🚀 DevTernity 2019: Scott Hanselman – Scaling Yourself

[Music] hello my friends do me a favor that Mike's a little hot does that sound okay or is that a little loud perfect raise your hand if there is a seat next to you because these people want to stand against the wall we're programmers we can defragment can we not you know how to move the contiguous space you have two choices either you move the entire row over or you have these nice people do this excuse me pardon me excuse me pardon me pardon me excuse me oh sorry about your foot sorry me feed me see this is how we do it everywhere my friends so now we've learned something really interesting the people who have moved in to sit down are really interested in the talk and the people on the wall are looking for a reason to leave I'll be three or four slides in and they'll say I didn't like that meme and then they're gonna take off and they're gonna go and delete email or whatever they're doing thank you for doing that friends it makes it for a nicer for everyone else my name is Scott Hanselman you can go out and Google with Bing for Scott and check me out I've got a web site that I've been managing now for almost 20 years I want to make sure that everyone is paying attention right now so here's a picture of Darth Vader riding a cat there'll be regular check-ups to make sure that you're paying attention during the rest of the talk I'm super old I've been programming now this is on my 30th year so I was already doing it professionally when I was doing this which is great because it's such a joy for me to meet a programmer who has been alive as long as I've been programming and then I become old man who shakes fists at cloud when I was a boy we didn't have containers I only had a Palm Pilot and it didn't have internet I literally told a story a couple of days ago in Prague about the time that I drew a circle on a Palm Pilot without a math library I thought it was the most amazing most fascinating story that anyone had ever told anyone and one of the young people just said why why didn't you just use the circle function completely missing the point so I've been on the internet for a non-trivial amount of time and I've written about a lot of stuff I've developed somewhat of a reputation of being productive I don't know if it's a myth or not but it's a nice reputation if one is thought of as being somewhat production productive but most of the stuff that I write about is crap I've written about being a phony having impostor syndrome which is something that I think we don't talk about enough in technology there's so many people now with github graphs that are all green that every system is set to make us feel bad about not being productive and we don't talk about it honestly with our co-workers with our friends with our family we just feel sad and feel inadequate internally that we are somehow a phony so I just come out and say that I'm a phony I have no idea what I'm doing and I've been largely coasting on charm for 30 years if you can just own being a phony you feel a lot better I write about all kinds of things write about that I've written about working from home as a remote worker I even have a little light that tells my children that I'm working and then they can ignore it as you can see right there I've written about teaching kids how to program I even write about gardening but specifically how programmers garden which is sectioning things off by square foot and having an organized garden with little lines and strings because programmers like graph paper I've written about building arcade machines from scratch from older arcade machines I even wrote a Windows Phone app that I'm not very proud of I also wrote a a game called baby smash for babies yeah babies my babies now 14 it was as a problem he's gonna be driving in a year but baby smash is still out there it's not about smashing babies it's about someone was like baby smash I'm not really sure how I feel about that it's about smashing the keyboard and then the babies get to learn their characters and things like that it's open source and it's up on github you can check it out I've written a bunch of books that I'm not very proud of I'm working on a book that I'm still haven't got done yet it's called relationship hacks it's about being in a mixed marriage where one is a normal person and one is a geek so I'm working on that book I've also got a podcast you should check out this is the advertising portion of depth Randi listen to my podcast I've done over 712 episodes that is three hundred and fifty hours of technical talk every Thursday for 14 years I've got another podcast called this developers life I did one on pop culture called ratchet and the geek I did a two hour documentary called get involved in tech that you can get for free up on Pluralsight even if you don't have a plural side subscription oh that's a lot of stuff why did why did Scott just tell us about all these things that he does because I must dance I just enjoy it I don't none of these things are even my job like being here literally not my job I took a vacation day to hang out with you all because a lot of us did in fact the speaker's take vacation days because we enjoyed doing this we are overflowing with enthusiasm for software and hardware and open-source it just makes us so happy and I've worked an open-source you know for 20 years of the last 30 and I've worked at Microsoft now for 12 in open-source and when I went to Microsoft everyone said I was a sellout I hurt my feelings no you're an open-source person why are you going to go work for these people and it really I didn't know what to do about this I mean I had to like emotionally like to work through those feelings somehow I was able to feel better about myself once I made that decision but I hurt me this is a picture of me before Microsoft and here's a picture of me after Microsoft now I'm gonna give you some advice there's a special word that we have in English that we invented which is the word for someone who asks for advice but then does the opposite of what you say right there an now certainly the great thing about advice and an important thing for you the audience for you the young people to know is the great thing about advice is you don't have to take it you just take it and say that that advice