Scott Hanselman - "It's not what you read, it's what you ignore"

hi everyone thank you very much for for having me here in in Poland I having a lot of fun so far I appreciate thank you for all your hard work for all the volunteers and everyone who has been working working working and staying up all night I know you were working very hard and drinking last night to do it to put on the best possible conference and and and you had suggested that I give not a technical talk but a more practical talk because you said that you wanted he wanted to mix it up a little bit you know I could come here and I could talk about asp.net or talk about MVC but you can probably get those videos online and that would be fine but what I wanted to talk about instead was the idea of scaling yourself about being a more effective developer about dealing with large amounts of information so I brought that talk instead and hopefully it will be it'll be fun also every good talk includes lots of pictures of cats so I decided I would just bring all of them so that's a 300 Meg AVI of every cat picture that I could find just this way I would get them out of the way upfront and there would be no cat pictures any later on that's really literally all of the pictures except for this one which is awesome that's the best of all cat pictures now I I have been programming for an extremely long time and I don't know are there any old people here anyone old guy right there I see an old guy yeah okay cool I've been programming since before this um so I'm very old very old this is a wig and I I blog a lot and I blog about of a lot of diverse things I blog about an arcade machine for geeks I've blogged about Square Foot Gardening for programmers I've blogged about Maslow's hierarchy of needs as it applies to software development I blogged about the importance of community and staying nice on the Internet I've created a couple of Windows applications Windows Phone apps I've write and written a few books some are good some are not so good I've got a podcasts I've got another podcast I've even got a video on how to be a presenter I also work for Microsoft but I work in open source so it's it's better also just a little bit of information if you if you google for Scott or Google with Bing for Scott I am in a fight right now with the Scott toilet paper tissue so we need to bring me up higher so if there's anything that you can do to help out so we can defeat the evil when you when you write your blog post about this talk just make sure you include a link that says my name does not suck and then just link to my blog so I do all of this stuff and people say you know how do you do it why do you do it why why won't you stop and the answer is very simple is I must dance I can't stop when I when I think about the enthusiasm the excitement that we all have around technology I think about this little guy right here and how happy he is to be doing what he does and I try to give advice to people I give advice on how they can be a more productive developer but you know sometimes you have that friend who asks you for advice and then doesn't take your advice this is the definition of what that is called so this is what happens if I give you my advice and then you don't take it we're going to call you an when you want to get something done you usually ask someone and this is a famous American actor named Paul Reiser and he was not famous for a while and he asked a very famous American actor named Peter Falk who played a character called Columbo and he said to this man how do you write a movie script so you can imagine this young actor is asking this older actor I really want right a movie how do you how do you do it and this man Peter Falk is one of these kind of classic American actors with the gravelly voices so he said to Paul Reiser he said well you get some paper you put it in a typewriter and you type fade in and then keep typing that was like the wisdom that he would bring this guy's and just keep typing this is basically saying just do it just shut up stop getting organized stop maintaining to-do lists just put the paper in the typewriter and don't stop typing I think that's a good motto for for everything in your life sometimes when you feel like you can't write just write anyway even if you write and you throw it away if you're feeling that you don't have the magic anymore you're having trouble writing code just write code anyway even if it's throwaway keep your keep your hands moving keep your hands moving if you want to scale yourself though you have to decide very carefully what are the things I should be working on so I've come up with this rule that the less that you do the more of it you can do turns out that if you do nothing you can do it infinitely it's a pretty good quote you like that quote let's make that a quote yeah all right in fact this there's computer science to back this up this is a chart that shows writing to null so here we're writing to null and it's scales forever you can write as much as you want to null and it works really well but but seriously though the amount of information in the world has changed there was a time when you could know everything because all of the books that existed were in one place and then as time goes on things get more and more complicated we go from stone books to just 100 plus Google Reader you can't possibly keep up when I started developing in the 80s these were the books that was the sum total of all information that was available there was no internet there was these two books and if you had a problem and it wasn't in these books you were dead there was nowhere - there was nowhere to Google there was no help you were alone in your mom's basement with a pizza in these two books but if you fast forward to today you're in a situation where about a third of your workday is being interrupted just wasted because people are interrupting you with things whether it be email or Skype or chats or text messages and the amount of information being created is more than you can possibly manage but still people think that they can keep up I'm showing you these numbers because I need you to understand that you cannot stay current you cannot keep up and you can find the danger signs you can see the danger signs when you start realizing that maybe I'm feeling like I'm a failure I'm feeling like a phony did you know that if you go in you google for phony I'm on the first page true it's true I am in fact you want me to prove it I can do that at Maya phony I am absolutely a phony because what does that mean a phony this is one of the things that I thought was really really important that I talked about when I talk about being a phony and why I wrote this some the blog post about being a phony is that we all feel