I coded 4 hours everyday for 1 year. And it changed my life.

how many hours do you code every day I want you to be honest with me I'm not talking about the total time you spend watching tutorials while scrolling your phone I'm talking about the time you spent writing actual code in your editor and I want you to give me the average per day so even if you skip a day of coding the day still counts let's face it you already know that you have the ability to achieve whatever you want if you could consistently code for a few hours every day it's just that life gets in the way today I want to share how I manage to beat procrastination and quote for or 4 hours a day while doing a full-time job this helped me go from a dead-end career to working at Amazon within 1 year let's do this there are two problems that we need to solve here number one how to code every day and number two how to actually code for 4 hours in a day believe it or not the first problem is harder to solve than the second one so let's start there not knowing what to do is the easiest way to get nothing done imagine that I ask you to make this very fancy Italian dish called pasta Alo aolo many people won't even bother trying to make it because they don't know where to start now imagine that I give you this recipe for the dish if you look a little closely at this recipe you will realize that pasta Alo oio means nothing but pasta with garlic and oil which is not the most difficult thing to make most of the time when we procrastinate it's because we don't really have any Clarity on what needs to be done and this holds true for programming as well just 15 more minutes before I start coding when I used to tell myself that it was not because I found programming hard to do it was because I didn't really have any plan on what I needed to finish on a particular day so I became a little more intentional about planning my programming lessons instead of telling myself I will cot tomorrow I would tell myself that I will finish exercise 2 3 and 4 tomorrow doing this every night before sleeping made sure that I had a clear plan for the next day as a result I would wake up excited knowing that I'm going to slay three more exercises today of course I made sure that number of exercises I shoes are doable within 4 hours by the way we will discuss why I keep stressing on exactly 4 hours Short shortly trust me it's not random knowing what to do is a great first step but you'll still need to do a few more things to help you stay motivated if you've ever used a language learning app like dualingo you would know the power of streaks a streak is nothing but the total number of consecutive days that you have been finishing your exercises there are hundreds of videos on social media where people are sharing their dualingo streaks and there are a couple of reasons for that number one maintaining a streak is a great incentive not to miss a day of exercising number two if you share your streak with your friends who are in the same boat as you it can be motivating for them as well but how can programmers track their streaks the best way would be to use GitHub consecutive dark Greens on your GitHub activity will make sure you stay on track alternatively you can go old school and use a physical calender it really does not matter what's important is to track your progress and find people to share it with so now you know what needs to be done let's talk about how to do it you have a to-do list that contains the exercises for the day but to-do list by themselves fail in the execution phase that's because let's face it one notification on the phone and you can kiss your to-do list goodbye so what's the solution here like they say you need fire to counter fire similarly you need a notification to counter notification if only there was an app that can send us notifications when it's time to do our exercises do you guys know that app where you can set reminders for events and it sends you a notification at the time of the event yes I'm talking about the Calendar app on your phone so open your calendar app and set up an event called code crunch that repeats daily this way of doing things is also called time blocking guard this notification with your life and make sure you don't swipe it away if you honor this notification for a few days you will be well on your way of building the habit of coding daily but all that work with nothing in return seems unreasonable for some people like me just making progress is not a good enough reward we need something more so here is what I came up with at the end of every day I would reward myself with quality time on social media but that's if if and only if I complete my exercise goal of the day this helped me in two ways one the very thought of not using social media at all made sure that I finished my exercises but more importantly this limited the time I wasted on social media now your voices might be very different than mine for you it might be playing video games or having that chocolate bar it does not really matter all you need to do is find a bad habit and tie it to finishing exercises and voila you have created a system for yourself to win now that you have plan and rewards in place how how can you make sure that you're getting maximum out of your time that's where this book called Deep work by Cal newort comes in you see when Bill Gates was developing basic in 1974 he wrote the first version in just 8 weeks by using deep work he would become so engrossed in work that he would often collapse on his keyboard while writing code he would sleep for a couple of hours and get back at it again deep work that he did during those 8 weeks became instrumental in the success of Microsoft but is there any science backing deep work researchers have found that intense period of focus lead to the development of myelin around our neurons myin acts as an insulator around your neurons and helps to transmit neural signals faster and this plays a vital role in skill development and Mastery research also shows that people who are new to deep work can only do it for about 1 hour and even at their best people can only do it for about 4 hours typically in 60 to 90 minute blocks so when we choose 4 hours to code every day it's not arbitrary we want to become Masters at Deep work but how do we do that in the book Cal newort recommends three ways first schedule your deep work sessions we have already done that two schedule your distractions most of us have no discipline around when to go online we reach for our phone whenever we feel like it but that's causing our brain to never go into deep work Cal newort recommends having a notepad near you and writing down time at which you'll have your next distraction break challenge yourself to stay focused until that time lastly do an evening shutdown daily we briefly talked about this in our planning phase write down your unfinished tasks on one side and actions you will take on them tomorrow on the other side basically plan ahead for tomorrow like we discussed in the beginning of the video now you can do everything we discussed but still fail to quote consistently and that's because of the valley of disappointment let me explain after all the planning and preparation we did today you would be thinking that you will put 4 hours every day and grow linearly like this but that's almost never the case in the beginning it's highly likely that you'll be below your expectations you might not be able to do deep work for 4 hours every day like the research shows or it might take you longer to finish the planned exercises this phase is called Valley of disappointment this is where most people throw away all the planning and hard work into the trash and give up but what they don't know is that once you get past the valley of disappointment the returns you get are much higher than expected genius is the art of Eternal patience so don't stress over a bad day or two and keep going if you like the idea of deep work and want to know even more ways to study more and less time watch this video My name is is sahil and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Sahil & Sarra

Views: 339,817

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Id: 6dpF_G3yMMQ

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023