Scaling Yourself • Scott Hanselman • GOTO 2012

so what we have 15 minutes then I've got 64 slides this will go totally smoothly I'm sure my name is Scott Hanselman and this talk is called scaling yourself you can see the 90 minute version of this talk up on my website feel free to go on google for scott or google with bing first god that would be all so cool that's that's Darth Vader on a cat that's awesome I've been in software for a very very long time this was something I've worked on and I blog about community and I've written some applications for the phone I've got some books that I'm not very proud of I've got a podcast that I'm proud of I've got one called this developers life that I do with Rob Connery that I'm very proud of I've even got a video that I sell on how to be a good technical speaker and a lot of people say well Scott you're doing all this stuff how why do you do it how do you are you not sleeping how do you stay productive why do you put all this effort into trying to be productive and it's because I must dance I just I can't I can't stop whenever I think about stopping I think about this little boy and how excited he is about doing what he's doing now I try to give people advice on how to be productive but when they don't take the advice this is what I call them hopefully you'll take the advice so it turns out that the less that you do the more of it that you can do this is the standard law of scale right this actually here's an actual graph that shows writing to dev nul see the throughput goes up and the latency is effectively nothing turns out that if you do nothing at all you can do it infinitely now the amount of information that one has to absorb has changed in the old days there was basically all this that was all the information in the entire world and then a little bit later everything became 1,000 plus right I mean that's just emotional bankruptcy at this point whether it be Google Reader or Gmail if it says a thousand plus obviously you just give up at that point you should just declare that in the old days I just had to know everything that was in those two books but that was it there was no internet there was those two books and I was alone in my mom's basement and that was the sum of all human knowledge and then the internet happened and suddenly there's exabytes of information being created and half of it is garbage and 1/3 of my day is wasted by interruptions I'm completely overwhelmed and we tell ourselves that we're going to be able to pull it off if we just work late tonight or you know honey it's just a really busy busy season for us right now and just once march is over or once April is over after this summer we'll be able to spend some time together and I just need to work late to catch up this is a danger side this is this is a danger sign there's also this phone enos that happens this feeling of being a phony and I've blogged about this I'm actually on the first page if you google for phony that was actually not the plan but if you google for phony my smiling face is like right there like so feeling like a phony is this idea that I've got so many emails and I go to work I do my 8:00 to 5:00 or my 8:00 to 6:00 I go home we make dinner to put the kids to bed and then what we do we work until 2:00 in the morning and we do it because someone's going to catch us and realize that we really have no idea what we're talking about and we're just lucky to have a job everybody feels like that but the thing is hope is not a strategy hoping that you're going to get past this is not a strategy so what are some things that we can do I want to juxtapose two words one is called effectiveness was called efficiency effectiveness is goal orientation this is picking something to do this is doing right things picking a goal and doing that goal that's effectiveness I'm just opposing these two words because in English they're close and in other languages they're even closer efficiency I was in Bulgaria giving this talk and tango went back and forth this Bulgarian guy before the talk because they use the same word to describe these two different things and we had to come up with like a word for effectiveness and then a phrase to describe efficiency so for for people that don't speak English as a first language effectiveness and efficiency can feel feel like the same word but efficiency is doing things in an economical way process oriented so phrased differently effectiveness is doing the right things but efficiency is doing things right that means effectiveness is picking a direction and efficiency is running really fast in that direction when you realize those two things are different it becomes an extremely powerful tool that you can use this is an example of being wholly ineffective I don't know why he thought that was a good vector to go on now you've got all this information that's coming in to your life and I don't mean your email inbox I mean the inbox of your life your mail your your do you have TiVo like a DVR you know you can tell it to record Dexter and then it just fills up with all the Dexter shows right okay you have that though that's an inbox also now I'm going to say these things need to be triaged and I use the word triage very specifically I didn't just say need to be dealt with need to be handled need to be man as need to be triage because what does triage make you think about makes you think about the zombie apocalypse because when there's a zombie apocalypse and everyone's dead we got to start triaging these bodies we have this toe tag here's a toe tag we have to go through all these bodies that are in my parking lot and say who's walking wounded who is non-life-threatening and then who is just a pulseless notice that they don't say dead they say more pulseless our non breathing because it would be just sad to say dead people that doesn't mean that we grab the first person and we deal with that person we triage them we sort them we sift them but isn't it funny that an ad for viagra an email from me and an email from Steve Ballmer are all peers in our inbox sorted only