sometimes like we're not good enough and that's okay boom look at that phony right right below the dictionary definition of the word phony there's me but you don't see that oh sorry brother better I'm a phony in Polish to look at that I'm not joking man sorry didn't know that PowerPoint was working like that let's try it again here see it no dudu there we go we're back sorry so yeah if you search for phony that's me so I wrote this blog post about being a phony and being a phony means that that you are feeling like maybe I'm just not as good as the other person at work maybe they that person is staying up too late there or they're working extra hard or they can absorb information faster than I can and the secret is the secret I'm having to tell you is that everyone feels like that everyone feels like that I feel like that I feel sometimes like one day my boss from Microsoft is going to call me and he's going to say because you know this is how bosses talk yeah um we we've been talking about you Scott and it's things for things were said and it's just it's not working out and then it's like breaking up with a girlfriend it's not you it's me you know and if you find yourself feeling like that if you find yourself saying to yourself I just need to work late to catch up because it's a busy season we always tell it's a very busy season but when the busy season is twelve months of the entire year when you work from eight to six you go home you make dinner you put the kids to bed and then you work from 10:00 to 2:00 in the morning and I know you're all doing it and you're not telling your friends and you know that there's other friends that are doing it because you look on the corporate instant messaging program and you see you see the green dots at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and you say yeah and you hate the yellow dots because they are asleep but you say I'm just going to work a little bit harder and then I will be okay and then my career will be okay well here's the thing my friends hope is not a strategy okay hoping it's going to get better is not going to make it better so I'm going to talk about two words and talk about two words first want to talk about is effectiveness what it means to be effective and I'm going to juxtapose that I'm going to alt you know compare that to another word called efficiency these are two very similar words in English so I've got it some little definitions here to make sure we're clear so to be effective means to do right things to do correct things to have a goal be focused on that goal and to do that that's different from efficiency efficiency is a process efficiency is doing things in an economical way okay so comparing the two let's look at it like this effectiveness is doing right things while efficiency is doing things right you see the difference effectiveness is picking the direction to run in efficiency is running as fast you can in that direction it doesn't matter you're just focused on that direction okay so let's talk about effectiveness here's an example of being ineffective so you have all this information coming into your life and you need to make a decision about how you're going to deal with it how you're going to be most effective so this information is coming into your life and it needs to be triage to triage is a French word and I pick this word on purpose because it doesn't just mean to sort to sift to select it means something very very specific we use the term triage to refer to sorting people who are injured okay let's zoom in this is a toe tag here so if you ever have a zombie apocalypse then there's going to be a triage so here's the toe tag if you have a zombie apocalypse and all these people are in the streets and there have some are dead and some are not dead what do you do do you take the first person and help them no you're going to figure out well who is hurt a little bit who is really really hurt who's dead let's get them off the street but isn't it interesting that in your email an email from Steve Ballmer and an email from your wife and an email fro for Viagra I'll sit next to each other in the same inbox as if they are of equal importance that needs to be triaged additionally we have this information coming in but we haven't really thought about where the work needs to be there's three kinds of work there's predefined work work that you've set up ahead of time that's that's work that you planned to do okay there's work as it appears this is work that's just showing up in your inbox or phone calls or texts just work appears and the most important kind of work he's got like a he's doing that let's go it's very smooth I like that I don't know it's floating magically I have no idea how it's happening that is really creepy and then there is the most important work which is the act of defining work where do you think we spend most of our time we spend it on No wow that would be that would be correct we spend it on working as it appears because things pop up and then you start doing them because it's very urgent but what you should be doing is working on defining work when was the last time that you shut down outlook shut down Gmail sat down and thought about what work you should be doing not for five minutes prefer like an hour sit down make an appointment with yourself and decide what you should be working on what is the most important thing and when you try to figure out what the most important thing is you can apply the four DS are you going to do that do the thing are you going to drop it we're going to talk about the importance of dropping things are you going to delegate it lets someone else work on it which is a really hard thing for us to do because we're programmer type people our personalities are such that we don't trust anyone else to do the work so we're not good at delegating but here's the trick kids managers are good at delegating so if you want to be a manager first learn to let someone else do your work okay this is from David Allen now if I take this information from David Allen who created a system called getting things done and we apply it to Stephen Covey's management style if you're familiar with Stephen Covey I've taken David Allen's and overlaid it on this graph this is the importance axis okay things that are more important or higher up and then urgency so something that is both urgent and important you should probably do right now examples of that would be a baby's coming baby's coming let's do it right now things that are not important but urgent maybe someone else can do things that are neither urgent nor important actually excuse me or down here where you need to be spending time or things that are very very important but the urgency hasn't happened yet it's funny because procrastination is a