Detailed Notes
In this episode of *Building Better Developers*, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche dive into what it means to be off the rails in business—and how to reset before burnout hits.
👉 Struggling with chaos, distraction, or burnout? 👉 Feeling stuck or stretched thin as a business owner or developer?
This episode delivers practical strategies to: ✅ Regain focus ✅ Simplify your workflow ✅ Eliminate distractions ✅ Reclaim your time and sanity
🎧 Full episode notes: https://develpreneur.com/off-the-rails-in-business 📺 More episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@develpreneur 📩 Contact us: [email protected]
🔔 Subscribe for weekly insights into business strategy, development, and personal growth.
00:00 – Pre-show 04:40 – Intro 09:55 – Off the Rails 27:50 – Weekly challenge 31:51 – Bonus Material
#OffTheRailsInBusiness #ProductivityTips #BuildingBetterDevelopers #FocusAndClarity
Transcript Text
[Music] All right. Well, there we hit record. You may or may not know. You probably do know because you're seeing this. And we will figure out what are we doing today. So, let's see. We got some ideas here. Did we we skipped the off the rails, right? We didn't do that one yet. How do you know things are off the rails? Read the room and um demo and feedback. So, no, we skipped that one. I threw a couple more out there. And we also had get uh getting valuable feedback. So, am I valuable feedback, right? Or we did just Oh, how to demo. Was that Yeah, we did have a demo and reading the room. Okay, so some ideas still got is am I off the rails, getting valuable feedback, self-doubt, uh, learn to overcome adversity and such, imposttor syndrome, never leaves, now what? Um, two new are kind of what I was facing this weekend. Yeah, I'm thinking be an interesting combo to do like maybe start with am I off the rails and then imposttor syndrome basically kind of off the rails is like a what are you thinking on that one because I could I could see that going a couple different directions. Uh well, your business is off the rails. Be it finances, you know, like maybe maybe it's your project, maybe it kind of goes around the idea of focus. It's like you're being like you're you're being pulled in too many different directions. You're not able to fully complete one and therefore like you're you're not touching everything. So things aren't working like things are in chaos. Okay. So, too much chaos and trying to figure out how to exist in that situation basically and how to get out of it. Yeah. Kind of like what we've talked about recently around tickets and stuff like that. How to like refocus, how to get back on track when you're off the rails. Okay. That a shot. So, let's see. So, I'm going to do So, we're going to do off the rails. That makes sense. Yeah. It's just one of those it could go so many different directions. I want to make sure we're sort of in the same thing. So, game imposter [Music] syndrome. Oh, let's see. All right. Sorry. No, that's fine. Like making myself some notes, thinking through what I'm gonna try to get ahead of myself a little bit here. I know that is like wrong. I should just do it all off the cuff, but uh All right. Get this off. I'm good. And also, I've like adjusted my little workspace now. So, like now I've got like I've pulled back a little bit more. I've got a a keyboard mouse thing instead of directly off the laptop. So, and then Natalie got a collapsing f uh it's a full keyboard that's a collapsible one and a mouse that's got a nice little like I don't know maybe eight inch wide like case. It almost looks like a um like you've seen the Steam Deck case or some of the hard shells they use for u the switches, something like that. It's just a nice little one and it's so far seems pretty good. I think she was going to use it for the first time tonight. So, see how that works for it. She decides she just go with her regular fullsize keyboard today. Nice. All right, got my SIP done. I think there we go. And we'll do a little three, two, one. Well, hello and welcome back. I'm going to do that again because you might not like how I did that for the edit. 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 Broadhead. one of the founders of building better developers developing our 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, in for penny, in for pound, 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're 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 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 and 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're 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, uh 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 uh it's a Japanese hot pot restaurant, basically is what it is. And so, brand new to us, had I had never been at anything like this. Uh wife had been, I think, to a couple similar, but not this particular one. turned out to be perfect. It was a nice lengthy hanging out, chill, have a little saki, have a bunch of different lots of different food and just sort of, you know, cook it as you go. We have a little uh habachi kind of grill there so we could throw stuff on there. And then we had our hot pot steam stuff. Awesome. Great place. Uh I'll even throw out the name. It's called Shaboo Shaboo. So if you were ever in Nashville, check them out. Uh it's a really good place. You could say I sent them and they'll be who the hell is he? So, uh, 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. Um, 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 Cinco de Mayo. We did not want to go anywhere Mexican because it was going to be a mad house. 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 work day didn't end until I don't know 7 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 to 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 EP uh introduction and then Michael is now going to introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Malashsh. I'm also one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as Developer. 