by date so there's basically three kinds of work that David Allen from getting things done talks about there's predefined work work you set up ahead of time there's work that's interrupting you and this is where we get in trouble there's that urgent work it must be really important it just happened but the most important thing is the defining of work so rarely do we find ourselves doing that how often if you actually put on your calendar one hour of time to say I want to sit down and think about what work I need to be doing no we we panic and we look at our to do dot text and we sort it and then we just kind of freak out for a while and then the to do dot text gets log gets larger as Brian said dropping it is so powerful do it drop it delegate it let someone else do it or defer it but drop it is such an amazing thing to scale yourself and when you're trying to decide what to drop you can use Stephen Covey's quadrants this is the importance axis and here's the urgency axis when something is both urgent and important like a pregnant wife or an appendix being burst you should probably do that now if it is neither urgent nor important you should dump it but unfortunately what happens is we spend our time on things that feel urgent but are not important at all but the urgency is an addiction trivia not urgent not important crises urgent and important phrased differently phones in-person people dropping by your office both urgent and important Twitter I'm going to focus on Twitter neither urgent nor important but I don't think any of you guys work because you're always on Twitter now this is a picture of a mouse with an electrode attached directly to his brain and he just has to push that lever to stimulate the the pleasure center of his brain if he wants to feel better he just pulls to refresh that feeling of excitement that kind of direct pleasure center of the brain he just pulls to refresh and just pull to refresh and you get that feeling of of something has happened I'm getting work done do you remember when there was just one set of footprints on the beach that's when Jesus unfollowed you on Twitter because you were tweeting too much now all systems at work including the Internet itself have flow control so drop packets communication by its nature is fault tolerant if you ever had a conversation with someone over a cellphone and make a couple words drop out you could still understand what they were saying because computer can become communication as a nature is fault tolerant sometimes dropping the ball is the right answer when anyone ever went in when anyone ever calls me and suggests and asked me for suggestions on how they can over time in their life they list out all the things that they have to do the first thing I say is which one of these can you say no to even if you've already committed to it what can you say I can't do it and for us as successful computer people and I know we are a successful computer people because we are here at a conference which by its nature puts you at the top 1% of all computer people that exists because you came to a conference that's amazing you should feel really great about yourself for that is that saying no is virtually impossible to us we'd love to say yes we'd love to get things done but you will feel so much better about yourself and you will get so much more work done when you can actually sprint and focus on something as opposed to juggling things also there's this notion of psychic weight that people don't think about and I brought up that issue of TiVo we call it TiVo in the US but the DVR when this thing first came out I could go and say I want to watch Law & Order and I hit record get a season pass and then suddenly there was like a whole law and order channel was there all the time what a joy this is going to free up so much time because I can watch TV whenever I want to but then I realized that this was psychic weight that was pressing me down because okay we got like seven law and orders on the thing okay we'll put the kids to bed early tonight and we're going to bang through law and order and then we're going to get this thing under control and we're going to handle it and then we'll be back on track so somehow this TiVo which was this gift from God this was this amazing glorious of Pro tippity thing has now become the primary source of psychic weight in my life so I think about the things that I want to get done I want to think about what are the three things I can get done today what are the three things I want to get done this week this year and if watching the entire seven seasons of The Wire is one of those things then absolutely put it on your list but if not it should probably be the first thing that you drop when you're going through your week you need to have a vision on Monday of what your week looks like and on Friday you need to stop and look back on your week and think about the reflection was that a successful week what could I have done differently what could I change then you do it all over again the next week I think that being busy is a form of laziness being busy is not thinking about what you should be doing so that you're not so busy we find ourselves just being busy it turns out that being creative and making something is the opposite of hanging out I'm always impressed when people that I see tweet a lot suddenly stop tweeting and then maybe a week or two later or a month later they'll come back with an amazing new creation it's like wow that person just made a list of the things I needed to get done and Twitter wasn't one of them and they went off and they created and then they came back and they shared it with us it's the opposite of hanging out it's it's it's funny because it's true turns out arguing on Twitter is the worst thing that you can do and we're all we're all guilty of doing it you it no one has ever come up to me and said I am so glad that you argued with me on Twitter completely changed my life I've can I've converted to Buddhism now and you know I I've got a smaller house and we got a Prius never happens on never happens