way of setting yourself up to not do something until well you have to do it you're forcing yourself to do it by making it 3:00 in the morning the night that it's due that's the wrong way to do things we change this you can see crises go up here and trivia goes down here and it's interesting because you guys spend a lot of time on Twitter so let's talk a little bit about Twitter because where do you think Twitter falls in the urgent and important I love Twitter you guys probably know if you follow me on Twitter you know I love Twitter but does any work happen on Twitter there is literally nothing useful that can ever come up Twitter that's going to get your job done so you just have to accept that this is a picture of a mouse with any electrode plugged directly into its brain into the pleasure center of its brain and they do these experiments where if the mouse just pulls that lever it's going to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain so then the mouse just has to pull to refresh that sense of good feeling right it's literally a drug pull-to-refresh that's funny that you point that out yeah just just pull to refresh and somehow then everything will be okay and you'll feel you'll feel better if you have any confusion at all that Twitter is a drug I hope that this makes it extremely clear so how do you get things done well you start by dropping things if you took this in computer science you took networking you know that any good system has flow control systems that work drop packets even more than that communication as its nature is fault tolerant if you miss a phone call they'll probably call back probably depending on what the phone call is it about if it was about finalizing your divorce then maybe they won't call back but for the most part communication is fault-tolerant you've all seen this with phone calls breaking up sometimes even when you're talking with so and that the breaks up and you understand them you can still figure out what's being said sometimes dropping the ball is the right answer and I have found in my experience that a boss will respect you more for saying no I am overwhelmed I need to stop I can't do this because I'm doing that or hey boss I can do this or this which one would you like done well you can have it good fast or cheap pick two bosses will respect you for saying no because here's the thing if you are the person who answers email at 2:00 in the morning at your company if you're the person who is answering a page in church on Sunday if you are the person who is available 24 hours a day and you even put it on your email signature and we all know this person at work who has me I'm always available call me at these numbers and this number you can Skype me here you can use viber here you can text me here I am always available let me know if I can help you then you are sending the message you are teaching your boss how to treat you you're telling them that you are the person that will be called at 2:00 in the morning you're you're saying please my personal time is meaningless my family is not important to me call me anytime drop the ball let it go sometimes unless you're this guy and then don't drop the ball and totally totally unrelated this is awesome this is a guy's surfboarding on an alligator totally just completely random but it was awesome now do you have the TV systems here where you can like set something to record and it records on a hard drive it's like what did we call it a TiVo what do you call it the DVR or a digital recorder okay so when this came out in America we thought this was a gift from God that that think he came down I'm like we hear the Ten Commandments and then he went back and then he brought the TiVo and he said you can record law-and-order do you have Law & Order alone ownership what's the Met what's an American show here that you have give CSI Dexter I actually have Dexter taped on my that's a little disturbing that Dexter is the first show that comes out of here yes I like texture a lot when when the DVR came out when the teen the DVR came out it was an amazing gift because I felt it was giving me time this is amazing I don't have to be there to watch Dexter I can say record and then I will have like the Dexter Channel I have all the Dexter's in one place and then as time went on my list of unwatched shows got longer and my DVR went from being a gift to being a to-do and my wife and I I don't know if you've had these discussions with your spouse but it's like okay we if we put the kids to bed early we can watch all seven episodes of Dexter tonight we just will skip the commercials we'll go go go go go we can watch 7:00 then we'll be caught up and the the DVR was was pressing on us like it was the psychic weight of these unwatched shows were stressing us out and we had to ask ourselves is that what we need to be doing we like that TV but we're stressed out how do we get the things done well what we started doing is we started considering the rule of three and this is a really good rule of thumb write down three outcomes that you really want to get done in a single day when you wake up in the morning don't look at the crushing to-do list of the stuff you're not going to get done that's a guilt system just pick three try this I'm totally serious pick three things you're going to get done today and try to get those three things done and then look back on your day and say I did a great job I got those three things done and then expand your scope a little bit and what are the three things I want to get done this week three things I might want to get done this day or like you know get the product to build and add some unit tests and set up continuous integration and for the year it might be make my business larger or get a new office or some larger scope but three is a great number it's a very comfortable number and if you use these bite-sized chunks the day of the week the year then on Monday you sit down for your week and you say what is the vision for my week literally think about what a really great week would look like a week that wouldn't make you feel guilt and I have this guilt and this faux ninis thing is an important theme because I know what it feels like to get to work start checking email and then you checked email and it's 2:00 in the afternoon and you've done nothing but do email and then you start getting you know okay I'm starting to get my flow I'm doing my email and then I'm closing I'll start doing cohhd cohhd cohhd it's 3:00 in the afternoon I got to go home soon and then I got to go home soon and then I've only done like two hours of coding so that I've I'm feeling guilty and sad and I've wasted the company's time so then I'll put the kids to bed and then I'll try to code at night we're paid to code and we do more