Scott Hanselman - Personal Productivity

mostly blue belt at Taekwondo I mean stop with the kicking what do you do and then in hand surgery that's fresh and I can show you pictures of broken toes I've broken them three times got got a toe caught in a man's belly button there's a thing I think that Taekwondo martial art people which one Aikido Taekwondo okay so you know a hook kick but a twist kick sorry a twist kick and I got my pinky toe caught in his belly button and then then I went down in the toe stayed in this building so kind of like you know and so that that toe is kind of like hey in the other direction which is fun but this is what we do when we have a midlife crisis right how can I prove I still have worth beat up other fat men so I did that tonight and that's why I'm late and thank you for your patience all right cool my name is Scott I am always when I give a talk concerned about the expensive meeting calculator you go and just figure everybody makes 50 bucks an hour and do the math you know holy crap was like a $12,000 meeting that we're at right now and I don't want to like piss anyone off so feel free to vote with your feet if you think that this sucks is it Chipotle down the street I'll meet you there after I don't in any way want to waste your time certainly also I think it would be enjoyable since we have a reasonably sized group here that I shouldn't be talking at you this shouldn't be a conversation like it should be more like this because we're all friends and peers so we can maybe I can share a couple of thoughts and some things that I'm currently thinking about and then we can have a bit of a conversation if that makes sense what a little bit of context if you have no idea who I am if you have a projector that works did the projector not go on because it's like I'm looking at the projector no you actually have a hide button hide video I'm gonna push that this thing runs Java and the user group is not here right now there we go got it cool yay so yeah my name is Scott and I've been in Portland forever my whole life since day one and I grew up on the actually let me turn the lights out actually maybe in the on the side I grew up in Northeast Portland I moved to Beaverton and hung out with Kristen in middle school and we both became programmers so we got that going for us were the only ones that got off the tough streets of Beaverton which was cool now I have been blogging for a non-trivial amount of time and actually if you go out there in Google with Bing for Scott there's Scott sports Scott Brant toilet paper these bastards that it all went south with a restricted trademark I used to be first like literally on the homepage of Google when you search for Scott and then all of the the other Scott's came around and now I'm like second behind whoever this schmuck is right 150 years I mean what is that really right yeah so if you go in google for Scott you know I'm one of the top Scott's in the area and I blogged before it was called a blog and that is kind of my claim to fame isn't blogging but it's rather not stopping blogging so I'm just going to go to my blog archives I'm going to just hold down the the spacebar and look at some of the stuff that I've been blogging about so this is probably going back I want to say 16 17 18 18 years and I have a bit of a reputation of being productive but that I don't believe in hustle culture and I want to talk about that because a lot of people that obsess about this kind of stuff I'm still going by the way get oh and I also have a podcast that you should all listen to my last name is is Hansel men handsome man like Hansel and Gretel man and I have a podcast I have done come on podcast this will be the one like 33 years ago I started the podcast right now this is episode 721 and one of the things that's worth pointing out about my podcast is that most podcast no disrespect if you have a podcast are two white guys on skype talking about JavaScript and I made a podcast many many many years ago hundreds of podcasts ago I want to point out that I'm still pressing space and I'm having no trouble finding really qualified women and people of color isn't that a funny thing with that pipeline that crazy pipeline problem that we're having just a challenge anyway having absolutely no issue putting on a show for 700 episodes that's every single Thursday for the last 700 episodes so I got a podcast I got a blog and none of it's my job okay so I tweeted about this because I was like kind of feeling myself a little bit I was like hey you know good job for not quitting and someone's like I don't like the way that your your your what it was the word that they said I was like me like the you know the San San Francisco Bay hustle culture like always be hustling you know you're not you're your company fail because you didn't try hard enough that's right I don't like that so I'm not trying to say hey look at me I'm productive yearning to try harder what I'm saying is that through focus and deliberate practice and absolute choice about what I wanted to be doing at the time I was able to do these things while also having a job and that is what I think productivity means and when people go out and say oh well you know it's about lists or it's about this or it's about that I think it's more about intentionality and more about what they call deliberate practice does anyone into deliberate practice no that is right it's a kind of its productivity plus mindfulness and being thoughtful like you you don't get to watch nine hours of a Netflix show and then wonder why you didn't get anything done that day now the alternative flipside of that is like well I needed that that time that binge to recharge like I owed that to myself so it's important that I and no one ever go and take your recharging time and make you feel bad for it like you know why you didn't get that code done is that nine hours of watching whatever a Netflix that's not that's like binge shaming right but at the same time if you complain about that nine hours then you have to ask yourself well maybe I should have just done seven and then blog for two hours or studied or learn Spanish or got my blue belt or whatever right so what I am kind of against if I can be against something is people complaining about not getting stuff done when they just kind of like do other they find stuff to do other stuff so when at work was saying I don't know how you find time to blog and there I was like well you you poop every day right and they were like well yeah sometimes twice twice well I mean that's that's a level of productive that I would only aspire to that's amazing it must be really important to you and they were like yeah and that's like so you do find time for things that are important and then and as I trying to understand that they to do these things to talk to people to blog to learn to whatever is important to me therefore I make time for it and I set up systems by which I can be successful a lot of times when we want to be productive we set up systems that are guilt systems that is the exact opposite of what you want to do you want to set up a success system that inspires you to succeed rather than shaming you does everyone have that big book pile on their desk and they get like the ruby way somewhere middle of the thing and then every once in a while you'll like pick the Ruby way up and you'll put it on top and like this is the time I'm gonna raid their Ruby right yeah and it you're never gonna read that pile that book pile is a monument to your failure and it sits there every day you know like we have it on the ground or it's here it's whatever and it's just books you're not going to read and it exists and it's a tiny little voice in your head that says you suck so I realized that rather than having a pile of books I'm not going to read I literally let some of them go and I make small piles of books that I actually read like two or three just a reasonable number and then when they're gone I actually