if you talk to someone on Twitter and we think about things like efficiency take the things though all the data streams this is homework for you take all the data streams in your life and I want you to sort them signal versus noise what provides you value and what doesn't this is mine I'm a community manager so my community there's a lot of phone and Skype and video calling so that's important last thing Google Reader and TiVo most powerful tool that you have in your arsenal is mark all as read just do it and never look back and don't feel bad and just feel the release of the psychic wait short your list see how I've sorted my work email specifically with bosses versus people who have cc'd me on stuff the one email rule that you need in your life the one thing that will fundamentally change how you think about email is if you put an inbox for stuff that your cc'd on and you train your boss next time your boss sends you it to do and CC's you want it don't do it don't do it and then when he says why didn't you do it oh you see seed me I thought you were just informing me he'll never do that again act on stuff that you are mailed directly and stuff that see seed it changes your life look at this I took a 250 email inbox and chopped it down by 2/3 because the stuff in the inbox is important to me and the stuff in inbox EC is not I've extended that a little bit as a community person notice how the inbox external my community people who don't work for my company they're important to me I've answered all of their emails don't check email in the morning because if you respond to email they will write you back the number one way the number one way to get more email is to answer email so don't put more energy into things that you don't want one wants you and remember if you're the person who answers email at 2:00 in the morning you've just taught your boss that you're the person who answers email at 2:00 in the morning maybe you're doing that because you want to move up at the company or maybe you're excited or maybe but you've just taught them that you're addicted to urgency and you literally have here's a thing to let you know how addicted urgence you are how many meters are you in the morning when you're sleeping from your phone and if you don't have to do anything other than roll your body like this to check your phone that you have a problem when you're driving put your phone in the trunk can't text when your phones in the trunk but you can still Bluetooth when you're sleeping put your phone across the room so if you really have to answer the thing go across the room but more importantly try not checking email until noon and you will be surprised at how much work you get done because what happens if if you check email in the morning you time travel you wake up at 9 you check email boom it's lunch and then you go to lunch and boom it's 2:30 and it's like okay it's 2:30 I'm going to start working now that all happened because you check the email in the morning last one I think I'm running out of time right how am i doing you're killing me well I'll slow down that will okay so let's talk about cancer conserving your keystrokes is a really important thing if Brian emails me a really interesting question about you know asp.net as much as I like Brian as a person and I enjoy his drunken emails if he sends me an email and I send him back an exciting and long five paragraph with a code sample email that he solves his problem I just gave him the gift of ten thousand of my keystrokes but there is a finite number of keystrokes left in my hands before I die and I am never going to get those keystrokes back and I've just gifted them to Brian I don't even know if he read that email so what should I do to multiply these keystrokes given that there is a finite number of those keystrokes left in my hands I write a blog post and I nail him the link and then after I'm dead my keystrokes multiply every time I get a page view that's 5,000 keystrokes that I did not have to type you should never write a long email to someone never more than three or four sentences anything longer than that should be on a blog or a wiki or it should be in your products documentation or it should be on a FAQ or a knowledge base or anywhere in the world except email because email is where your keystrokes go to die you guys remember the Pomodoro Technique any Pomodoro people here and one have their official Pomodoro timer the Pomodoro Technique is this amazing way to do personal scrums isn't it funny how the project manager on your team is the one with a thousand emails that are unread in their inbox it's funny how that works out then the programmers have any email but the project managers got it basically emailed bankruptcy thousands of emails can't manage their own life but they're managing your project try running your life as a scrum do little tiny work Sprint's Pomodoro is a unit of time I think it means tomato and Italian and the idea is that you have this timer and you set the timer and you put it down and then you focus on one thing no multitasking you focus on one thing for 25 minutes it's amazing you won't be able to do it you will you'll be vibrating with the need to multitask and you'll just be like any like alt-tab you're like well what happened which is and then suddenly you're on Reddit and you like I didn't even touch it in my brain just took me to Reddit I don't know how it happened when that happens when you've interrupted yourself internally just write it down just tick put a tick so imagine you have a sheet of paper it says all right I'm starting a Pomodoro I'm starting a 25-minute work sprint every time I interrupt myself I put a tick just to be aware of it just to think about it to be aware of the number and type of interruptions and then look back and reflect and you say you know I interrupted myself six times in 25 minutes and you're going to get numbers like that but then you'll do it again and you'll interrupt yourself twice and then you'll interrupt yourself once and you want to interrupt yourself at all and a Pomodoro will feel