of it at night think about your Monday and what you'd like to get done and then on Friday look back on your week and think about reflect on your week and think what are like what did i do right what did I do wrong because here's another little thing for you being busy being super busy especially bosses that are just so bound with very busy and very patient very important I'm very busy very busy and I'm very important being busy is a kind of laziness because it's showing that you're not focused enough to decide what to be working on so you're going to work on everything it's indiscriminate action what is indiscriminant that means acting without thinking I would much rather have someone who is focused and doing an amazing job on one thing one thing for eight hours then someone who thinks I'm impressed with their ability to multitask and juggle at the same time while standing on one foot now here's another one for you being creative and making something is the opposite of hanging out so when you're hanging out when you're on Twitter when you're just chilling when you're doing your email whatever you're doing I don't know what it is but it is absolutely the opposite of being creative so you've got to start dropping things think about that someone is wrong in the internet I need to stay up late to fix it the most healthy thing you can do there is let it go let it go scale yourself so once you're decided the things that you want to do you can be more efficient so what I want you to do is do some homework for me this is homework for later take the data streams the things in your life that are streaming into your life not just email but Facebook and Google and Skype and chats and physical paper and and tickets and bills and all that stuff and I want you to sort them sort them with signal versus noise the noisy things that don't matter and the signal that really matters to you the things that you care about sort them here's my sorted list this is my personal list your list will be different because I'm a community manager the phone and by phone I mean phone Skype texts I'm always talking to the community I'd Skyped with some of you guys before I think that face-to-face communication is important so I am up doing a lot of video calls those are important what's not important sadly it's Google Reader and TiVo those are just guilt systems but to notice this here this is another important one here work email I've split that out because I think that the inbox where everything is appear where everything is equal is a mistake so I really recommend that people use email rules and filters unfortunately people take this too far and they create a thousand different rules and they do it in Gmail and do it everywhere and they say sort these things and they catch it and then you realize that your job at work is just deleting email and moving emails into folders and you're never going to see those emails again you're never going to do them so this is the email rule that I use one email rule to rule them all I have an inbox and I have an inbox where I am cc'd this is so important and I think we should try to make this like a worldwide thing if you CC me on something that doesn't mean that you needed me to do it it means you're letting me know you're informing me if it comes to me correctly that means it was for me directly and it was important so look at this here I've taken over 240 emails and I've split them up which ones are the most important inbox but notice that inbox external is there I'm a community manager so people email me from inside Microsoft they email me from outside Microsoft how many emails are in the external folder zero why that shows you what I prioritize emails from you guys you think about that there's nothing in there if there were 80 emails in inbox external that would show you that I clearly don't prioritize the community which is my job I also have a separate folder this is search folder these are special it's not like an actual folder it's a view on my email and I call it bosses 3 up I made a special rule that said any message from a boss that shows up anywhere three bosses up all you know Scott goose got hunter other Scott some other guy named Scott all the Scott's all the way up they will show they're just so I don't miss them and then I have one called big ass mail that in case I don't I don't want to fill up my mailbox sometimes someone sends a screenshot of their multiple monitors set up as a bitmap I want to delete that so you make these two here that's what's important so what this means is that you're going to train your boss that if he see sees you on something it's an informational thing the very first time your boss sends you something in C sees you and asks you to do it don't it'll only happen once why didn't you do that thing I see seed you oh I thought you were just informing me if you need me to do something send it to me directly okay cool problem solved this means that I can focus on the things that are important that I was actually mailed to and then those I can look at every couple of days I literally only look in the CC folder every day or two it is completely freeing and it cut my email by two thirds now here's the next big challenge for you because if we're going to do some crazy stuff let's just go all the way shall we don't check email in the morning checking email in the morning is how you time travel to the afternoon let's get into work I've got my coffee here let's go ahead and get our day started and fire up email well it's 2:00 in the afternoon what just happened you checked email at 9:00 was email one of the three things you needed to get done today No so do the three things that you needed to get done today schedule time for email you schedule time for meetings you don't want to go to why don't you schedule time for email I literally put on my calendar one hour check email and I time box it time box it very important time boxing is important put the time in a box do the work and then be done we let email tell us what to do we should be doing that ourselves now if you respond to email they will respond back so the number one way to get more email is send more email it's okay sometimes to not answer an email you just have to ask yourself what's important don't answer every single one because you're basically saying if you disagree with me that's fine but you're saying no Scott I can answer every single email and I will do it at 2:00 in the morning well you're just on a treadmill running as fast as you can and you're teaching people how to treat you anyone here can a consultant independent consultant doing contracting work Rob's one cup of people if a client emails you at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Sunday even if you're in front of your computer