feel successful and I'm like oh that was awesome because it doesn't feel good to read one book in a pile of eleven but it does feel to be one or two out of a pile of one or two does that make sense so setting measurable goals right like I don't have any any illusions that I'm gonna be good at Taekwondo but at least I'm going you know twice a week and that's important to me and the idea that it's a marathon whether it be the blog or the podcast it looks like a lot of productivity but let's look at the blog for example go by date let's look at 2019 so here's the blog going all the way back to 2010 - okay so what do we notice about the blog let's just look February March April May what are we seeing here twice a week not four times a week like do you have a blog your blog you should plug five times a week oh my god how did this talk enhancement was great and he's guilted me into five times a week I want to go from zero five times a week and that will work for exactly two and a half days and you'll miss one and then you're gonna feel bad about yourself and then your very last blog post that people visit when they go to your blog it's gonna be four years ago and it's gonna be like I know I haven't blogged lately but I'm rededicating myself to blogging right so then you're gonna come and gonna get a job and then I'm gonna Google you and then I'm gonna find that your last blog post was four years ago and it was you saying I'm gonna blog more and it's just it's a thing right so for me twice a week was an amount that was like non-threatening but what's amazing about that is twice a week that's a hundred times a year holy that's like 100 pages like a book you know I mean and a hundred times a year like if you if you give a blog they need an outlook if you blog twice a week for 17 years you will be a moderately successful Pacific Northwest technologist in an obscure space of some renown like yeah she's like checkbox right that's going on my LinkedIn you know I mean I I told my my my dad was like you know people kind of know you and I was like I'm kind of the Bruce Campbell of programming size of you laughs because you know who Bruce Campbell is and fire of you're like is booth Campbell exactly that's me who the Hanselman who's Hanselman know because Bruce Campbell Bruce Campbell it's that guy from that thing right he's just is that character actor from that thing you know you're that guy yeah yeah that's me but for computers which means nothing that's not even like a guest star on Law & Order so we all have to like lower our expectations about what our doing so then I started thinking about well Who am I doing this for Who am I writing this blog post for here's the trick though friends let us PowerPoint PowerPoint PowerPoint yeah why am i blogging about stuff the biggest thing that keep people from blogging is this idea that well Who am I what do I know right Who am I to blog about Ruby right I did Ruby for like three years when it first came out I did rails and like rails blonde I shouldn't be blogging I don't know I have no authority of any kind so I did this blog post I got a 3d printer that's one of my most popular blog posts ever the basics of 3d printing from someone was 16 whole hours experience I just I just owned it like I have been 3d printing for a weekend and I just wrote up like the whole experience and people love that stuff but Who am I writing it for though right am I like a famous blogger no I get decent numbers but I'm not like Gruber or one of these people I it's not my job it's a side hustle so why let's say that you email me and you say oh you have a question yes what do you got oh that's cool okay so you like you thought that was a good hook right really Square Foot Gardening for programmers that's a thing I actually have that so let's say that you email me afterwards and you're like awesome talk here's a great question she's got a great question like oh holy crap that was a great question I'm glad she emailed me I don't know you right I'm not gonna give you the gift of my keystrokes like she said this amazing question oh I should have thought about that sure talk shoot like I only have so many keystrokes left like you maybe you may feel young but you have a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die how old are you how fast you type not very will say 60 you have 207 million keystrokes left it's going down by the way I just want to point that out it's actually going as we sit here that is assuming that you live to 90 you have 60 years of typing left that's four hours a day I had nothing but typing that is 67 novels that you could potentially write so get on that feel bad 414 medium size computer programs or a million emails to your boss okay so she emails me this like super awesome question and I'm like oh dude great question um but I'm not gonna give her 2,000 keystrokes like for free no like not gonna happen where can I put those keystrokes where can I put them I can put them anywhere with a URL doesn't matter blog maybe not medium don't put them in Walt Gardens cuz walled gardens suck but somewhere with a URL and then I email you a link to that thing and then she sends it to one friend I just doubled my keystroke potential like it's literally that you easy email is where your keystrokes go to die there's she's waste of time nobody reads your emails nobody prints an email out and puts it on the wall unless it has a password in it nobody laminates like just emails are just trash dumpster fire for your hands and your tendons and when your hands start going when you're old like me you're gonna regret a lot of those emails so every single time someone writes you an email you've got love that you're nodding you're like yes like this is exactly the thing put it in a knowledgebase article a wiki for God's sakes sharepoint if you have to OneNote literally anywhere and then send a link and then if she sends it to two people or three people or ten if only five people read your blog your million keystrokes becomes five million keystrokes so I've been doing that for the last 17 years can I don't email people stuff anytime someone has a question about something like for example if someone wants to come on my podcast I realized after about three times that I kept typing the same crap so I made a one-pager called Hanselman at slash get set go set up it says hey you're gonna be a guest on our show and then I realized that I was typing that URL a lot and then I made an autohotkey to just go like shift alt H and then it like prints out the URL like anytime this is the whole point right every time that you can automate stuff automate stuff like seriously dry that's the whole thing about rails right just don't repeat yourself don't repeat yourself you see the irony so anytime that you can yeah yeah it's a joke grenade it'll get you a little bit later now it's really fine you were laughing at the opening I understand that's not weird at all nothing wrong with that so I'm not writing the blogs for you or for the audience in any way and that's the thing people say well howdy why do you have a podcast how do you pick your people well you know how people are always when they're early in career how many people early in career here early in career like less than five years listen ten years okay cool one of the things that you're gonna want to do a lot is like call people and ask them to take you to coffee I got a minimum number of coffees left like there's like an I could measure coffees okay I don't mean to overly pivot on age a little bit but I'm pushing 50 and that gets you thinking right my dad's like 75 so let's assume he's around for 20 more years and that's optimal and he's kosher and I see him once a week I could measure the number of lunches we have left that's how you start thinking at this age so a very nice young young person says can I have coffee with you am i taking that got a lunch with my dad is that a lunch with my kids my 14 year olds 14 I got only four years with that kid