like that and then you'll start thinking about a Productivity in your life as how many Pomodoro's that you got done in a day and you'll say man that was a four Pomodoro day I got a lot of work done how many hours was that like it was like two hours but there's not the point it was like so productive because you were sprinting turnoff toasts you guys know what toast is fred is online thank God Skype I don't know what I fred has a birthday I don't know fred is but Skype felt the need to interrupt me with a piece of toast that popped up on my screen turn all that stuff off notifications background processes anything at all that is going to keep you out of your flow you see Usain Bolt texting while sprinting no because he's sprinting that's why it's called sprinting remember that anything important that happens in the world in the news in your life into your work will come your way many times if there's another 911 somebody will tell you you probably didn't learn it by hitting refresh on your favorite news site someone might something might happen someone famous might die is Lady Gaga dead is she dead f5 f5 if I try to remain in your flow be wrapped up like a child is in the thing that captures your attention get that excitement back and that excitement does not involve alt tabbing over to Gmail multitasking is a myth this is funny but multitasking does not work the optimal number of threads in any system is one thread that is a computer science fact and if you think you can multitask you're wrong and I hate talking to people I totally can multitask you can't it's biologically impossible the mo they test the best multitasking you can do is think about a problem and then sleep and then let the background threads do that work for you while you sleep and then wake up in the shower with the answer that's like the only multitasking that I even know about but all you're doing is wasting time task switching and task switching causes time it's a context switch you ever been working on something and working in something the phone rings and you're mean to like your dad so why was I so mean to my dad we called you at work at 3:00 in the afternoon and you were totally focused on something that afterwards I'm sorry I was really working on something well what could I have done I could have turned off the ringer and then I'm sad for like 10 or 15 minutes that's the context switch as I get back from that phone call that I screwed up back to the work what was I thinking about context switching context which he doesn't work here are some things that you can multitask on and they are few and far between and they start with walking and chewing gum but the number one way that I do multitasking is I work out while listening to podcasts I never have time to listen to podcast I'm so busy busy busy well if you're working out listen to podcasts I like watching TV I unapologetically love to watch TV and if I tweet about it people like how do you have time to watch TV well the rule is I'm only allowed to watch TV while I'm working out so as soon as I stop working out TV has to go off so I got the iPad and I've got like seven seasons of the wire and I just run towards the iPad it's like a carrot and a stick that's what I've promised to do if I'm going to be watching a show I am always moving there is no actual sitting on your ass watching TV for me you have to work out and if you make that rule for yourself you realize that that is really great multitasking commuting and reading if you commute on a train or in some way that doesn't involve driving a car you can do that utilize your idle and waiting time the iPhone has completely change the way that I poop I have no idea what we were doing in there before weren't you thinking this is completely unproductive time you know and then the iPhone came along and instapaper and now poop time is good time we set up these guilt systems my friend Kathy Sierra has this great blog post about a guilt system we have these you know think about the pile of books that you have I'm not going to read the ruby way this week but the ruby way has been on my desk for three years and what happens is I move it in the stack so every once in a while they'll look at the guilt pile the monument to my own stack of failure and I'll walk out I'm probably not going to read all these but I'm gonna move the Ruby way a little higher and then I'll move the css3 down and then I'll probably I'll probably only read this much but the guilt pile persists I have actually had guilt piles last so long that the technology has been come obsolete from the moment I got the book from the publisher until it eventually just went out of business think about this for a second and this guy uses it in the context of making money if it is not helping me make money it's mental clutter and it's out now let's get rid of making money if it's not helping me - what is your goal spend time with your kids pay off your house grow your business in any decision if you're going to do something is that helping you with that blank whatever that blank is for you I stopped caring about my career when I had kids so everything that I do every decision that I make is how I can get home to my four-year-old my six-year-old faster I'm going to be going to a conference in Poland tomorrow morning and they're mad at me because I'm going to be doing the conference I'm going to leave that afternoon and they want to show me their beautiful city and I think that that's great but the thing is their beautiful city will be there in a couple of years but my four-year-old has only have fifty two weekends in his fourth year and every weekend I missed that is a fecund in his fourth year that I will never get back so I'm gonna be home for dinner on Friday thank you sir rock on so here's your homework my friends I want you to audit and sort your sources the things in your life I want you to think about scheduling work sprints turn off all distractions think about your inbox and then go look at your personal toolbox notice that I didn't talk about Evernote or any of these fancy systems