is not for me so just like everything from our last speaker all the way to Kevin at the very beginning yesterday these are all wonderful nuggets of advice pieces of advice for you to put into your toolkit pick the ones that make you happy I'm gonna make a bunch of declarative statements when people make declarative statements they are most likely to be called a fool in retrospect and that's fine take the things that I say that you like use them and the ones you don't discard them happily because you're gonna find a system that works for you now there is an American actor named Paul Reiser who was on a famous TV show in America it doesn't matter and he started out by making a movie in the 80s called diner and this movie was very famous but he was stuck writing this movie for a very long time and he didn't understand how to get it going so he went and he asked some advice of another very old famous American actor who was on a show called Columbo and he said I would need some advice how do you write a movie script and he says you get some paper you put it in a typewriter you type fade in and then keep typing you would think that that would not be really useful advice I mean that's effectively like a Nike how do you start a marathon just do it but people don't understand that so much of life so much of productivity so much of happiness so much of coding so much of everything is simply showing up put the piece of paper into the thing you turn it and you say keep typing now of course it's 2020 almost this is the last month of the decade by the way enjoy that a bit of nightmare fuel and we're still thinking about carriage returns and line feeds and I'm making a typewriter reference I had another young person yesterday said what's a carriage why is it returning and why are we feeding it lines so I would encourage you to turn to the 20-something next to you and talk to him about the top carriage of the typewriter and how git and Windows and Mac still haven't got it together but we are really just doing carriage returns tinting line feed so let's talk about being productive and scaling yourself I know that there's been a lot of really great talks some have been soft talk some have been hard talks but they've all had computer science at their heart so how do you scale yourself well here's a computer science fact the less stuff that you do the more of it you can do in fact if you do nothing you can do it infinitely isn't that a great quote I'm gonna make that a quote there you go I just made that a quote it's a famous quote now from a famous person here's a chart that shows if you do nothing it's scales the throughput of nothing is infinite throughput it's fantastic so if you want to be productive the best thing that you can do is as little as possible saying no is the most powerful thing that you can do but it's overwhelming because the amount of information that the world has has changed there was a time when there was a finite amount of information and now our IP Google Google Reader everything in my life is just a badge that says a thousand plus I've peeked over some of your shoulders and some of you have like 30,000 emails on your iPhone and it's just like the number doesn't even matter anymore doesn't that hurt you right here don't you feel that like burrowing into your brain I don't even look at the numbers anymore just delete all the email then it doesn't matter if it says 1000 plus you're never gonna read it when I was developing software in the 80s and 90s there was no internet there was these two books and that was the sum total of all human information you got the Old Testament you got the New Testament you got him right there and if the information wasn't in those books and you're in your mom's basement well that's it those are the books that you have but now you've got all these different things to look at Plus Google and Stack Overflow and people largely agree that the information that they get is not valuable huge huge amounts of information and we have this information hanging in front of our faces and we don't even have the words to explain it there's a really great book called that should be a word that the Germans they just make a really long sentence put it together with no spaces and they call that a word so they would take this paragraph remove all the spaces and punctuation and just make it like you know schadenfreude at the thought it'll be a big long word but she is saying that we're in dire need of a word for that email you know that email the one that's in your inbox that's been there for months and you really need to give it your full attention but it's so important you don't really have time to think about it now so you just let it sit there for a while until it slowly moves down the screen and then it's on age two and then eventually it isn't important at all I just kind of like fades away what is the word for that email but we all have that email I've been putting off answering that email for months now I've got emails from March of 2018 I need to get to them because they're so very very important what are the danger signs that you're having trouble that you might be in a situation while you're gonna start missing deadlines you might feel like a failure and not want to talk about it your family might complain but here's the number one the number one thing that I see people doing whether they be a project manager or a programmer is they say I'm gonna work late just do a little work late to catch up it's a busy time it's a busy season October November December it's a very busy time I'm just gonna go to work at 8:00 I'll come home at 6:00 put the kids to bed say hi to my partner they go to sleep then I'm gonna work from 10:00 p.m. check a little email until 2:00 and then wake up the next morning and then do it again just you know just October November December kind of that January February March April kind of like just may june july august you know just kind of that September October just that kind of it's a busy season it's a busy time I hope things will be better though I hope that if I do this extra work things will be okay hope is not a strategy but you don't want to say anything to your boss because then your boss will know that you're a phony your boss will know that you don't know what you're doing that you're