and you reply to them you just taught that client that you're the guy that will answer stuff at 2:00 on a Sunday and next Sunday when they email you and you don't answer they'll be mad at you so there's tools you can use like one is called boomerang for Gmail or you can also an outlook when you hit Send you know that there's an options folder that says the time you want it sent so even if you are working on a Sunday tell the email that you want it sent at 9:00 a.m. on Monday and it'll just sit in your outbox totally serious because then your boss knows I don't work on Sundays I tweeted something a couple of days ago and people bunch of people yelled at me because they said that I was on stereotyping Europeans I was in why would we do that it's not it's not like we stereotyped Americans do we don't stare tap America no no stereotypes at all um so I'm at the Warsaw Airport and this guy is there and he's sitting with his wife and the phone rings and I can hear him someone is upset you know what the guy says no no no no no I am I am no no stop stop I don't care I'm on holidays I would back on the 12th goodbye click now no one else was doing that but I was just like I was looking around to see if the other people were as amazed by the and they kept they went on with their lives no one else thought that was amazing and I was like that's awesome I men Europeans know how to break you know I mean he was chilling he was just like no I'm on holiday sorry hmm Americans can't you sir oh yes sir oh I'm I am I'm at Disneyland yeah I know I can leave Disneyland that's okay I I will I will let me let me see if I can FTP into that right now sir don't put energy into things that you don't want more of if you like that feeling if you like that feeling then that is how you're going to get that feeling that's called urgency addiction there's a difference between being important being an important person at work and being the one who is addicted to the urgency of work there's always something going on at work if you want to be addicted to urgency there's always something going on at work now let's talk about scaling yourself here conserve your keystrokes how do you conserve your keystrokes check this out if you email me sir and you say Oh mr. Scott I need you to send me the code right help me I'm graduating with my masters tomorrow and I need you to write the program in mail at 3:00 if I write you five pages and include the code okay I just gave him the gift the gift of thousands of my keystrokes that are in my fingers but there is a limited number of keystrokes left in my hands before I die and I will never get those keystrokes back I don't know you you thin like a very lovely gentleman but how do I make my keystrokes meaningful while also helping him any suggestions where do I put my keystrokes Google no no no I blog them and then I send him a link I put them in documentation and I send him a link I put them on SharePoint or a wiki or in the product documentation I put them effectively anywhere but email email is where your keystrokes go to die no actual work happens on email email this is work we're talking now this is where work happens email should be used for the meeting that we set up and then we go out to lunch and we have it we have work email is for setting things up but if you're using email as chat client email is not IRC if you're writing more than a few sentences in an email you're just wasting your keystrokes and you're wasting your time especially if you're emailing the person in the next cubicle so I recommend that you limit the number of sentences that you put on an email this is a really cool website it's actually the in Spain it says five sentence says dot es and it says this is a policy that all email will be less than five sentences you just can put it in your signature and it's a way of saying this is a very short email because I'm trying not to waste time sometimes people think this is too much you're lying Scott this is too intense how can we survive on only five sentences fine three three sentences pick the number that makes you happy it doesn't matter the point is limit your email because you're wasting your keystrokes think about all the long-winded emails that your you are writing and your co-workers your writing to answer questions put that knowledge somewhere that it has a Lync work documentation wiki's knowledge bases anywhere of an email okay also there's physical things that you get so you need to find a trusted source and put things in that trusted source for any one medium and by medium a medium could be physical stuff or emails or chats or pictures or whatever pick a location for that medium so like you don't want to set up a complicated system where there's 15 different places to look put all your stuff in Evernote or put all your stuff in OneNote I don't care but put it in one place that when I talked about email before notice how there was no folder hierarchy for mailing lists and stuff there's just another folder called all mail and I can search it complicated hierarchies are too complicated just for each thing in your life have a trusted source I put all my presentations in Dropbox I put all my code somewhere in a source control system I put all my email and Outlook in Gmail and all of my notes in OneNote the point there is that you want to find a place doesn't matter where you put it pick the one that makes you happy you put it somewhere where you can find it and you can trust it because trusting is so important you need to be able to put it there so that it is released from your brain and that the weight member the psychic weight isn't on you anymore you know when you're writing code and you're writing coding like okay don't forget to get milk I need to buy milk on the way home writing code writing code what am I supposed to get milk right okay milk milk you're telling yourself that you're multitasking but you're not because there's a thing that's weighing on you put that thing somewhere doesn't matter if it's to do dot text doesn't matter but you need to be able to put it somewhere where it is fully released and it will remind you again if it's Siri or if it's a OneNote or a Google Calendar don't care the goal being to focus on one thing is it funny how the project manager at your work probably is the person who has the most emails they're probably the one with thousands of emails you've seen it because you've looked over her shoulder one time you have like six thousand emails who's wrong with you and what is what does she say well I know where everything is well she would know where it was if it wasn't in her inbox it would be in a folder that's called not my inbox your inbox is for processing if it's in your inbox it hasn't been thought about yet it's not a storage location