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 that 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. And if it's not, we can build you a tailored solution or find something that fits the needs of your business. Good thing, bad thing. Uh it's kind of a mixed bag uh this week. Um it's both good and bad. Uh 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 [Music] Sorry. Kind of got stuck on a ticket. Got kind of got stuck in my head and kind of goes to the topic we're going to be talking about today. Uh, you know, kind of went off the rails. But with that came the light. Uh, 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 I 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 uh 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 like where you just feel like you're working your butt off and you're just not making progress. It's 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 like 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 wrench. there's something out there that turns our smooth running, you know, machine organization processes into something that is not so much. Now, usually the problem is uh 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 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 okay, 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 what we're going to end up doing is we're going to spread our our focus basically. And now that you 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's it really does. It brings to mind the some of you may not even remember this, but it would be the old Lucille Ball uh 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 there more and there more and then 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 again get to a little bit to the 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 uh John Lee Dumis entrepreneurs on fire talks about focus one um yeah I think it is uh basically it's focus 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 you know 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 end up focusing on nothing. Nothing gets complete. And now instead of one thing going by, everything goes by. And that is how we are 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 uh Lucy and the chocolate uh conveyor belt where the chocolates came out and she had to start stuffing them down her shirt and everything cuz 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 it can come in waves. Um usually this isn't something that just happens overnight. It can if natural disaster happens or you know something is literally on fire. But as Rob mentioned, you know, 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. Uh 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." Well, 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 5 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. Um, 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. It's like, "Oh, is this more important? Oh, is this more important? Am I really on task for what I need to do?" And 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 a um the overwhelm definitely comes to mind from a business point of view. I think as you as you said that sometimes you're I I guess I'll just point it this way. I think sometimes it sneaks up on you. I I think it is it's one of those and especially as a business owner. Um 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 lane 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 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, you know, 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 where 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 now then 22 hours a week and then 24 hours a week and then 30 hours a week and then 35 hour 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 comment sort of like where your comment really reminded me of or triggered that in me. It's like 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. uh we're not as you don't 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 of 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 it's flooding and o going over. And so I think that's a having a uh sort of like a pulse or a heart heartbeat check or a sanity check or something like that of like okay how am I doing on a regular basis is one of the things that we can look at as a way to to sort of avoid it. I I think along the lines of the 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. I that kind of a weekly check-in allows you to maintain some perspective on what am I doing? Is this 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, it'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, 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. Um, one of the things when I figure out that I'm in that firefighting mode or when I'm overwhelmed, um, 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. Um, turn, you know, turn on those do not disturb apps, turn off the apps, uh, turn off your phone. Um, 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 uh 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 like 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. So, 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. Now, for some people, you quiet isn't a good thing. Quiet can actually be a distraction because your thoughts will drive you nuts. you you could be one of those overthinkers which leads to this kind of overthinking critical uh off the rails kind of uh issue as I go off the rails here. Uh it it's one of those things though that you do have to be cautious of. So all I can say is look at your environment. Eliminate anything that is a distraction. If literally you have got a big uh 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. Um, when we get off the rails, I find this personally, uh, 