that's a 1200 days and he's gone and I'll probably never talk to him again that's what the kids do right and that's a problem so how do i scale something like that give talks write blog post you YouTube's anything at all where I can get the word out mentorship rings I've got a mentorship group of about sixty people and we go and we pair off into little groups then we meet up so I can I can't do one-on-one mentoring because it just doesn't scale that this is my obsession I recognize that there is value in singular one-on-one time with individuals and there are people that I do have that time with but if someone says hey can I have coffee with you early in career not really now when I was early in career I wanted to have coffee with all kinds of cool people but they don't have time either but if you tell them would you like to be on my podcast you freaking love that so the podcast has been a long con the whole podcast is an excuse for me to talk to people that would normally not talk to me this guy here just talked to this guy his dad was the first black software engineer in America in 1946 just wrote a New York Times best selling book I would love to freaking have coffee with this guy but if we all email him simultaneously and say can we have coffee why is he gonna pick me but I emailed them and I said would you like to be in my podcast and he said well you push my book and I was like hell yeah I'll push your book by the book I have gotten to talk to all kinds of cool people on the show DEA Chase is in there somewhere Matt's Japanese dude nice Doug nice guy Martin Fowler what's uh where's DHH Hanna - no Hanna miner Oh purple but I must have changed the thing I talked to Martin and David and Hannah Mayer Hanson in 2007 again two people who I have no business talking to but I had a podcast right you two can't have a podcast any matter if no one listens to it people just don't ask no one has ever asked me but how many people listen to your podcast oh just me I just want to have lunch with you and record record it that's not weird at all no it's not you make a good-looking page like this good I honestly have no idea how many people listen to this show but I have this a wonderful wall of faces and I literally went to the lawyer just a couple of days ago and I put together a digital will to make sure that my domains and things will remain so with this we'll go read-only and I will be gone and that's three hundred and sixty hours of somewhat meaningful content and that cool so it only takes me about two and a half hours a week to do the podcast and the blog it's minimal so I want you to think about the kinds of stuff that you want to do and the kinds of value that you want to provide and if you're excited about it now I'm not saying that everyone needs to go and do this but I am mindful about it if I choose to not do a show one week then what is that what does that mean do I do I lose something do I lose momentum in this case here if I look at my calendar actually I won't bring my calendar because it's internal I've got three podcasts recording at lunchtime on Thursday that'll get three weeks out of the way so that I can take time off I actually took off eight weeks and we lived in South Africa last year and I kept the podcast going because I pre-recorded shows and then I hired a person on Fiverr to go and like publish the shows and then I added a little bit of code to my podcast site to invalidate the cache and auto publish the shows on every Thursday now cool so I can now go up here to my my little thing here this is the place where I do my podcasts and look at those and I've got the green one is coming next week and I've got the two yellow ones that are ready to go so I'm up I'm done for February I don't feel pressure there's no psychic wait to do that with me so far feel free to interrupt I said psychic wait let me talk about this a little bit we'll talk about a little bit about productivity unless you guys have any questions or thoughts you with me you like you buying what I'm selling we go okay cool blah blah blah this is Darth Vader on a cat it's got to keep it frosty make sure you're paying attention I've been coding for a very long time some yeah thank you very much the one true way that was I was actually programming three years by the time of that started that I actually wrote the first diabetes management system on a Palm Pilot I did it in 4k but that's literally enough that you could you could print memory out and put it on the ground and stand on a chair and see all 4k I mean like all is like a byte there that's wrong that's literally that's how much you had this was awesome like just think just because it's fun to talk about old stuff you see that circle that was the first time anyone ever drawn a circle on a Palm Pilot hey so my early in career people ain't boot camp people here why would that be interesting like oh he drew a circle yeh right what do you need to draw a circle what kind of thing do you need bootcamp people to draw a circle any radius you need math yeah math does not exist on a Palm Pilot no Palm Pilots only have integers they have 8-bit integers so how do you get a decimal point on an 8-bit integer well you cut it in half and you say everything in the middle left is going to be on the left of the decimal point everything on the right of the decimal point is gonna be on the other side of the decimal point so you basically pretend that a unsigned integer is in fact cut in half you treat as a float and then you go and find out that you don't have kind sine or cosine or the ability to do any kind of math like that and the screen is only 160 by 160 so instead I made a constant array that represented the biggest screen I could imagine any computer could ever have 1000 by 1000 and I made a 1000 hard-coded I generated it like at a command line and then pasted in a constant integer that represented a circle and then held it in in memory there and then shrunk it down to the size of the screen because you know what what device could ever have more than 1000 pixels it's madness and then drew a circle it was crazy like that was the best thing I've ever done in compute 30 years of programming like nothing makes you think you just like I stand up never done that before in any programmers just like you're at home and you're hanging out with your partner and you're just like right and you're like and they're just like don't care whatever this is I'm excited for you I'm glad that you're glad that you drew a circle all right yeah my wife is a nurse okay I've written all kinds of stuff we talked about that I wrote about being a phony that was great if you google for phony my face shows up which is fun this is a picture of my son ignoring the light that I put up that would indicate that I was on a call yeah it is very nice I've talked about kids and programming Square Foot Gardening for programmers building your own arcade cabinet before and after shot god help me I wrote an app for the Windows Phone I got a game called baby smash and we have any babies it's not for smashing babies it's for the baby to smash the keyboard and like stuff happens and that's open source yeah it's super awesome so we got babies like rock my babies 14 which is problematic I wrote a bunch of books that are trash I I'm working on a book right now called relationship hacks about being mayor and it being in a mixed marriage we have a geek and a normal person how you deal with that talk about the podcast I have a couple podcast I got another one called this developers life that is nothing at all like this American life in no way I have to say that for legal reasons I did one on pop culture called ratchet in the geek I've got a video you can download if you're interested cut get involved in tech it's a two-hour free documentary about getting involved in tech blogging Twitter Stack Overflow conferences user groups stuff like that do all of this because I enjoy it yeah when I went to Microsoft actually people said I was