overwhelmed you're not in a healthy job or a healthy management structure where you can say I need help I need to drop some balls I need to do less people will tell you well you know Beyonce has the same number of hours in a day that you do well she also has a glam squad and a management team and a bunch of people that she what delegate stew I don't think that she's extra good at doing emails she probably doesn't even do email so there's a couple of words that I want to parse we may have heard these words from other speakers over the course of the day so I'm using the opportunity of this talk being the lock note that closes things out at the end to double click some of the great ideas that have been presented over the last couple of days here the first word that I'm gonna want to hit is called effectiveness now I do this talk all over the world and I do it in different languages and I've learned something that even as a native English speaker the difference between the word effectiveness or to be effective and the word efficient or efficiency is hard for an English speaker to kkuk scribe tell me the difference between effective and efficient so you go to Google Translate because we all know that that's a wonderful resource and it's totally accurate pick a bunch of different words and we say okay so here's the word I double-check this with a lap in that's effective Latvian cool close enough right good so when you're being effective you're doing right things like oh you're an effective worker yeah you know I'm setting targets I'm heading towards a goal I'm goal-oriented that's effective excellent now can I also be efficient let's look up what efficient and Latvian is oh it's the same word turns out this is the case in many many languages where these two very different concepts pull back into the same word and if you look at Russian they've got a word for effective and then they end up with just an acronym that describes a paragraph that describes a PhD paper that talks about the ratio of you know power over time little brother and they just say copy there and then they say oh yeah it's like efficiency no it's not like you're you don't have a word for that it's okay these are complicated concepts efficiency hello how's it going paparazzi it's constantly just all over Europe it's such a hassle efficiency is being processed oriented okay this is doing things in an economical way let's think about this in the context of a sprinter someone like Usain Bolt fastest man alive very efficient runner he picks a direction and he runs in that direction as fast as possible so that would be efficient being ineffective would be picking the wrong direction but still running really really well so we know that we can't go to Google Translate and solve these problems because it'll tell you that literally the words mean the same thing so here's Hanselman x' definition of these words being effective is doing right things correct things efficiency is doing things right see the difference pick a direction effective do it well efficient is this effective well it depends on your perspective he jumped the wrong way now there's a lot of information coming in at us we heard the word inbox in the last talk when we say inbox though it's a conceptual inbox I'm going to use the word inbox to not necessarily mean your literal email inbox your inbox is any piece of information that comes at you your inbox could be a piece of paper it could be ballet tickets that are physical for next year it could be a slack notification it could be the little red notification on your phone that you're ignoring that you say doesn't stress you out but it really does subconsciously stress you out because it is a reminder of your failure this information I'm not joking subconsciously you know that those little red badges are there and you need to declare email bankruptcy but you don't want to go and do that so you just sit on it forever these things need to be triaged triage is a great word I like the word triage now the the definition if you pull it back into the French means to sift to sort to separate to sift sifting is like when you take a sand and you sift it and then the gold stays at the hop in the sand comes down at the bottom but triage has a very specific very aggressive background when we say the word triage there's usually violence associated with it I think about it in the terms of a battlefield or like the zombie apocalypse this is a toe tag that you put on dead people here there's zoom in on the toe tag imagine you're on the battlefield and you've got a bunch of people that are various levels of zombie and you have to figure out are you okay are you okay walking wounded get off my battlefield serious okay we're gonna take care of you you're dead we're gonna put a toe tag on you get it done do it drop it delegate it defer it very aggressive because it's a battlefield we have things to do we're not going to be like how are you are you feeling okay at that leg that looks a little rough can we fix that no walking wounded get off my battlefield triage it means get it done so when we take the concept of getting it done we look at David Allen who we've invoked in previous talks and some of his ideas and they're getting it done philosophy he had this thing called the threefold nature of work there's three different kinds of work there's work that you defined ahead of time there is work that has appeared like surprise here's some work interrupted boom work but then there's a thing that we don't spend enough time doing and we've heard from different practitioners the last few days that you should be doing this you should be working on defining work when was the last time that you made an appointment with yourself to actually sit down and figure out what the hell you're doing like you tend to do that between meetings or at night you have these moments of panic like I don't know what I'm doing I mean let me write it down okay I feel kind of what's going on but very rarely do we see people putting appointments on their calendar with themselves to just figure it out to define the work project planning for one's self defining work is as important as predefined work now once we get a piece of work once it comes into our inbox into our life we can do it we heard about the two-minute rule do it