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 creep. You have too much on your plate. eliminate and reset. What are your thoughts on that, Rob? I think that's that's really what it is is is think of it as like a car that's been revved too far. That's sort of because that's sort of what you're doing is you've gone beyond your you know, you're 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, you know, 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 is sometimes it's it's going to be better. It seems counterintuitive, but it's actually be better to cut back a little bit, go back to a more sane schedule and then focus on one thing and get it done. Now, it's like the, you know, the the evil villains often you'll see in a movie where they like make the hero choose between one or another. And usually what would happen is if you, you know, some of the movies the hero manages to get them both anyways and everything's good. Uh, a lot of times they, you know, 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 is, it's hard to accept that loss. But sometimes it's like 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, you know, 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, you know, to Michael's no distractions. is 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. You get a little bit of a, you know, 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 in 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 it affects your health and things like sleep because you're 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 plate. Now, solutionwise, like I said, it it comes down to simplify is it's and Michael probably gave us the I think 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. You know, 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 a 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. Get go to that one first. Focus on thing you don't want to do first because now you get even extra bonuses because when you're done, you get to say at least I'm done with that thing I that was scaring me that I didn't want to do. And a lot of times too, if there was some sort of a an overthinking or anxiety around it, you get done, you're like, "Oh, it really wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be." Now, it could be. Sorry. Life's like that sometimes, but sometimes it's not. And a lot of times, actually, it's not because we make things bigger than they 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 this is the 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 an 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 note, something like that, and 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 [email protected]. You can also check us out on xdevelopure Facebook. We have a developer page, developer.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. All right, bonus material. So, one of the things I thought of as we were wrapping up was we talked about, you know, what to do to try and reset to get off the rails. One of the things that I found was actually detrimental to helping me get off the rails was uh when I'm off work, when I put down work and step away, I'm still thinking about work, but it is compounded if I do things that are critical thinking or heavy thinking tasks after I've had a hard workday. Uh, for instance, uh, you know, it could be a hobby, it could be a book, it could be a TV show that's you you really get into it and you're stuck thinking about it when you're done watching it. Uh, I mean, it could be a video game. For me, I found I love rogike games and I found that playing the darkest dungeon when I am under a heavy load of work or a lot of tasks to do or if I'm off the rails, so to speak, or I'm working long hours, I found that it was actually stress inducing. It actually caused more stress on top of my already stressed out state, making things worse. So whatever you do when you are off the rails, when you're in this state of mind, try to find something that takes you out of that, that does not add to your current state of mind and keeping you kind of pressed down, keeping you thinking about work and, you know, making you multitask when you shouldn't. Make make sure that you just stay on task. Yeah, this is one where I'm going to I preach I'm preaching to myself here is uh along with that is get away get away from your work. Especially now as Michael said the notifications depending on where you're at. Like for myself, I've worked remote full-time remote for a long long time. And so work is always available to me. I could always sit down and I can always do work, which is sort of nice because you don't have a commute, but it sucks because then you can instantly be sucked back into work. I've had it happen way too many times. And that is where there are things like okay instead of sometimes it's like it's not necessarily the you know in the general scheme of things what you want to do but it'll be stuff like all right I'm going to actually go out to eat instead of eat at home because if I eat at home if I'm making dinner the next thing I know I'm going to be reading an email I'm going to burn something or I'm going to like take forever. You know it's there's a lot of stuff that can happen. Uh same kind of thing as like maybe entertainment stuff. So if you you know it's like they will say don't you know don't do stuff in your bedroom that's not related to sleep because it makes it harder to sleep. Same thing is don't have your fun like if you have a you know whatever like a you know a man dungeon or you know something like that or if you have a game room that also happens to be your work room you're going to end up flipping back and forth too much between them. You're going to be doing your games and the next thing you know you're going to be off of doing emails and doing your work. And it for me it's very challenging because a lot of the things I like to do are the same kinds of things