a sellout because I started an open-source back in the early 90s I was like a big open source person and I went to Microsoft people like you're such a sellout I thinking made me feel sad like I hurt my feelings but some somehow I was able to work through those those feelings that's a picture of me before Microsoft he's me after Microsoft worked out pretty well okay so a lot of this is just advice right so like feel free if you don't like the advice do you want me to take any like okay this actor that you don't know back in the day when and asked a question of this other actor that you don't know and said how do you write a movie script and he said you get some paper you put it in a typewriter you type fade in and you keep typing that's the way productivity advice was given in the in the in the 60s and 70s but if you want to scale yourself you got to go back to the basics you got to get down a computer science right the less stuff you do the more you can do like if you do nothing you can do it infinitely that's a really good quote I'm gonna make that a quote ok that's now famous quote here's a graph that proves that if you do nothing it has high throughput extremely high throughput nothing now there was a time when you could know all the information right you could know everything cuz there was like basically two books but now everything's just 1,000 plus does anyone have like 30 40 50 thousand items in their inbox and their iPhone and you don't even like see it anymore like it is like the little book the little badge it's like 50 thousand you just don't care like you could turn the badge off right like it's telling you that you suck and you just don't care yeah I never gonna read those emails just control a barque I just so they don't they don't like they're not teasing you now when I was developing software in the 80s there was no internet there were these two books and that was the sum total of all information so it was really easy to focus because you would sit down in the basement with these two books and then if you had a question you could put it on either phyto net you can google that or you'd like those and then you could go on a BBS ask a question and then in about four or five weeks someone would answer you and go I also have that question right the only kind of comparable feeling for the young people for you have you ever like posted a question then years later googled found yourself asking the question and there's still no answer that is like true loneliness you know I mean like just the profound depth of loneliness but now we have people being interrupted all the time right people are constantly being interrupted and we find ourselves in these situations where we feel like we're failing and what I am trying to do is to make people talk about that there is no safe place at big Co Nike Intel Microsoft Google Facebook Amazon whatever to go and talk to your coworker and say I feel like a failure because they are keeping the fact that they feel like a failure to themselves and we all just pretend like we're all just crushing it and then we go home and then we say you know I'm just gonna work late a little bit just to catch up because you know it's a busy time like February kind of timeframe that February March since very march/april kind of you know May June July August kind of like just the September October November you know January through March kind of time frame is busy and once I get past that over the hump it'll be awesome right and then we hope that things will work out but hope is not a strategy and no one talks about it so what I've broken down is a couple of concepts from uh Stephen Covey a couple of concepts from David Allen and and synthesize them into a system that helps me get centered and be deliberate in my practice now I give this talk all over the world and every time I go to a new place I put the word for the thing I'm about to talk about in the language the thing that's interesting though anyone speak a non English language which you got Japanese what's the word for effectiveness in Japanese think about that you can google it if you need to okay what's the word for efficiency in Japanese okay Google those pick Google those two words for me who else had another foreign language what you got kalpen de balzac day huh man bahut community gentlemen effectiveness efficiency what are the words in Hindi okay you check that anyone else any other languages what you'll find is for many many languages it's the same word so even for English speakers what's the difference is between effectiveness and efficiency in English well I don't know is it he says not a lot anyone got a definition for effectiveness and efficiency even as a native English speaker we got ones that efficiency or effectiveness that's efficiency for you that's good I like that that's good stuff so I call it like this effectiveness is doing right things setting at target its goal-oriented I'm gonna run a race which direction do I run that's the finish line I will run that way very effective running this way would be somewhat ineffective efficiency is doing things in an economical way so once I've picked my direction now I'm in a haul ass but if you go and translate like in Spanish they'll literally put the same words together the Japanese have the same yeah so it they mixed it you'll find this in many many languages this is how I like to phrase it so that's a good take a picture shot efficiency doing the right things no effectiveness yeah I did it myself see how hard this is this is important effectiveness is doing the right things I am an effective person at this task and then efficiency doing things right good stuff is this effective depends you jump the wrong way how do we make these decisions though we have all this crap coming into our lives all this information that's coming in it needs to be triaged I love language I love looking at language and parsing it out you know where this word is from what language that's from because English steals everything French exactly it's a word that means to sift to separate but you can dig more into that when we think about triage whatever you really think about we think about war zombies apocalypse toe tags right when it gets when the stuff goes down and you know that there aren't a lot of software engineers on the walking dead so think about your skill set I'm just saying there wasn't a guy in the walking dead that was like quick I need someone to reboot the router and then I was like I can do it no they want you to chop things and lift things so we're all dead unless you have a skill I saw there's an attila kilt around here somewhere that guy's probably got like a knife so there's potential you don't have a knife no you're supposed to supposed to have a knife in your sporran yeah utility man utility like if all of us I thought it was gonna be you you're you're gonna die in the next time it might be too late so no when stuff goes down how do you triage it well triage is very effective you're on the battlefield and you say are you dead are you walking wounded get off my battlefield you're fine you have to be aggressive when you're gonna survive a war like that you have to do the same thing with your email you know that one email that you've had in your inbox that's so important so very important that you haven't answered it yet because you need to give it the time it deserves in order to answer it and it will just sit there and it's been there you ever have an email from like last August you need it there it has to be there because it will be answered it's important that person may die I've actually had this happen people will die and I felt bad I never got back to them and like now that email bounces which is super sad so answer your emails or just declare that you're not going to do it be aggressive there's work that comes into your life and David Allen thinks about it like this there's predefined work work that you have set up ahead of time like we're gonna paint the