grow yeah I think that is technology makes it really hard to stay focused because there's so many places we can go there's so many opportunities we have like oh yeah we can do that for you and we can do that for you but figuring out where it is and that's something that you know definitely have gone through that same growth over the years and actually RB consulting has evolved many times and particularly when it grew from just being a solopreneur kind of thing to now we've got employees and you know having a team and that kind of stuff changes it because now you've got like you can really put something behind your you know what you're doing you can do bigger projects you can do different projects but you also are it changes the stakes because now you have to make sure you've got people paid and stuff like that so it's yeah I think that is one of the things that is a great starting point is setting goals is having something and I actually I found that is really valuable this is why I talk about this so often is doing that regular momentum is doing like every day go spend 15 minutes or half an hour on your business and just moving something forward on it so that as you go through the week then maybe you've spent an hour maybe two hours on it and as you go through the month now you've spent like maybe the equivalent of a full day on it and you will find progress in it I think doing that allows you also bite sized chunks so you don't feel like you're in a like on a death march or you're in a slog where you're just like okay I've got an accomplishment I've so I have made progress I got this thing done and that thing done and honestly it's it has it is snowballed and I've done this with like automations with other pieces and so as some of those things get free and actually get to a point where I'm like okay that's actually complete I can actually set that aside for a little bit now now I have time freed up to go focus on the other thing and whatever the next thing is and then some of it is now swinging back around finally and and honestly and some of it is saying yeah I don't have time for it but it doesn't matter I have to make time for it I have to decide at some point I've got to decide that I'm going to take this thing and improve it I'm gonna add some processes around it I'm gonna automation around it I'm gonna turn into a product whatever the heck it is and I think that for me has been a big maybe not an epiphany or something like that but pretty darn close to it where I was like wow I can take huge sections of this stuff that I do and in dramatically increase my productivity because now stuff that was taking me an hour to do I can get done in five minutes and maybe not quite that much but sometimes it is and there have been more than a few things that I've said gosh I was I spend some time on I'm spending 15 minutes a day well you know it's over an hour a week but now when I automate it and it just ends up in a mailbox or whatever it needs to be that's an hour a week that I get back and now I can go put that somewhere else and so it's finding a way to use that snowball effect to get better and to improve and that's why it's so important to take that first step is like get started because if you're stuck if you're sitting there and you're thinking about it too much and you're trying to figure out where do I need to go you're not making forward momentum thoughts yeah and I almost think let's bring back challenges this season so I would like to throw out a challenge since we are starting a new season on forward momentum let's start by identify the tasks that you want to get accomplished that you haven't had time you've been stuck or you just don't think you can get it done write those down on a list and just start every week pick one put it on your to-do list every day try to move that forward do like five minutes ten minutes every day and then the end of the week assess how much you got accomplished and see if that helped if it didn't help then do you need to pivot or do you need to change but I think we all need to get in the habit of making sure that we are moving the dial forward and not just spinning our wheels and standing in place oh a hundred percent I think that is I actually this is something I did I guess I started back back about a year and a half ago maybe a year ago now I had several projects that had been they weren't really mothballed they were just shelved at the time and really were not it wasn't really touching or doing anything with them and I actually set it up and there was like seven of them I think there's seven things I was working on so every day of the week I had I would do 15 minutes on something that was it I was like and a lot of times it would go to a half hour but my goal was I just need to do 15 minutes a day and I was cycling through these things it was different technologies different apps different projects that alone was pretty cool because every day was something new was or something different so I was constantly like changing a little bit allowed me to have like a fresh perspective I don't necessarily recommend it to everybody because sometimes it was hard to remember where was I on this thing a week ago you've got to make sure you're very good at like tracking and writing down where was I at what's my next thing to do making sure that before you wrap up you know where you want to start the next time but in doing so I completed the you can see there's some apps out there on the developer site there was one came out of something to been in the back of my head for a long time that I finally said I'm just going to go tackle that the rewrite of of developer site I think has been sitting on my to-do list for three or four years particularly the the categorization of all of the the podcasts