that I get paid to do which is really cool except as Michael says you have to be careful because next thing you know you've been draining yourself everywhere and that one actually becomes even a little more insidious because you're doing stuff you like and the next thing you know you've just switched a little bit. So now you're not doing the stuff you like, you're doing the work stuff and you've managed to drift right back into the things that you don't need to be doing. So be very intentional about separating the work, the hard thing, whatever the thing is that's draining you from the things that you can go do to, you know, energize you. And a lot of times this is so like notifications, feel free to shut off all notifications because that is one of the things that I think more than anything will help you out. Um, I have done this. I've been going through I'm almost in of a 40-day digital fast essentially, which is obviously I'm like I'm like it'd be like a food fast where I'm still eating cheeseburgers daily almost, but it's like it's my version of it. But one of the things I've done, shut off all those notifications. It has made a world of difference. A simple thing I'll throw out here and then we'll wrap this one up because we could go all day on this. Um, is when I wherever I go, if I have to take my phone, you know, I'm like I'm one of those people. I don't have an alarm clock. Yes, I should go buy an alarm clock, but I don't have one. So, I use my phone to wake up. Uh, when I drive, I use use my phone for GPS and music and stuff like that. But what I've got, so I do wherever it is, I put my phone away so I can't see it. It's like in a drawer. It's like in a bag or something like that. So, it's not very accessible. And that includes like if I could, you know, if I'm walking around instead of carrying my phone in my wallet or my pocket, then maybe I'll throw it in my backpack or something like that to just put a little more distance between me and that thing that's going to distract me. If you've got a wearable of any sort, then that is probably the worst thing. Take your watch off, turn off notifications, whatever you need to do. Go to do not disturb. Those things will just drive you nuts. And the next thing you know, you're going to wake up in the middle of all night, and I've had this before before I got everything cleaned up on some of my notifications because, you know, some email came in that you really didn't care about. There's a junk mail that already, you don't even see it. It's already been moved on, but you got the notification and it woke you up before, you know, the systems took care of it. There's things like that. Just beware. And when you want to get a break, make sure that you do everything in your power to ensure that you will get a break. Right now, we're going to ensure that you will get a break from us because we're going to wrap this episode up. As always, we would love to hear your feedback wherever you give it to us, whether it's out on the podcast, wherever you consume podcast, if it's out on YouTube, if it's out on the developer site, uh social media, however you can reach us, we would love to hear from you. Suggestions, comments, jokes, you name it, we will take it, we will digest it, and we will find a way to use it to build a better podcast. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great one and we will talk to you next time. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
All
right. Well, there we hit record. You
may or may not know. You probably do
know because you're seeing
this. And we will figure out what are we
doing today. So, let's see. We got some
ideas here.
Did we we skipped the off the rails,
right? We didn't do that one yet. How do
you know things are off the rails? Read
the
room and
um demo and feedback. So, no, we skipped
that
one. I threw a couple more out there.
And we also had get uh getting valuable
feedback. So, am I valuable feedback,
right? Or we did just Oh, how to demo.
Was that Yeah, we did have a demo and
reading the room.
Okay, so some ideas still got is am I
off the rails, getting valuable
feedback, self-doubt,
uh, learn to overcome adversity and
such, imposttor syndrome, never leaves,
now what?
Um, two new are kind of what I was
facing this weekend.
Yeah, I'm
thinking be an interesting combo to do
like maybe start with am I off the
rails and then imposttor syndrome
basically kind of off the rails is like
a what are you thinking on that one
because I could I could see that going a
couple different directions. Uh well,
your business is off the rails. Be it
finances, you know,
like maybe maybe it's your project,
maybe it kind of goes around the idea of
focus. It's like you're being like
you're you're being pulled in too many
different directions. You're not able to
fully complete one and therefore like
you're you're not touching everything.
So things aren't working like things are
in chaos. Okay. So, too much chaos and
trying to figure out how to exist in
that situation basically and how to get
out of it. Yeah. Kind of like what we've
talked about recently around tickets and
stuff like that. How to like refocus,
how to get back on track when you're off
the rails.
Okay. That a shot. So, let's see. So,
I'm going to do So, we're going to do
off the rails.
That makes sense.
Yeah. It's just one of those it could go
so many different directions. I want to
make sure we're sort of in the same
thing. So, game imposter
[Music]
syndrome. Oh, let's see.
All right. Sorry. No, that's fine. Like
making myself some notes, thinking
through what I'm gonna try to get ahead
of myself a little bit here. I know that
is like wrong. I should
just do it all off the cuff, but uh All
right. Get this off. I'm good. And also,
I've like adjusted my little workspace
now. So, like now I've got like I've
pulled back a little bit more. I've got
a a keyboard mouse thing instead of
directly off the laptop.