this is the person in your life who's doing your scrums right your project managers doing your scrums but they can't manage their own lives that's not good she talked to her or him what you could consider doing is scheduling your own sprints your your project has Sprint's right you sprint for a week and at the end of the week you talked about the Sprint why don't you schedule work Sprint's little short Sprint's where I'm going to go and sprint for two hours now there's an important thing about sprinting when you sprint do you think about anything else other than sprinting very important point do you guys know who's saying bolt is world's fastest man have you ever seen him texting while sprinting doesn't happen I saw a guy riding a bicycle down the street over here he was texting it was extremely impressive but we don't schedule these Sprint's what do we do this is what it looks like when we're having our projects there's a great technique for sprinting that's called the Pomodoro Technique you guys familiar with this any Pomodoro people up here oh this is beautiful I love my Pomodoro people do you have your official ooh and then he brought out his tomato a Pomodoro it's Italian for tomato and this is just a little timer you can use an egg timer or any tea timer it doesn't matter a Pomodoro is a unit of time don't think of it as a funny timer think of it as a unit of time one Pomodoro is 25 minutes 25 minutes not 30 because you need that 5-minute break at the end 25 minutes the trick with the Pomodoro Technique is you can never done one before as you sit down and you set your timer and you focus on one thing for 25 minutes which sounds easy turns out it's the hardest thing your lover do because you're vibrating with other things that are weighing down on you and you're going to just Alt you're going to alt-tab to other stuff and you're going to switch and then the solitaire is going to open up and you're going to be tweeting and you just hand is tweeting I don't even know this hand wants to code but that one wants to tweet what you need to do is you need to observe the times that you interrupt yourself okay there are two kinds of interruptions there are internal interruptions these are the ones where you alt-tab or you oh I got it okay get milk I just interrupted myself I got to get some milk those are internal interruptions oh you know I really got to play solitaire that's I'm really really good at solitaire though so that's cool and I don't know what that is and toasters on bagels dancing and the second one is external interruptions you want to think about those interruptions in your life be aware of them so if an internal or external interruption happens what you do is you're doing your work and you just have a sheet of paper and you just put a tick I always interrupted work work work work work I just interrupt myself again and then at the end of the Pomodoro at 25 minutes you look at that and you go I interrupted myself six times in 25 minutes I'm going to do another Pomodoro take a five-minute break go back work oh I only interrupted myself three times that time and then once and you want to improve your focus now external interruptions are more difficult though external interruptions you don't know what's happening and suddenly just boom you've been interrupted and you don't know what's going on you have to say I'm in the middle of a sprint I'll be done in 25 minutes and unless the server farm is on fire that's okay your boss will respect you I'm sorry boss I'm making money for the company right now did you did you need me to reboot your computer for you no okay I want to go ahead and create value for our business right now is that the point here is to embrace flow and if you go out and search for the Pomodoro Technique you can get the free book on the topic okay it's a great technique because you want to stay engrossed and excited about the thing you're excited about the way that children do kids are so excited about stuff they just focus and they just draw I'm doing my coloring right now and I don't want to be no I don't want don't bother me I'm coloring but we don't do that we want to be interrupted but what happens is if you're interrupting yourself all the time at the end of the day you know what you're going to feel like man I did not do anything today I don't know what happened well maybe it was because you were dealing with all those interruptions anything important will come your way many times if there is another 911 someone will tell you someone will say hey you know there's another 911 Wow crazy that sucks you're not going to discover that from sitting on the cnn.com homepage and hitting refresh refresh refresh does anything happened yet refresh refresh try to be cannot be captured be wrapped up in that thing that has captured your attention I want you guys to be single tasker's not multitaskers this guy thinks that multitasking is the best way to do things well in computer science you probably have heard that the optimal number of threads in any system is one because what is the system doing when it's not doing work it's context switching and is context switching free no you know when you're working working working in like your mom calls mom I'm at work I don't know if you guys sound like that when your mom calls but we ah mom okay what was I doing oh right I was writing code what am i working on that's a context switch she just burned two minutes well that may sound silly but that adds up and then that two minutes turns into an hour and then an eight-hour day becomes a seven hour day so if you burn an hour every single day context switching how many hours is that a week that's five hours a week that's 20 hours a month 20 hours is a half a week think about that we just did the math you could burn a half of a workweek just on context switching single tasking is how you get stuff done here's an example of extremely poor multitasking I want you to watch very carefully here and watch the arm watch wait for it oh yeah in America we have a word for people like this organ donor multitasking is unsafe best way to avoid texting while in the car put your phone in the boot put in the trunk you can still Bluetooth but if you have a bad habit and I've had that habit myself you just the hand just something something important could have happened in the last 10 minutes I have to know if you're pulled to refreshing in your car you're going to die maybe not now but it's going to happen so put your phone in the trunk so what are some things that you could do well you can walk and chew gum that's very good multitasking one of the things that I like though is is working out which none of us likes to do except for my buddy over here has it going ja I met this gentleman he's got really good arms and I