and and putting all those episodes into season so you get like one place you could go and see all of those to some extent and we'll add some more stuff as we're going with that but that was a huge one the rewrite of the rb consulting site was was part of what has come out of this these like 15 minute a day things and some of the apps that we've got are pretty darn you know if you can go try out the shorty the link shortener app we got was something that's just like actually that came out of frustration because everybody was raising their prices I'm like we're going to write our own and just be fine with it and then also the gosh all the apps we've got oh the the goals driven app was actually something that I was used it was like it was one of those like you know scratch your own itch it was like I want something that I can use to just track for myself and then I was like hey why don't we do it as something that's a social experiment of sort sort of like a kickstarter starter kind of approach and we'll see where that app goes but it was fun to get that kind of stuff out and it's again there's like those balls move forward the next thing you know it's like okay it's time to deploy something and that's where you need to get whether you can do it 15 minutes a day 30 minutes a day do it in an hour chunk on a weekend whatever it is get that ball moving forward and before you know it you are like you know you've gotten across the finish line now I would say probably don't start with seven if you're not comfortable doing this but I pick I would do no more than two with one but if you have a large list like rob do no more than two keep it to no more than two that way and maybe set a goal like rob said 15 minutes a day if you're sticking to one or two maybe do 30 minutes a day 15 minutes in the morning 15 minutes in the evening but still break it up but keep it keep your focus narrow stay focused keep something moving forward if you do too many you may not see enough for momentum and you might quit so again keep your focus narrow yeah very much so and that's what we've got looking forward to the the year ahead and the season ahead and actually funding let's see so this will put us yeah so we'll probably be almost halfway through the year by the time we wrap up this season and so we'll be looking to see what we get into season 28 when we get to that but first things first let's get our forward momentum and step into this next season really looking forward to it there are a lot of people we have lined up that are going to be really cool interviews I am going to throw some stuff out because I've failed to mention this for but I also am a podcast guest in a lot of places and I've had some really fun cool interviews a lot of great questions and some of those others there will be links out on the if you do to the about us page on develop an or I'm going to end up throwing that in there so you can see some of the other places that you can see you know your famous develop a newer host out there especially because there are just some really interesting conversations we had a lot of them around productivity and ai tools and some things like that that I think would be very valuable to everybody they've definitely helped me it's just having those conversations kind of stuff it's like you just got to learn how to ask the right question have the right conversation and suddenly things start to click in your in your head and next thing you know you're like moving ahead and that forward motion becomes that much easier that being said we're going to wrap this one up and before you know it we will be into the first episode of season 27 god this is crazy to me go out there to have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time bonus I can't find my mouse bonus material I'm not really like pumped about any bonus material right now because we just like covered some cool stuff and we're gonna just we'll save this we're gonna continue there will be sort of like in the interviews we're gonna continue with the bonus material being things like hey do you have one thing that you would tell your younger self or something along those lines to give you like just one extra golden nugget of knowledge because you've sat here and watched us on the youtube side so please continue to do that subscribe leave us comments leave us notes shoot us suggestions comments feedback of any sort because we would love to have it because we're here to do this for you and we will be back before you know it for now we're going to do something for us and go get some forward momentum on all of our projects and then we'll come back and help you with yours remember those challenges that's a great idea I think you know pick something and start doing it just 15 minutes a day this is a great time as we're starting a year to pick up one of those kind of habits and turn it into a habit of just working that product that project whatever it is every day have yourself a great one and we will talk to you next time this was sponsored by rb consulting your partner in building smarter scale to tech from startups to established teams rb consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward also sponsored by envision qa they help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most quality reliability and support you can count on find out more at envisionqa.com thanks for tuning in to the development of our podcast where we're all about building better developers and better careers I'd love to hear your thoughts your feedback so drop a note to info at developinewer.com be sure to subscribe on apple podcast youtube or wherever you listen and remember a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success keep learning keep growing and we'll see you in the next episode