So, and then Natalie got a collapsing f
uh it's a full keyboard that's a
collapsible one and a mouse that's got a
nice little
like I don't know maybe eight inch wide
like case. It almost looks like a um
like you've seen the Steam Deck case or
some of the hard shells they use for u
the switches, something like that. It's
just a nice little one and it's so far
seems pretty good. I think she was going
to use it for the first time tonight.
So, see how that works for it. She
decides she just go with her regular
fullsize keyboard today. Nice.
All right, got my SIP
done. I think there we go. And we'll do
a little three, two, one. Well, hello
and welcome back. I'm going to do that
again because you might not like how I
did that for the edit. 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 Broadhead. one of the founders
of building better developers developing
our 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, in for penny, in for
pound, 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're 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 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 and 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're 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, uh 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 uh it's a Japanese hot pot
restaurant, basically is what it is. And
so, brand new to us, had I had never
been at anything like this. Uh wife had
been, I think, to a couple similar, but
not this particular one. turned out to
be perfect. It was a nice lengthy
hanging out, chill, have a little saki,
have a bunch of different lots of
different food and just sort of, you
know, cook it as you go. We have a
little uh habachi kind of grill there so
we could throw stuff on there. And then
we had our hot pot steam stuff. Awesome.
Great place. Uh I'll even throw out the
name. It's called Shaboo Shaboo. So if
you were ever in Nashville, check them
out. Uh it's a really good place. You
could say I sent them and they'll be who
the hell is he? So, uh, 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. Um, 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 Cinco de
Mayo. We did not want to go anywhere
Mexican because it was going to be a mad
house.
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
work day didn't end until I don't know 7
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 to 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 EP uh introduction and then Michael
is now going to introduce himself. Hey
everyone, my name is Michael Malashsh.
I'm also one of the co-founders of
Building Better Developers, also known
as Developer. 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 that 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. And if it's not, we can build
you a tailored solution or find
something that fits the needs of your
business. Good thing, bad thing. Uh it's
kind of a mixed bag uh this week. Um
it's both good and bad. Uh 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
[Music]
Sorry. Kind of got stuck on a ticket.
Got kind of got stuck in my head and
kind of goes to the topic we're going to
be talking about today. Uh, you know,
kind of went off the rails. But with
that came the light. Uh, 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 I 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 uh
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 like
where you just feel like you're working
your butt off and you're just not making
progress. It's 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 like 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 wrench. there's something out
there that turns our smooth running, you
know, machine organization processes
into something that is not so much. Now,
usually the problem is uh 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 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 okay, 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 what we're
going to end up doing is we're going to
spread our our focus basically. And now
that you 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's it really does.
It brings to mind the some of you may
not even remember this, but it would be
the old Lucille Ball uh 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 there more
and there more and then 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 again get
to a little bit to the 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 uh John Lee Dumis
entrepreneurs on fire talks about
focus one um yeah I think it is uh
basically it's focus 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 you know
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 end up
focusing on nothing. Nothing gets
complete. And now instead of one thing
going by, everything goes by. And that
is how we are 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
uh Lucy and the chocolate uh conveyor
belt where the chocolates came out and
she had to start stuffing them down her
shirt and everything cuz 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 it can come in waves. Um
usually this isn't something that just
happens overnight. It can if natural
disaster happens or you know something
is literally on fire. But as Rob
mentioned, you know,
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. Uh
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."
Well, 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
5 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. Um, 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.
It's like, "Oh, is this more important?
Oh, is this more important? Am I really
on task for what I need to do?" And 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 a um the overwhelm definitely
comes to mind from a business point of
view. I think as you as you said that
sometimes
you're I I guess I'll just point it this
way. I think sometimes it sneaks up on
you. I I think it is it's one of those
and especially as a business owner. Um 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 lane
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 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,
you know, 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 where 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 now then 22
hours a week and then 24 hours a week
and then 30 hours a week and then 35
hour 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 comment sort of like where
your comment really reminded me of or
triggered that in me. It's like 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. uh we're not as
you don't 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 of 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 it's flooding and o going over.