wanted to ask him yesterday how he get it and I was too embarrassed to ask so the way that I work out is I work out and listen to podcast and I work out and I watch TV because remember it's before I talked about TiVo I love television like I unapologetically loved television and I know that there are people who are like oh I don't even have a television mm-hmm you know I only I only read very old hardback books no man Dexter ah when I get home tonight i am so watching the first episode of dexter ah but that's not good use of my time but if i workout while i'm doing that that's real multitasking i can run on the treadmill and watch Dexter I can do push-ups and I can watch Dexter I can watch as much as my rule I can watch as much TV as I want as long as I can keep moving and when I collapse in exhaustion I have to turn off the television set that's real feasible multitasking more TV i watch the better shape i get in what a great deal and what's the only thing preventing someone from doing that is the willpower sometimes when I see when people see a person who's very fit I know he's wasting all his time in a gym I think that's a person with willpower they made a decision and they followed through I wish I had that kind of willpower I've been sucking it in the whole time I've been up here you can commute and you can read you can utilize idle waiting time you can be doing your when you're waiting in line you can be doing things with your phone you can drive and listen to podcasts that's a great use of time don't set up a system though where you can't succeed don't set up a guilt system we all have this pile of books don't we it's the pile of books that you're going to read this week the problem is it's a year old I'm never going to read the ruby way but I keep moving it up and down the pile of guilt okay well maybe I'll just read the top three I'll rearrange it and I'll put those at the top it's a monolith it's a monument to my own failure so I took half of those books and I put them on the shelf and I decided I will actually read these this week but when am I going to read them I'm so busy well I make appointments to check email and I make appointments to go to meetings that I don't want to go to I made appointments to read absolutely I made an appointment to read and if I feel that I was doing a great job at work I put a half an hour at lunchtime and I said I'm gonna read a book and I'll sit there and the boss will come in and I'm reading you know some netbook what are you doing I'm becoming a better programmer for the company sir well keep it up Scott well thank you I will I'm on code CAD amiright now becoming a better programmer remember though that you can't be simultaneously current on all of these different things you can't be the best programmer and the best pop culture person and know who's winning on x-factor and know about all the latest diet trends but there's always someone who will be there's always someone who is unhealthy how can we use their their unhealthiness their obsession to work for us well what you do is you let them be the ones that are up to date on all of these things let someone else guide you if you have to go and do something like learn Python separate out the things that you you need to know ask a Python expert what do I need to know not everything just the need to and then decide I'm not going to draw the line that need to know or maybe I'll just draw it it nice to know the problem is we tell ourselves we need to know Python including all edge cases and completely useless trivia useless trivia is what the internet for you just need to decide is going to be neat too should know are nice to know find someone else who is doing this work for you go through your news feeds and audit them delete blogs because you're just setting up a guilt system if your google reader says 1,000 plus mark all is read it's not going to happen if you have a thousand emails in your inbox go from a week ago and then just delete everything or move them all into a folder declare email bankruptcy I'm not saying delete them but just you know control a and then move them into a folder that says not my inbox and then you'll have the clear inbox for the first time in your life asking the amazing and then start sorting from there find someone who is good at this so what I do is I find some blogs where someone else is reading everything that they want to read this is one website called boeing-boeing it's wonderful things the verge I don't read fifteen technology blogs anymore I read the verge because they have a team of thirty people that are finding the cool stuff I read Lifehacker you know find that aggregator find that person who does read a thousand blogs there's a really great blog by a guy named Chris Alcock called the morning brew and when read the morning brew first blog that I read in the morning because he reads like a thousand net blogs a man is sick I don't have to now he's a robot therefore I don't have to be a robot so I went from being a Google Reader guide to being a guy with a couple of bookmarks I just open a couple of tabs in the morning and everything's okay and I like reading this stuff I will send this information to Instapaper anyone use Instapaper or read it later or pocket I'm going to talk a little bit about this these are great because I want to idolize I'm gonna I want to utilize rather idle time if I have time that's not being used I want to use that right isn't it great how innovative things have become before the iPhone and after the iPhone I think that's really great um for me the iPhone has completely changed the way that I poop I don't know what we did in there before but I read technical blogs and that makes it really useful time so some tools that we can do to do to deal with that we can find some tools that will help to make our idle time more useful we're going to find the right tools for the job first thing we're going to do is we're going to figure out how to cut things out of our life because you can't cut something if you aren't measuring first you can't say well I'm going to throw this out I don't know if it was useful time or not there's a really great application called rescue time rescue time sits in the background and it watches what you're doing and it sends you a report of what window was in front categorized so here is very distracting time by hour and look at me here 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. I'm reading The Guardian I'm reading news and it's categorized as very distracting here is very productive time by day I'm working an outlook of doing command prompt stuff you can see now what happened on Monday here why was I not doing any productive work on Monday turns out I was in the hospital because my appendix burst why am i sky no product