if you can do it in two minutes just do it make the call send the text delete the email done then there's drop it so powerful we'll talk about that in a second just don't do it easiest thing you can do don't do it boom no work no problem you know how they always say no pain no gain I say no pain no pain but my exercise strategy for a while you can tell then you can delegate it this is a really hard thing a lot of programmers are control freaks we want to do things ourselves so it's difficult to say you do it but at the same time if you're building a team and you can't say you do it you're really saying I don't trust you to do this because I have control issues but scaling yourself is about not doing stuff which means giving it to someone else which means being a part of a team and then there's of course deferring it and deferring it is doing it later now if we take David Allen getting things done and then we take the concept of Stephen Covey's seven Habits of Highly Effective People he had the Covey quadrants and we overlay David Allen's ideas on top of Stephen Covey's we can come up with an interesting chart noticing that our y-axis here is importance important stuff is at the top the x-axis is urgency where really urgent stuff is in the upper left corner there so an example of urgent and important would be houses on fire and not urgent nor important would be anything on Twitter right very rarely will you see something on Twitter that would cause you to grab your bags your family and escape your home therefore nothing on Twitter is interesting useful or helpful or in any way makes you money so do it now urgent and important if it is not urgent but it is still important that's where your power is that's the quadrant where you want to spend some time you want to be sitting there thinking about important stuff that isn't currently on fire that's preparation that's project work don't be on Twitter don't be on social media this is a picture of a rat with a electro electrode into the brain of the pleasure center of the brain and if the rat just pulls on that little bar it will refresh the serotonin in the brain and it will give a sense of well-being to the rat it'll make the rat feel good about itself it'll improve the rats self-esteem just has to pull to refresh it gets that electrical stimulator and it feels good about itself just just pull to refresh and it says I'm okay pull-to-refresh things are gonna be alright people care about me I got more likes pull-to-refresh do you remember the story about Jesus when there was only one set of footprints that's when he unfollowed you on Twitter because there's too much happening in your Twitter Jesus unfollowed you now every good system every programming system the Internet itself tcp/ip were all set up to be communication fault-tolerant you can drop packets and still get your work done Skype would be a perfect example of that right any any cellphone call ever I have a pocket supercomputer and I can't make phone call without that and then what hear you but you still understood what I said and I dropped half the packets sometimes dropping the ball is the right answer unless you are a juggler of chainsaws and then don't drop the ball just to make sure that you're paying attention here is a man surfboarding on a crocodile in space and a golden LeMay outfit I don't know what movie that is but I want to see it now remember that thing I was talking about with those little red numbers on your emails telling you how many you have in the States we have this thing called a TiVo TIV oh it's a digital video recorder before you know after VCRs we get these digital things and before Netflix you would say the television show I want to watch is on Thursdays at 8:00 and in the old days for the young people we would actually go to the TV at 8:00 on Thursday and we watched the thing but then we got this digital video recorder that would record it on a hard drive and we just say I'm gonna see you know Criminal Minds or law and order and I would record the show and then I have this disk drive filled with it you might use Cody or torrents or whatever but suddenly what was a family appointment where we had a thing we would sit down with watch TV became this ever-growing queue this infinite list of shows that I will never watch what was originally I thought a gift from the technology gods you don't have to be there on Thursday at 8:00 you can watch it whenever there's five seasons of The Wire that I will never see but I can feel it here the the the personal failure you haven't watched the good place oh my god you have to watch the wire and and watch men and all these other shows you've never heard of and lost oh my god there's only 25 seasons of lost you have to watch lost and I would actually have conversations with my partner and I would say all right listen there's like nine episodes let's just put the kids to bed early you'll call in sick and we'll just binge we'll just watch we'll just get it done there will always be more television to watch the psychic weight of the television presses here the shows that I want to see the movies I want to see how can I solve that how can I get that away from my my brain I just let it go I thought about what was important and the way that I think about what's important is with my buddy JD Meyer at getting results.com calls the rule of three everybody's got lists in the old days I just had a file called to do dot text other people had a dot pland file now you all put it in mind maps and sync it to the clown and all that kind of stuff but know this we can't keep really more than two or three things in our brains at a time so why not keep three three things that you could do today tomorrow or Monday that would make you feel good that would make you feel accomplished because what happens now is you go to work you check your email you time travel to 2:00 in the afternoon you don't know how it happened you have an awkward lunch at your desk somewhere around 3:30 you start feeling yourself and you're like yeah I'm kind of oh I got to go home now and then you do it all again and you wonder why you suck and you don't talk to your friends your family about it you just feel like a failure and then you do it again and then there's the nervous laughter because it's funny cuz it's true so let's