And so I think that's a having a uh sort
of like a pulse or a heart heartbeat
check or a sanity check or something
like that of like okay how am I doing on
a regular basis is one of the things
that we can look at as a way to to sort
of avoid it. I I think along the lines
of the 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. I that kind of a
weekly check-in allows you to maintain
some perspective on what am I doing? Is
this 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, it'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, 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. Um, one of the
things when I figure out that I'm in
that firefighting mode or when I'm
overwhelmed,
um, 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. Um, turn, you know, turn
on those do not disturb apps, turn off
the apps, uh, turn off your phone. Um,
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 uh
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 like 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. So, 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. Now, for some people, you
quiet isn't a good thing. Quiet can
actually be a distraction because your
thoughts will drive you nuts. you you
could be one of those overthinkers which
leads to this kind of overthinking
critical uh off the rails kind of uh
issue as I go off the rails here. Uh it
it's one of those things though that you
do have to be cautious of.
So all I can say is look at your
environment. Eliminate anything that is
a distraction.
If literally you have got a big
uh 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.
Um, when we get off the rails, I find
this personally, uh, 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 creep. You have too much
on your plate. eliminate and reset. What
are your thoughts on that, Rob?
I think that's that's really what it is
is
is think of it as like a car that's been
revved too far. That's sort of because
that's sort of what you're doing is
you've gone beyond your you know, you're
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, you know, 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 is
sometimes it's it's going to be better.
It seems counterintuitive, but it's
actually be better to cut back a little
bit, go back to a more sane schedule and
then focus on one thing and get it done.
Now, it's like the, you know, the the
evil villains often you'll see in a
movie where they like make the hero
choose between one or another. And
usually what would happen is if you, you
know, some of the movies the hero
manages to get them both anyways and
everything's good. Uh, a lot of times
they, you know, 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 is, it's hard to accept
that loss. But sometimes it's like 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,
you know, 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, you know, to Michael's
no distractions. is 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. You get a little
bit of a, you know, 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 in 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 it affects your health and things
like sleep because you're 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 plate.
Now, solutionwise, like I said, it it
comes down to simplify is it's and
Michael probably gave us the I think 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. You know, 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 a
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. Get go to that one
first. Focus on thing you don't want to
do first because now you get even extra
bonuses because when you're done, you
get to say at least I'm done with that
thing I that was scaring me that I
didn't want to do. And a lot of times
too, if there was some sort of a an
overthinking or anxiety around it, you
get done, you're like, "Oh, it really
wasn't as bad as I thought it was going
to be." Now, it could be. Sorry. Life's
like that sometimes, but sometimes it's
not. And a lot of times, actually, it's
not because we make things bigger than
they 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 this is the 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 an 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
note, something like that, and 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
[email protected]. You can also check
us out on
xdevelopure Facebook. We have a
developer page,
developer.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. All
right, bonus material.
So, one of the things I thought of as we
were wrapping up
was we talked about, you know, what to
do to try and reset to get off the
rails. One of the things that I found
was actually detrimental to helping me
get off the rails was
uh when I'm off work, when I put down
work and step away, I'm still thinking
about work, but it is compounded if I do
things that are critical thinking or
heavy thinking tasks after I've had a
hard workday. Uh, for instance, uh, you
know, it could be a hobby, it could be a
book, it could be a TV show that's you
you really get into it and you're stuck
thinking about it when you're done
watching it. Uh, I mean, it could be a
video game.
For me, I found I love rogike games and
I found that playing the darkest dungeon
when I am under a heavy load of work or
a lot of tasks to do or if I'm off the
rails, so to speak, or I'm working long
hours, I found that it was actually
stress inducing. It actually caused more
stress on top of my already stressed out
state, making things worse. So whatever
you do when you are off the rails, when
you're in this state of mind, try to
find something that takes you out of
that, that does not add to your current
state of mind and keeping you kind of
pressed down, keeping you thinking about
work and, you know, making
you multitask when you shouldn't. Make
make sure that you just stay on task.