Avant OU's day that's because I'm an idiot and I took my laptop to the hospital so this is me checking email from my hospital bed turns out if they cut your appendix out and then you put a really warm a hot laptop on your tummy it really hurts so don't do that rescue time is a really great way to keep track of things like that um sometimes though there's physical things there's like like a ticket someone will send you a ticket or a coupon or a bill to pay and you can't put that in Evernote you know you could scan it or whatever but I mean you really need the physical paper so we use a thing that's called 43 folders this is amazing technology rather than a whole cabinet full of stuff and papers all over my desk I get 43 folders 12 that are labeled the months and 31 that are the days so this is what October 5th right is that correct so I would have 5 6 7 8 all the way up through 31 and then the next one would be November December and it'd be a circularbuffer so if I got a ticket to come to a conference in next March I just take that ticket and I put it into March and the psychic wait is released I don't even know where it is anymore I just know that it's in the system and then in the end of the month I just keep moving my days and then my months and then one day I open up March 9 a look at the ticket I forgot all about that and here it has come into my life again just with 43 folders and it ends up being about this big and then you go and you get like a little tiny briefcase and boom that's my whole filing system it's yummy sometimes I get really stressed out so I sink to paper there's no about this trick of syncing to paper this is a really great PDA because it has no batteries never runs out and I can use it on the airplane I even have like multi-touch I just go like this when you get really really stressed out and you think to yourself you know I would not be stressed out if I only had a Retina display because Retina display has more dots per inch has like 200 dots per inch well my my laser printer has 300 dots per inch so I just print stuff out and you know what you can do to multiply your resolution this is like 10,000 pixels wide when you're really stressed out and you feel like you need to get the big picture write some stuff down why do you think database people and architects print out things and put them up on the wall because a 10 inch view on the world is too small sometimes you just need to put it on paper and back up and see the big picture and you will feel better and I do that all the time best thing it's really really cheap any Evernote people Evernote Evernote's wonderful talk to your friends that raise their hands Evernote is great also I use OneNote I switched from Evernote to OneNote because it's got an iPhone version now so I can have it on my iPad and my iPhone and my Windows system it's on Windows Phone so OneNote or Evernote doesn't matter which one you pick the point is you put your note in one place and it's anywhere trusted system I use things like workflowy which is great for managing large outlines of things I've even started putting together a Kanban board for my life so I actually ended up taking my to-do text file and I just keep track of the things I need to do here I got my blog posts here you go upgrade to Windows 8 I have a running my life like a scrum and it works really well it's very lightweight that's why we went to the scrum system is didn't tweet because it's lightweight now to the bathroom are you this person yeah and that funny turns out that opening a new tab doesn't mean I'm going to read it later opening a new tab mean I don't care about my systems memory and I don't really care about this provost link because I'm never going to go and look at it again but they put restore all tabs into Google Chrome as a feature so when you reboot and finally crash you can open up all 43 again seriously open up task manager and ask yourself do all my processors need to be running Google Chrome when you open up these tabs what you're really saying is I want to read this later that's what you're saying that's different having things open for reference for a project you're working on is different from Wow interesting article about we should be eating more apples I'm going to read that am I going to open that a new tab and let the let the flash player on the ads on that tab use up CPU in the background no I want to read it later so I use the thing called Instapaper I've got a little read it later button in my tool bar there and I just click read it later here's the best part they don't have a Kindle or an e-reader or anything like that or you've got Kindle on your phone turns out at the end of the week they will mail you a book automatically of everything you wanted to read all week imagine getting like a personal newspaper of all the really cool stuff that you care about that you've been collecting all week shows up on Friday that's Instapaper it's fantastic it adds something browsing is fun email is fun but there was never really a gesture for read it later go do your email filters like I talked about consider using things like if this then that which is a great workflow system you can go and build workflows like if I put a new photo on Instagram then put it in my Dropbox or if I tweet something put it on my Facebook any kind of workflow that you want use Dropbox I don't even worry about this laptop crashing everything's in Dropbox here's the thing guys if it's not helping me now this guy said make money I think that's a little selfish I'm going to blank that out that's not helping me to achieve my goal spend time with my kids become more a better programmer become a manager at my job what your goal is if it's not helping you blank its mental clutter and throw it out audit the things in your life that you're doing that means friends too and if they're not getting you where you need to go throw them out so here's your homework and I'm almost done I'm running 30 seconds over go through and audit your sources start scheduling work sprints turn off distractions fred is online and little piece of toast pops up oh he's online thank you that was so important that you had to pop up and tell me turn off email notifications turn off skype notifications turn off chat okay there's nothing that could pop up that is so important that it needs to keep you away from your focus look at your inbox think about being efficient think of it being effective look at your personal toolbox and that is all my time thank you guys very much for letting me talk to you today you

Channel: Dev Day

Views: 85,370

Rating: 4.9555864 out of 5

Keywords: ScottHanselman, devday, abb, productivity, hanselman

Id: IWPgUn8tL8s

Length: 61min 52sec (3712 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2012