be honest with ourselves I want you to make a plan for three things you can do on Monday I want you to try to get two of them done before noon and which three things should you pick well this is up to you you could pick the most urgent things you could pick the things that are the most on fire but since we're just getting started on this technique what I want you to do is I want you to make the choice to pick things that will make you feel accomplished that you'll go yeah freaking did that thing at work set up that bill I got the CI CD working tests are passing and I did it before noon how awesome am i what you do is you roll into work on Monday with a vision with a plan three things a day three things for the week three things for the month three things for the year of widening scope then on Friday you reflect on the week did I get those things done if you didn't why not then you forgive yourself because every day every new day is a day that you can turn it around you can feel bad if you want to feel bad you want to beat up beat yourself up you can feel bad but you can also do a little tip that my mom gave me she said you should feel horrible this is my mom you should feel you screwed up and you suck and you need to feel awful about that for 15 minutes and she's shortened that speech too you feel bad set a timer seriously she says feel awful squish it all into fifteen minutes and then at the end of that you get over it and you do the next thing forgive yourself on Friday and then on Monday you try again and you pick three things and you make those things awesome now a lot of people think well you know I need to be busy you gotta be busy busy busy we all have these bosses or I'm too busy to have lunch with you or they have these people that we look up to and far too busy to have coffee right I'm sorry busy busy busy people who are busy are often intellectually lazy because it's indiscriminate action it's exciting to be busy it's exciting to delete email and I got a very important text hang on the human that's in front of me is not as important as this very important text I'm very busy lazy thinking and indiscriminate action people who have time for important things make that time if you don't have enough time you make time by doing less sometimes I'll hang out with my friends and they complain about how they have nothing to have that I've got all these things I got to do Wow all my life that why are you here why are you hanging out and then there's always that one friend who's not there and then a year later they'll pop up and they will have done something amazing some open-source projects some books some pamphlets and website and I'll be like wow that's where you were yeah it turns out that being creative is the opposite of hanging out how amazing is that they were being intentional they were doing deliberate practice they knew that doing the thing making the thing whatever it was that fed their spirit was more important than FOMO you know what FOMO is fear of missing out we were taught FOMO in school you didn't know it but you were taught this in kind of high school before University FOMO is when you're hanging out with your friends and you really need to go home and study but you have a fear of missing out because you're gonna go home and study and then the next day they're gonna be like oh dude or whatever they say in your part of Europe dude after you left the ghost of prints was there and they did like a whole concert was it me and you stick around hoping that this will be the time that that will happen and it never happens do you know about the marshmallow test it's a test that they give to little kids four years old five years old psychological test to see who is more likely to succeed they take a little four year old or five year old and they put them in a room and they say hello how are you and they put a marshmallow like a sweetie on the table and they say I'm gonna I'm gonna go if you can just watch my marshmallow don't eat it please and then when I get back in five minutes you can have two marshmallows but if you eat it then I'm not going to give you the other marshmallow and then they leave and then they have the video and the kids just sit there and they stare at the marshmallow and they're just like and then they follow up with these kids 20 years later and the kids that don't eat the marshmallow and get to afterwards end up doing better because they have some willpower and the the tale of this particular thing is kind of bad because it implies that we're born that way that willpower is a thing that we either have or we don't and I don't think that that's fair it implies that at four I can tell you if you're gonna be successful at 24 what I would propose is that you could teach the kids that it's a muscle we could teach the four-year-old by doing 30 seconds and then a minute and working up to the point where everyone can build up their willpower well but unfortunately we have things poking at us things that are keeping us from going to bed and getting a good lights a good night's sleep anybody ever argue with strangers on the Internet did anyone get a check afterwards maybe pay off their house or get a promotion from arguing with the stranger on the Internet no yeah that's what I thought let's talk about being efficient I got all these things in my life here's some homework this is a good thing to take a photograph of this is your homework I want you to take all of the things that come into your life your list will be different than my list and I want you to sort them valuable not valuable hi signal pine noise think about the things yours might be github issues JIRA tickets whatever doesn't matter which of these can be dropped are the noisy ones stressful why are they noisy do they have value to you why do you insist on doing that people bugging you on Twitter people bugging you on it quit Twitter mute those people someone calling you and bother you don't answer the phone block him block easy block often why would you let a stranger on the why would you let someone who doesn't love you ruin your day this is my list I work with community so phone calls and by phone I mean phone phone FaceTime whatsapp audio Skype anything in face-to-face I do this a lot I talk to people your list will be different work email I'll talk