Yeah, this is one where I'm going to I
preach I'm preaching to myself here is
uh along with that is get away get away
from your work. Especially now as
Michael said the
notifications depending on where you're
at. Like for myself, I've worked remote
full-time remote for a long long time.
And so work is always available to me. I
could always sit down and I can always
do work, which is sort of nice because
you don't have a commute, but it sucks
because then you can instantly be sucked
back into work. I've had it happen way
too many times. And that is where there
are things like okay instead of
sometimes it's like it's not necessarily
the you know in the general scheme of
things what you want to do but it'll be
stuff like all right I'm going to
actually go out to eat instead of eat at
home because if I eat at home if I'm
making dinner the next thing I know I'm
going to be reading an email I'm going
to burn something or I'm going to like
take forever. You know it's there's a
lot of stuff that can happen. Uh same
kind of thing as like maybe
entertainment stuff. So if you you know
it's like they will say don't you know
don't do stuff in your bedroom that's
not related to sleep because it makes it
harder to sleep. Same thing is don't
have your fun like if you have a you
know whatever like a you know a man
dungeon or you know something like that
or if you have a game room that also
happens to be your work room you're
going to end up flipping back and forth
too much between them. You're going to
be doing your games and the next thing
you know you're going to be off of doing
emails and doing your work. And it for
me it's very challenging because a lot
of the things I like to do are the same
kinds of things that I get paid to do
which is really cool except as Michael
says you have to be careful because next
thing you know you've been draining
yourself everywhere and that one
actually becomes even a little more
insidious because you're doing stuff you
like and the next thing you know you've
just switched a little bit. So now
you're not doing the stuff you like,
you're doing the work stuff and you've
managed to drift right back into the
things that you don't need to be doing.
So be very intentional
about separating the work, the hard
thing, whatever the thing is that's
draining you from the things that you
can go do to, you know, energize you.
And a lot of times this is so like
notifications, feel free to shut off all
notifications because that is one of the
things that I think more than anything
will help you out. Um, I have done this.
I've been going through I'm almost in of
a 40-day digital fast essentially, which
is obviously I'm like I'm like it'd be
like a food fast where I'm still eating
cheeseburgers daily almost, but it's
like it's my version of it. But one of
the things I've done, shut off all those
notifications. It has made a world of
difference. A simple thing I'll throw
out here and then we'll wrap this one up
because we could go all day on this. Um,
is when I wherever I go, if I have to
take my phone, you know, I'm like I'm
one of those people. I don't have an
alarm clock. Yes, I should go buy an
alarm clock, but I don't have one. So, I
use my phone to wake up. Uh, when I
drive, I use use my phone for GPS and
music and stuff like that. But what I've
got, so I do wherever it is, I put my
phone away so I can't see it. It's like
in a drawer. It's like in a bag or
something like that. So, it's not very
accessible. And that includes like if I
could, you know, if I'm walking around
instead of carrying my phone in my
wallet or my pocket, then maybe I'll
throw it in my backpack or something
like that to just put a little more
distance between me and that thing
that's going to distract me. If you've
got a wearable of any sort, then that is
probably the worst thing. Take your
watch off, turn off notifications,
whatever you need to do. Go to do not
disturb. Those things will just drive
you nuts. And the next thing you know,
you're going to wake up in the middle of
all night, and I've had this before
before I got everything cleaned up on
some of my notifications because, you
know, some email came in that you really
didn't care about. There's a junk mail
that already, you don't even see it.
It's already been moved on, but you got
the notification and it woke you up
before, you know, the systems took care
of it. There's things like that.
Just beware. And when you want to get a
break, make sure that you do everything
in your power to ensure that you will
get a break. Right now, we're going to
ensure that you will get a break from us
because we're going to wrap this episode
up. As always, we would love to hear
your feedback wherever you give it to
us, whether it's out on the podcast,
wherever you consume podcast, if it's
out on YouTube, if it's out on the
developer site, uh social media, however
you can reach us, we would love to hear
from you. Suggestions, comments, jokes,
you name it, we will take it, we will
digest it, and we will find a way to use
it to build a better podcast.
That being said, go out there and have
yourself a great one and we will talk to
you next time.
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