house this weekend there's work as it appears like quick do this that work just appeared and then there's the work of defining work the work that we don't do is defining work does anyone have a meeting on their calendar anywhere at all in the week to figure out what the hell you're doing well you got that's great I love that what do you got Mondays Wednesdays when do you meet and touch it just by yourself or you have people there rock on superstar love that what do you got day prep when you do it every day you're like once a week whoa Saturday day prep that is impressive very no I mean that's awesome it sounds small but there's a moment there when you you just need to go how am i doing busyness is kind of an illusion and it's also a form of laziness being overly busy is a kind of laziness we'll talk about that when you have some work then the only things you can do to it is do it drop it delegate it give it to somebody else or defer it don't do it now if you take David Allen's DS and you take Stephen Covey's productivity urgency importance of you overlay the two so this is merging to productivity concepts importance on your vertical axis urgency across the horizontal axis things that are both urgent and important houses on fire baby's coming do it now build is broken website down do it now things that are neither urgent nor important dump it if something super super important but not yet currently on fire planning meeting awesome until it becomes a problem like I'll give you an example of a thing that's currently in my head I've got this blog had it for a few years I thought it was on a virtual machine didn't think about I got a free hosting deal years ago from a company called orcs web they never sent me a bill it's been 17 years nothing's happened forgot my password decided to go and find out what's going on orcs web doesn't exist anymore my blog still exists though how is that a thing turns out orcs web got bought by a French company and or Quebec close enough and they bought all that stuff so it's like oh okay fine my virtual machine is in Quebec cool rock on hey can you send me a copy of my virtual machine so I can run it in like a proper cloud I don't do Quebec but they're like Oh so sorry it's on the old hardware ok well that's cool where is it oh it's right here what do you mean right here no it's under my desk I'm on the phone with Francois and they literally took some of the servers from the acquisition and they just shoved it under his desk it's never been in a virtual machine he can touch it like he can put his hand on the hard drive I can push refresh and Oregon ago that was you that's not ok you know what the MTBF is right and we know what MTBF stands for meantime before failure how long do hard drives last 5 years my thing's been on the same hard drive for 17 years is a huge problem in the back of my mind it was down here and now it's slowly making its way over here it's not quite urgent but here's the deal one day it's gonna be pretty urgent and I'm like freaking out because I have to go and like move the whole thing and this is like 15 16 17 year old software like I'm running dotnet you know 2.0 and like that's 9 dot Nets ago and I've been the whole thing is done in XML so like and I because you know it was the time like we didn't know what we were doing kids we just we thought it was a good idea it is the new ha it's it will rise again my friend you think that curly braces are where it's at no man angle brackets right it's the same thing no you all think that Jason is cute it's not cute still just XML but with curly braces so that's another conversation yeah Moe the curly braces you can't see them it's still there it's totally still there again no I'm gonna be like old man who shakes fist at cloud and that's fine yeah I mean they're gonna just roll me out and I'll be like actually I was the way sgml where's my DG DS look all that stuff up XML it I was probably one of the big fans of that product point is this is becoming very very urgent and actually I have one XML file for each blog post so there's like 47,000 no XML it's a whole thing so what is currently in preparation phase is soon to become a crisis but things that are not important but still super fun to do interruptions interruptions are so fun you know why people like interruptions interruptions are a drug interruptions are pseudo important they make you feel oh god I have to take this co-op sorry I'm very important dear phone you're all a little vibration all the little notifications oh that's all just hiccups hiccups in your life slowing you down you think the news saying bolt runs as fast as he can and then gets like a little vibration on his watch and he's like oh look at that you can't sprint full-on if you're being interrupted turn all that off all the notifications all the toast remember when Skype was an app that we would actually used to talk to people and that was just a thing that reminds me of strangers birthdays just like random I got so and so's birthday you Skyped eight years ago like thank you Skype that little piece of toast that like pops up or like comes in from the side like I was coding and oh what am i doing where do I work what's my password all those things slow you down no joke urgency Twitter great example this is a picture of a mouse with an electrical wire in his brain and he just has to pull on this little lever to refresh the serotonin the fret refresh that sense of positivity that sense of I'm okay just just pull to refresh just pull to refresh and he gets a feeling that I'm going to be alright that I'm going to be okay you have to catch yourself in those moments when you're scrolling idly through Facebook or through Instagram and ask yourself is this doing anything for me other than improving my serotonin if it does improve your serotonin that's great just know that it is acknowledge that it is remember when if you see that's that's a great I love that you brought that up because like we went to middle school together right um do you ever like go through Facebook or whatever and you're like oh I'm gonna go to Facebook Co they're on a jet oh I'm not on a jet like it's like it's a system literally designed to make me feel bad about myself and I'm not even really friends with those people like like we hung out like on New Year's Eve because we're friends but the other like friends I don't hang out with them like I see them on Facebook I get a baby like oh good for you like I haven't seen them in 25 years I just don't care so I gotta let it go remember when Jesus had to had the whole thing with the - with the fit the footprints memory you're walking in the beach and the only that's when he unfollowed you on Twitter that's why there's one there's only one set of footprints because he's like you tweet too much you need to stop any system that can succeed has flow control if you know anything about tcp/ip you've learned about this kind of stuff you'll know that like 20 or 30 percent of your packets are being dropped that's okay communication by its nature is fault tolerance why people can call each other multiple times why texting is asynchronous dropping the ball is the right answer for your mental health for your getting stuff done unless you are this guy and that's your job don't just just drop stuff you don't need to do those things here is a guy surfboarding in the space on a crocodile stay focused people now when we think about our well-being in our health and our anxiety and those kinds of things I came up with this term called psychic wait does anyone remember when when t-bo's came out there was like I got a record he called DVRs right right like there was a moment did anyone your whole do you you're probably like 30 okay did you ever remember like making an appointment to watch TV like let's all get together on Thursday and like watch TV are you the last generation that will ever do that right like my kids they don't like Seinfeld Thursdays at 8:00 and they all get together and they