about how I chop those up and then my Tivo my television is low the reason that you sort this is because your life has moments of high stress and moments of low stress so what you need to do is decide where you're going to cut and every day is different the reason that we're not successful is that we don't make adjustments you might be really stressed on Tuesday but you still insist on doing your Twitter and doing your TV and doing all your personal email but if you're in a busy time I'm in a busy time right now I've done 11 talks in four countries in four days I'm not doing any personal email I'm not doing any of these things because I'm focused now I'll do them later so the water level will go up and then the water level will go down and what I'm is being intentional about it to be clear I like television I'm not saying don't do the things you like but I'm saying be conscious deliberate and intentional about the things that are providing you value at the moment and the things that will provide you value later and then build systems build up success systems to make this easier now we've all seen really exquisite and complicated to email rules that people build and they sort their email they see look at my system I've got 99 folders that I never really open and look at I have one email rule here's the rule stuff that goes to me goes into inbox stuff that's see seed goes in an inbox see seed because it's FYI now for the young people who've never seen carbon paper CC means carbon copy you go and look on Wikipedia what carbon paper is but crlf right what by doing that I took 240 emails and I put 2/3 of them in a separate inbox now you might say well hang on there's still 240 emails sure but I don't read inbox CC every day they look at it a couple times a week that cut my email down by 2/3 didn't change my job changed my stress level my feelings my perceived stress required minimal effort and I've only dropped a few balls now you might say well sometimes people that work will CC me on stuff and then I'm not gonna see it then yeah you probably won't and it probably won't get done and that will happen once and then you'll train that person you'll teach that person yeah CC me on stuff that's FYI for your information and then to me on other stuff and I go okay cool won't take long you teach people how to treat you now I work in community so I do a lot of external stuff I have a third inbox I lied that one is for external email notice that it's empty because people inside Microsoft are less important to me as people outside Microsoft I've answered all of those emails my community is more important than my internal people so those are answered and then I have a search folder for my bosses I say three up my boss my boss is boss her boss is boss three up and then I have big ass mail because I only have so much space so I delete like big attachments and stuff and plus it's funny to have ass in your in your email here's some homework for you I want you to try this on Monday don't check email in the morning you get to work don't check email instead think about your rule of three and do the thing that you want to do and what's gonna happen is it's gonna feel weird now if your job is email deleter like if that's your LinkedIn profile deletes email right project manager what are you doing I delete email mostly that's fine then delete your email but for the most part you are not emailed to leaders you don't look like an email deleting crowd but it'll happen though is you're not gonna waste ninety minutes or two hours or I don't know five hours messing around an email you're gonna be very awkward like I guess I actually have to work right now and then you're gonna get that done you're gonna feel so good by 10:30 or 11:00 you're gonna get that work done you're gonna go to lunch having already achieved and the people you go to lunch with are gonna be like I don't know where the time goes and you figured it out you know where the time goes it goes into email another crappy thing about email if you respond they will respond to you email only makes more email so when you send that email you need to ask yourself do you really want to hear from these people again don't put energy into things you don't want more of now you're a beautiful crowd you're a lovely bunch of people but you type a lot and you need to conserve your keystrokes here's a little sobering fact you ready for this you have a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die you're not gonna get any more keystrokes you think you're gonna get faster let me tell you as an old person you will get slower I made a website for you you can go and check it out it's called keys left calm you can go two keys left you put in your age and your words per minute and it will tell you how many keys you have left and the great part about it with the power of JavaScript the number of keystrokes you have left will go down as you look at the page but I will also for you I will also calculate how many computer programs you have left how many books you could write I will also tell you how many love letters that you could write and how many emails to your boss you have this many keystrokes who are you gonna give them to now your lovely people let's say one of you decides to email me a great question afterwards and you go hey Scott great talk here's a question and I'm like oh I have never heard that question that was a freaking awesome question but I don't know you am I gonna give you the gift the gift of my keystrokes some internet Rando hey Scott great talk super awesome here's a question I give you 5,000 keystrokes five six paragraphs I write a whole blog post and then you're like thanks or even worse you're young and you go thx KK or whatever like I don't know what KK means it's like okay but it's more cash and like you didn't even give me the full thanks with an exclamation point it was just like thanks with a full stop like what is that so then my keystrokes are in the void and I'm never gonna get them back again but but but you gave me a gift you gave me a great freaking question I should do something with that gift so I'm gonna put that gift anywhere with a URL literally anywhere share point god help me my blog medium Facebook anywhere that has a URL and then I will say thank you for that great question I