it all speaks to what Brian was talking about you can spend more time reading productivity books and making productivity systems when maybe all you need is a to-do text maybe what you really need is the will to do it and the recognition in your mind that there is a difference between being busy and doing the work that you want to do I'm you can find all this stuff and a longer version of this talk up at Hanselman comm thank you very much was that enough time yes sir so sure so why do you have a wheat planet add a plan so again with every single thing that I've talked about here pick the thing that makes you happy this is not a religion this is a perspective and if you have a system that works for you rock on so don't this none of this is Dogma okay it's just a thought but my opinion is that the number three is a great number four or five is too much to hold in your brain too much to focus on one or two is not really working hard enough three is a great number so every day I wake up and I say what are three things that I can do today I may have a thousand things to do today but if I did three of them I could look back on the day and say that was an awesome day maybe it's two but whatever whatever works for you three is a great number it's a nice round number then it allows you to it allows you to to scope things but the three things you would try to get done in a single day are different than the three things you would get done in a week because those things would have larger scope right fix bug number three that's a day thing you know release version 1.2 that might be a week thing and a year thing might be you know double the size of the business you can pick the amount of time that you want to spend on these things but the rule of three allows you to just arbitrarily chop things up and accomplish something so that you feel good about yourself so if the process for you is four or ten or twenty things whatever but the point is to end the day without guilt to end the day with that psychic wait because I mean maybe I'm just talking to myself here but I truly believe that we have had that feeling at the end of the day where I didn't do a damn thing today I around on Twitter and I was at the client's office and I was on the toilet for half an hour and I'm billing the guy so that was like a 30 30 euro poop and and we've had those days you know I mean we don't talk about them no one talks like no one puts a microphone on and says that I feel like such a phony today so what do we do when we put the kids to bed and we try to make the day not suck from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. we don't talk about it we don't tell anyone about and we know who the other people are though because we see them on chat because they're the ones with the green dots while all the yellow dot people are asleep on corporate chat God's green dot people he's always up at 2:00 a.m. and I know he has young kids and he's probably really freaking out too so why do I pick three because it's in round number good question all right so the gentleman is pointing out that sometimes when you separate email like this you are going to miss context yes you absolutely will miss context and the question is are you have you put yourself on a treadmill at work that is a sustainable treadmill if you have a situation at work right now where you have too much responsibility or too much email or too much whatever and you're worried about missing out on context then you need to change how your job is you have too much to do you shouldn't need to be constantly checking email for fear of Keeping Up it's that very fear that I think we just need to let go of I've got probably 500 emails I usually have zero but I'm on vacation right I'm here in wherever whatever country this is and you see how that works sweet Sweden yes we know the point is that that I'm watching people like they give their talks and then they rush back to delete email it's just like oh my god is my job really come to this is this my job deleting email so I actually end up having trusted aggregators people who are not willing to drop things so I'll call them and I'll ask them what's going on isn't that funny I used to have a thousand blogs that I would read right and then who's the greatest blogger blog reader in the world - Rob Robert Scoble he's always talking about how many blogs that he reads so I finally decided I'm not Robert Scoble he's a freak and it's not healthy to keep up on that many blogs so you know what I do I read his blog so I took the thousand blogs that I read and I picked five linked blogs I found my squabbles and I read those five blogs and they give me an aggregated news it's like why we listen to the BBC news on the hour because it tells us what's going on so I don't have to watch all the other news find your aggregator inside of the company who is a person who can tell you what's going on who can keep you up-to-date I read I do less emails but I actually have more one-on-ones with my boss I told him unapologetically if you're making me delete email if deleting email is my job then I'm going to get less work done so let's have more 15 minutes stand-ups one-on-ones you tell me what the hell's going on and then I'll be doing work because it's his job to read all those emails so drop the ball is what I'm telling you to do okay fantastic question any other questions what a great crowd put a very relaxed and mellow crowd lunch let's eat thank you

Channel: GOTO Conferences

Views: 99,871

Rating: 4.9375811 out of 5

Keywords: Software Development, goto aarhus, professional productivity, ZEB, Scott Hanselman, Productivity (Software Genre), GOTO, GOTOcon, GOTO Conference, Software (Industry), Scaling Yourself, Computer Science (Field Of Study), Software Development (Industry), Programming Language (Software Genre), Videos for Developers

Id: FS1mnISoG7U

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/timshoaf]

I fucking came to this talk.... from reddit. god. dammit. I didn't even mean to be on here. I didn't *want* to be on here. 16:30... He's 100% right.