watch it appointment TV then one day the TiVo happened and then there was like the Law & Order channel and you don't know what you're doing it like Lauren order click I'm gonna watch that episode well click click I'll just watch them all then you come back and there's like 97 episodes of Law & Order and then you're like what was a joy what was the greatest thing since God talked to Moses is now a to-do list of things that you're never gonna do I have never seen the wire I am told I know I'm told it's very good but it's a commitment it's like 7 seasons if we're talking about like 40 or 50 hours of my life and I have to be conscientious about is that 50 hours the ones I need are that is that gonna help my anxiety am I gonna be able to get something out of it the psychic weight of the TiVo literally was causing my wife and I to put the kids down early I mean like okay we'll put him down early I'll call in sick tomorrow we're just gonna bang through Dexter and we're gonna get it done and then it's done ork and of course the Dexter finale was just a dumpster fire so like just forget that the last season ever happens to stop at John let's go point is letting things go is the number one tool that you can have for your mental health and your sense of productivity saying no to your co-workers to your friends to your family is how you stay sane say it's a positive oh I wish that I had more more time in the day how do you have so much time you look 27 hours I get the same number of hours you have what are the things that you're doing what is the 24-hour like chart every 20 minutes and ask yourself what did I do during that time and say was that value-add could I get out of that and then you'll get yourself another 90 minutes okay now here's the thing that here's the problem I like television a lot but I can't spend that kind of time so what's some feasible multitasking what could I do what success system could I set up where I might be able to watch the TV that I want I just binge on October faction fantastic show 10 hours what could I do and also watch TV workout bingo I made a deal with myself that I'm only allowed to watch TV when I'm on the treadmill one more episode that's one more hour that three more miles that's the trick that's the trick actual feasible multitasking being able to set that up allowed me to be conscious and focused about that catching myself in bed on my side with the iPhone going like is this my life now is this what we're doing this is the thing now if that's what you need if that's what you need to recharge do it but do it intentionally so make sense now my buddy JD Meyer at getting results calm has this idea of the rule of three everyone's heard of a version of this rule the idea is that everyone's got these lists of to do and it's too big the only thing that we can really do is three things so if you have three things of varying scope what could you do tomorrow to set yourself up for success and do three things where you would feel so awesome about it like rather you ever go home just feeling bad like an even know what I did today like I fixed the build what was that and then you discard I'm just gonna do better tomorrow and then each day is just more piles of crap like that what could you do which are three things that you could do before lunch you could do two of them before lunch and one in the afternoon be like I just crushed my day in order to pick three you have to say no to a bunch then you expand the scope and you have three things for the week and then three things for the year two to this young lady's example Monday make a plan make a meeting with yourself 9:00 a.m. what's your vision for the week Friday reflection how did it go what worked what didn't and reflection has to also turn into forgiveness yeah this week up was not awesome did my best this is some things that didn't work out I got interrupted the build happened my website went down and I totally didn't do XYZ own it move on and Monday is a new week to start all over again you're not going to answer those emails you're just never gonna answer them control a archive they're not going anywhere they're just not in your Inbox totally serious now remember I said that busy is a form of laziness it's because busy overtly busy overly busy oh I'm far too busy to have people who remember very important that kind of busy is non deliberate I'm so busy because I'm just putting fires out I really respect when I have a boss or a person who's important in my life at my work vaccine you sit down and hang out with me so that example that I made before about you answer you ask me a really great question it's not that I'm too busy to hang out with you we don't we don't we're not like that you're not my mentee or you're not my person I'm in a relationship therefore I am choosing to consciously protect myself and prioritize I will give you the gift of my keystrokes because what a great question every good question every good technical question is a gift because every one of them is a potential blog post so if I go to my to-do list I use the to-do app Microsoft to do it used to be Wonder list these are all blog post ideas every single time someone says hey blog something I throw it in there I will never run out of stuff to blog about then I go to my day I click on the idea button and I say oh I could do that and I could do that and I could do that and I think a very small list and I check those things off there's always a backlog this is agile as applied to your life make sense it's the intentionality that we fail to do in my opinion now you're like go hang out with your friends and there's someone who's not around and they're not around for like a while and then out of nowhere they pop back and I like where'd a book or get a PDF or made a whole business or made a website holy that was amazing because being creative is the opposite of hanging out now in high school we used to hang out like super late like 2:00 a.m. 3:00 a.m. because we had FOMO right fear of missing out because every time you would not hang out late you would fight you with like some of it all dude after you left Wow like the hologram of prints came and they did a whole set it was amazing never happens never ever happens think about yourself if you want to hang out with them in the lobby of the hotel until 2:00 a.m. and see what happens cool but do it with intention but that four hours that five hours it's easy to blow time like that with people would have made you more successful on your test and your bootcamp in that open source project you're working on or whatever we live in a very complicated time right now it's easy to have a lot of malaise someone is always wrong in the internet you're not going to change their vote not gonna happen they couldn't believe a thing I believe and no one's me like oh my god I was gonna vote for so-and-so but then I saw this tweet that turned the tide of the election for me because of that tweet thank God that person in bed on their side and their iPhone 3 in the morning just could not sleep and then tweeted that thing that I saw let go here's some homework for you take this list this is just my list your list is gonna be different identify the streams of crap that come into your life an inbox isn't about email and inbox about everything it could be your property taxes it could be a ticket to a concert or a Broadway show that you're gonna go to it could be physical it could be virtual take it identify the streams and sort them signal versus noise this is mine now I like talking on the phone I like FaceTime I like synchronous communication with humans when I'm stressed out though this is the sorted list this is the least important that's the most important I draw a line and the way I make up time the way I free up time to work on the stuff I want to work on is by dropping stuff you know how we always do out of office emails ever having something to do like an out-of-office you know they're not really out of office or just like