wrote a blog post boom and then you'll say well no one reads my blog you only need a second person to read your blog and you've doubled your keystrokes if 10 people oh I only have 10 people read my blog are you kidding me you could multiply your keystrokes by 10 well I don't have a lot of time in the day you write in a lot of email maybe you should turn those emails into documentation markdown files 1 notes share points literally literally anything but email and then link those do that for 20 years and you will be a moderately successful technology blogger and be able to speak at midsize conferences in small countries in Europe [Applause] how are you so productive Scot I never answer your emails now there's lots of sources out there's lots of physical stuff also what you need to do is find a trusted source for stuff and put it there everyone's got the drawer of USB key of USB cables and stuff right the trick is do you have one drawer or or if someone says find a USB cable do you have to go and say let me check the seven drawers of USB cables for everything in your life have a trusted place one place to put that pick a location for each medium keep it open and updated all the time additionally you spend so much time talking about scrum and practice and stuff but how many people actually practice scrum in their own lives it always seems like this the project managers at work that are the most stressed out here's a picture of pee-wee Herman saving some snakes from a fire it's one of our great American philosophers if you don't know who that is now there's a thing called the Pomodoro Technique where my Pomodoro people at Pomodoro people good every row has a Pomodoro person so you can find those people and ask them what it is it's the idea of a of a unit of time it's 25 minutes it's not a half an hour it's not 60 minutes it's 25 minutes that's because you need five minutes to pee at the end and when someone says hey can you do this for me and you look at it you go it's about two hours it's actually about four Pomodoro's and you start to think about things in terms of a Pomodoro but here's your challenge though what you have to do is focus on that thing you have to do the thing one thing for 25 minutes now often we get caught up in the flow we've heard that word a lot at the conference flow get stay on the flow get in your flow you want to stay in your flow but you would be surprised how challenging it is especially with tasks that are distasteful things that you don't want to do to stay focused for 25 minutes but the great thing about 25 minutes is that it is finite it will be over but you're also going to interrupt yourself you're going interrupt yourself internally and you're gonna get interrupted externally the objective is to be aware of these interruptions you might be just doing something and then somehow you alt-tab and you're like I don't know how I got here like a suddenly Oh like I'm really good at solitaire like you're supposed to be coding like what is happening this is totally not what you need to be doing right now and then there's also external interruptions external interruptions they can be like yeah um we're gonna need you to work late this week is that okay and then your boss comes to you you have to deal with these interruptions acknowledge them analyze them and say look I consistently find myself on reddit when I should be coding now you need to acknowledge that that's a failing that's a thing like is it good or is it bad do you feel bad about yourself doing that don't do that maybe instead of doing it twice in 25 minutes try doing it once it's a muscle it's an exercise it's not the marshmallow test where they declare that you don't have willpower at 4:00 and you'll never be successful it is about you being deliberately conscious of the thing that you did that you didn't like you measured it you didn't like it you decided no judgment from outside yeah I keep coding and I try to code for half an hour and then somehow I'm on reddit or I'm on Twitter I'm on whatever I'm gonna try it again for another 25 minutes and I'm gonna see if I can interrupt myself once or maybe not at all and then I'm gonna give myself hey look I did it 25 minutes and then I'll do it again reminding yourself that everything that's important will find its way to you oftentimes we'll go over there because it's FOMO its internet FOMO I might have mentions I might have issues there might be something going on do you think that who's saying bolt while sprinting gets like a little vibration on his Apple watch and he checks it out no he's focused he's running that way his Pomodoro is a hundred meters yours is 25 minutes and you'll feel like this now a lot of people think well you know I'm a really good multitasker I like to multitask multitask a lot this person says that the worst app on my iPhone is this thing called phone we have to speak synchronously to other humans here's the deal though the optimal number of threads in any system is one we are not multitaskers there is no multitasking here is a video some poor multitasking we have a name for those people in my country organ donors there's no multitasking this is the only true multitasking there is no other multitasking in the world my friends but still we rearrange these guilt systems these monuments to our own failure how many of us have a pile of books on our desk that's been there for a year and occasionally we will reorganize them and move you know I'm going to read the ruby way I'll move that to the top and martin fowler's new book I'll put that on top it's been there for a year but I'll move it to the top that'll cause me to be more likely to read that and it's a stack of fail on your desk it is a system that you have set up for yourself to make yourself feel bad why don't you set up success systems set up three things that you're gonna do a smaller stack and then actually do it as opposed to twelve books you're never going to read you're not gonna be able to say simultaneously up on all of these things go and audit your news feeds the things the feeds the inbox the things that bring you information is too much find an aggregator make it simpler go and take a look at the tools the tool kit that you have and audit that as well remember that you can't cut stuff if you don't measure it I encourage people to use a tool called rescue time any rescue time people hear rescue time is wonderful it runs in the background looks at the window on your machine in the foreground and then builds charts for you you get to then decide is the window and the foreground productive or not productive you can decide if the tab you're reading is productive or not and then it gives you a list and I learned that I somehow end up on news websites at four o'clock I learned about myself that somewhere around 4:00 in the afternoon I stopped caring about my work so now I know that about myself right what can I do with this information can I care can i maybe just decide that I'll shift my time and I'll work earlier four o'clock is when I stopped caring I learned that I'm not very productive on Mondays you know not really sure why remember I mentioned before that physical devices happen sometimes you might get physical tickets or a physical piece of paper that represents something there's a really great system called 43 folders and 43 folders literally is that 43 manila folders labeled 1 2 31 for the days and then 12 of them for the months and you make a circularbuffer so if you get a ticket for a play a physical thing and you might lose it you put it in March next year and you have December January through then you have this circular buffer and then each day you move the date of the back when a month happens you move the month of the back and the year moves through you and the whole thing fits in that much space every physical piece of paper every form every receipt will become this much space in 43 folders in a little tiny box completely revolutionized how I thought about paper and I don't think people give paper enough respect that's my dad's iPad it's actually called the hipster PDA it's got unlimited battery Retina display it works great it's a bunch of three by five cards printed out and you can pick the pages that you want you might be using one node or workflowy or Trello or whatever it doesn't matter go and look at your systems and ask yourself are they effective are you this person do you open a lot of tabs remember how I don't want to give you the gift of my keystrokes I don't want to give these websites the gift of my RAM 500 megabytes so I can read The Verge and then the CPU that's running in the background is like an ad and JavaScript opening a new tab you mean read it later like that's the intent but you just basically open it until the thing ventually crashes and then it starts up again and then you've got that existential dread as you go restore 500 tabs did they really matter my iPhone is starting to do that now it actually has a thing where it's like you've got 500 tabs open we need to talk to you about this what you really mean is read it later that's a different gesture open new tab might be reasonable if you're working on a project you have six or ten open 40 or 50 you're just saying I'm gonna look at this later so why don't you send it to a read it later system Instapaper pocket every browser has a read it later now your phone has read it later built-in you can talk to these things with api's I use api's to take all of the different things that you send me all of the articles and notes and stuff and then what I'll do is send them to myself in a compiled PDF so they show up on my Kindle and then I can read them when I poop which is multitasking go check take a look at your workflows think about all the things you can use whether it be IFTTT or Dropbox but here is the rule now this is a quote by Christopher Hawking's he says if it's not helping me make money I mean I remove that I make it more generic if it's not improving my life in some way it is mental clutter and I will throw it out you decide what goes in that blank space get promoted learn about software have a better relationship with my partner you decide what that is and then I want you to take that list that we made earlier and you say if this thing is not X making me money getting me closer to my family getting me more fit helping me learn a language whatever throw it out say no the hard part is filling in that blank but you would be surprised how easy it is once you decide what your goal is and you're like oh yeah I spent like seven hours watching this show on Netflix but I'm gonna help you make any money are you richer now are you but well but I enjoyed myself okay then if it's not helping me to enjoy myself well that's not really my goal well then figure your goal out you see how we talked ourselves out of Y binge watching Netflix is a bad idea now I'm not saying don't watch TV I love TV so I you know you know the the peloton add everyone's talking about I just went to the thrift store and I bought it when he call it a treadmill and I put an iPad on it and I made a contract with myself that I can watch as much TV as I want as long as I'm on the treadmill so if I want to watch another hour I got to keep walking that helped me decide whether or not I would watch this other show or watch other show and I got more fit and I got to watch more shows and I was doing feasible multitasking so here's your homework my friends take a picture of this I want you to look at your sources all the things that are coming into your life write them all down sort them the sorting is the part sort the things in your life think about scheduling work sprints look at the Pomodoro system it's free you can read it up none of these things cost money anything that could pop up and slow you down you know how we used to use Skype to talk to people and now it just like tells us about birthdays for people we don't really know very well like oh thanks Skype but popped up and someone who I haven't called in 10 years birthday is today thank you that was a speed bump you do not need to know when your email arrives you do not need there is literally nothing that my phone or computer can pop in my face that I would care about that much to keep me from staying in my flow think about effectiveness and efficiency in your personal toolbox thank you very much and thank you for letting me close the the day [Applause] [Music]

Channel: DevTernity Conference

Views: 29,520

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Id: V4NJo2Mfvrc

Length: 55min 56sec (3356 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019