here's my out of office thing to tell you I'm too busy to answer email people do that for work but they never do that for personal do that make it personal out of office and just say I'm not answering in for the next month I'm writing a book I got a thing I'm working out I'm doing my black vote or whatever I'm not gonna watch TV oh I'm gonna make these things go away and that's how you get one two three five hours a day that's how you make these hours up here this is huge if you have any kind of an email situation this was the biggest email rural game-changer I would encourage you if you have Outlook or anything like that in your life I have 240 emails here notice that two-thirds of them are in an inbox called cc'd the young people can go and look up what a carbon copy or is I put the cc'd stuff stuff where I'm not - and another inbox and I only check it once a week fYI this isn't do a task this is FYI GameChanger cut my email down by 2/3 now you might say well my boss has a tendency to put stuff on CC that I need to do don't do it only has to happen once you train people how to treat you they will learn oh ok so if it's important to put you on - cool handle make sense now here's a real challenge unless your job like your LinkedIn is like emailer that's like your title try this tomorrow don't check email in the morning don't roll out of bed and check your tweets you don't get - yes sir yeah any notification slack whatever I want you to do this for me and try it out you can tweet me later let me know how it work don't respond to any notifications until noon and what's gonna happen is you're not gonna know it - freaking do to yourself you're not you're gonna like you we don't even know how to poop without a phone like that's where we're at right now so what's your job what do you want to get done tomorrow on Wednesday you don't get to check any notifications in the morning put your phone in your pocket put it on airplane mode airplane mode works on the ground shocker it's a thing do not put energy into things you don't want more of you know how when you're just starting out early in career people are going to have this happen you're gonna be on the slack you're gonna get these notifications at 2:00 in the morning on a Sunday and you're gonna reply you just taught your boss that you're that person you just taught them that that is the boundary slack team's outlook they all have do not disturb my phone goes and I do not disturb at 7 o'clock I'm even using screen time on my iPhone to dim apps that I don't want to be using you should also do that use the same child controls to block yourself from doing stuff that is unhealthy that you would do to a child that makes sense and we talked about keystrokes bla bla bla bla bla bla skipping skipping skipping Oh fill stuff Oh work Sprint's even do Pomodoro get the Pomodoro is Pomodoro Pomodoro phone a Pomodoro is like I think it's Italian for tomato it's a little tomato timer and it goes for 25 minutes think of it as a unit of time someone says hey can you do this little bit of code for me it's about two Pomodoro's it's about an hour you have five minutes to pee you've got to do this thing you've got to do it once without stopping at a sprint what can you do for 25 minutes without doing anything else you focus on the task try that it's really freaking hard you'll find yourself at reddit you'll alt-tab to other random places and all of a sudden you're gonna be like I don't know I want to read it now I was writing code and now I'm looking at cats I don't know what happened right Sprint's this is just agile applied to yourself think about the things that happen during that sprint that 25 minutes did you interrupt yourself did you get anxious did someone interrupt you did you get called write it down sprint again and see if you can reduce that number of interruptions lower here is pee-wee Herman saving some snakes from a fire there are internal interruptions like you're just hanging out and you just like wow I am playing solitaire and I'm like really good at solitaire and then there's external interruptions where like your boss is like hello the reason that we interrupt ourselves is that we think we're gonna miss out on something for a lot of us like 9/11 was a thing that we were like when that happened it changed how we thought about news and a lot of us spent a lot of time like what's gonna what's happening like is the world ending like a climate change has got me stressed out but it did it whatever it is happen and I missed it if we can really acknowledge to ourselves that everything that is important will find itself to you many times did you hear about whatever you'll hear someone will tell you you don't need to go and check whatever the news website is and refresh it stay in your flow catch yourself in that runner's high whatever that is while you are coding or knitting or whatever makes you happy focus on wrapping yourself up in the thing that captures your attention and you'll feel like this guy I think this is really interesting when people think that multitasking is a thing speaking on the phone to talk to humans synchronously computer science the optimal number of threads in any system is one soon as you multitask get to context switch and if you context switch that's a load you've just lowered you know 3% 5% 10% here is a really good example of a bad multitasker you know we call them in Oregon right organ donors seriously that's that's awful put your phone in the trunk focus on what you're doing the only true multitasking is this his eyes are moving too I worked really hard on that gift remember I talked about guilt systems don't set him up bla bla bla bla bla bla so if you don't you see some suggestions RescueTime anyone use rescue time it's a lovely app runs in the background and will chart and graph the app in front if you don't know you're on reddit or you're wherever you're not supposed to be and you care you can't cut it out of your life unless you measure it what's a healthy amount of time around online yeah I disagree that's ha that's a hustle mentality and we reject that yeah do you that's why you succeed this this was interesting to me where I was noticing that I was messing around from 1:00 to 4:00 a.m. every day I didn't know that that sucks don't do that I needed to see the chart to know it was a bad idea this year was interesting this was a Monday where I did nothing that's when my appendix burst so not a huge deal but what's wrong with Tuesday though exactly I was in the hospital in Outlook the next day and then working on Wednesday very dumb you got to see the chart to go wow that is not the chart I would have expected to see now we talk about physical things I'll try to wrap it up really quickly here um physical things that tickle your brain you go oh yeah that thing right there's all kinds of physical stuff that come into your life like we have tickets to the Broadway Portland Broadway thing right you like buy it once a year and then the tickets show up and they're pretty random and we don't even like literally like what are we doing this weekend oh crap we have tickets to Fiddler on the Roof or whatever let me forget about these tickets and then again you gotta go looking for the tickets where are they they're in the drawer with all the USB cables or whatever what you can do is you do 43 folders 12 folders for the month 31 folders for the days you make a circularbuffer so right now we are on what what is today the 4th so you'd have four five six seven and all the way to 28 then you'd have March April May whatever and then as the days and the months move you take it and you move it to the back so if I get a ticket for something in April I pick it up I stick it in April I forget about it and then when April comes back around I open it up works for any physical thing only takes up this much space you get one of the little suitcase filing cabinet deals at Home Depot that's the sum total of all paper in your house period bills it makes everything go away not cool speaking of paper my dad who's trying is a firefighter and he's not technical and he was really struggling with the whole iPad thing and you know keeping it charged and all that kind of stuff so he has made him one three by five three by five cards you go to hipster PDA it's an actual thing just Google hypocrite and you print out this stuff and you get one of those big snappy deals and he puts it in his back pocket it's got Retina display infinite battery makes him feel very comfortable and he's got the things that he wants to do just handled not joking people forget paper papers where it's at when you're stressed out when you're freaking out I know about you we all have our thing that we do when we are anxious if I'm overwhelmed I clean my room take everything off my desk and put it back on my desk and I get a haircut I've accomplished nothing but at least I've got the hair and the desk handled if you're really stressed out you can't figure it out by looking at an 11 inch MacBook Air you just can't you got to get a big old piece of butcher paper or something and you go okay I was stressed out about my year I printed out 12 calendars and I looked at them and I said okay I can see I can stand up and look at my year if you do that with an 11 inch MacBook Air you just end up being really far away from the screen you can't see find whiteboard paint a whiteboard paint a wall in your house with a white board with the whiteboard or the chalkboard paint and go what the hell am i doing we actually did that one better and I would recommend that you do this as well does anyone have a DAC board in their house no oh love you people look at this kids go to Goodwill and buy a $20 monitor it's got to be 1080p take a Raspberry Pi you all have one lying around go and install the dashboard software you shove the Raspberry Pi in the back of the monitor and it loads up opens Chrome goes full screen and Auto refreshes every five minutes has my Google Calendar has family pictures the weather it is beautiful sir it is beautiful and because I'm that nerd because I'm that nerd I actually have my blood sugar because I'm a type 1 diabetic on a screen in the house and a picture frame so when I'm remote they can see my medical implants that show my blood sugar in the cloud and tell the daddies okay even when I'm in another country that then is a rest api from my own body which then shows up on the Raspberry Pi which I can then mount it is freaking awesome yes I love that you're excited about it no one else cares you bastard you can then rotate it put you know like art paintings put it in like a cool frame if you're really cool going Google for magic mirror you get one way glass and then it's a mirror and then you walk in front of it and a motion detector and then it's like oh space you know it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Mars movie or whatever right telling you and all this stuff totally free that's sure see I got that a goodwill like I'm a goodwill all the time if you go check out my Instagram fee my Instagram feed it's literally Mia at Goodwill it sounds silly but it's like literally that's all I do like I found this Palm Pilot goodwill this is a dreamcast that I got recently a goodwill i modded it to support i modded the green dreamcast and i put an SD card inside it which is kind of badass if I may say so I'm like oh it's a Dreamcast SD card this you know kind of stuff that you have on an Instagram it's all meant to make you feel good about yourself right don't you look at my my my Instagram you just like what is he doing Bunny's good stuff yeah I'm winning it life man it's all just it's there to make people I went to high school with feel bad about themselves let's just make it make you feel bad Kirsten this is a quote that I like but I don't like all of it it says it was not helping me make money it's not improving my life in some way it's mental clutter I'm gonna remove the money part if it's not helping me to blank whatever blank is improve your relationships get promoted at work learn how to code whatever I want you to take all the things in your life sort them measure them it can be toxic relationships it can be your roommate it could be the TV show that you're never gonna finish is it moving you towards your goal if it's not out that's it and here's the deal though willpower is a well that has to be replenished this is not hustle culture I'm not telling you you need to try harder you need to work harder what you need to do is you wake up every morning in a place of forgiveness say yeah okay yesterday sucked but today is a day to do it all over again and I know what I'm gonna do today I'm gonna have a salad instead of a instead of two burritos that's what I'm gonna do after this I'm not gonna eat the entire bag of chips you can actually ask for baby chips at Chipotle just say I want the baby chips and then you won't eat an entire bag of chips cuz that's 1200 calories just say baby chips they keep them underneath the counter it's a carbohydrate little tip for you there I'd like a burrito and baby chips it's kinda like getting a double whopper in a diet coke kind of that that bit of irony here's your homework sort your sources think about work sprints go and look about look onto the Pomodoro Technique anything that distracts you any thing just go into your iPhone or your Android phone in settings notifications turn them all off the only notifications I care about is like the alarm for the house trying to think like is the house on fire or like my wife text me speaking of texts you can go into your phone and you can make it not buzz for anybody except important people I did that I went to my faves they beat my phone randos don't beat my phone turn all that off you will not know what to do with the quiet then go look at your personal toolbox and consider the tools that you're using consider a tool like RescueTime etc and then of course follow me on Twitter uh and now I've taken up a little bit of your time sir well no I mean you had some stuff to talk about anyway that's my spiel there's like another hour there I could do like a whole workshop but you get like why it such a great time to be a programmer right now and how we can go out and kick ass tomorrow and only one person left and I judge him quietly but I said nothing when he left and he probably left because this wasn't feeding his spirit and that's okay that's a great reason see that's freaking awesome someone actually got mad at me because I don't want to go to the Ukraine to talk to 250 programmers and he was we were going back and forth he was being all sassy I'm like dude it's the Ukraine like it's like gonna take me two days to get there oh but we love you here in the Ukraine and I said dude 365 days a year four more years of my 14-year old it's gonna take me seven days now is it as is it a summertime I can take my son with me that'd be awesome I'll take him with me oh no it's an April during when oh it's drink Spring Break I'm not going to your conference like I'd love to but no saying no so yes going home to see the babies before bed apps freaking lately hell yeah I love that that's what I that's my whole thing right now dig it any questions comments thoughts anyone disagree with anything anything I said or thing getting feedback where I can make this suck less sure okay deep work all right yes atomic have excellent I dig it are you doing those things though so both of you know those things so that so this was all like old school for you cool I'm gonna do it that's the thing and then you got to understand that you're not gonna do it all the time and then you had to forgive yourself and then just do it the next day cool do you want to do your thing look excellent I will unplug and I will release this to you [Applause]

Channel: PDX.rb - Portland Ruby Brigade

Views: 15,222

Keywords: Ruby, Portland

Id: RpH6IPhyh7I

Length: 70min 21sec (4221 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020