Staying Focused with a Coding Schedule

hey guys so in this video I wanted to talk to you guys about keeping lawn hours as a developer and maintaining a good routine to keep focus keep energized and physically and mentally healthy throughout that process I'm gonna talk about my personal schedule break down what I went through and maybe gave you some recommendations on what you can do with your schedule and how you can apply it to whatever works for you so before I get started I changed my layout here a little bit fix my lighting and added this little gym ooh robot onto the table just for just for a prop here this is something that my little sister and I put together we bought it from the Apple Store and just piece it together so it's nothing cool I'm not a mechanical engineer or anything like that but it's always fun to get the younger ones involved in tech and just trying to keep them interested so my schedule this is my personal routine this is what worked for me everyone's gonna have their own style so just take away what you can from this and apply it to your life but there should be some pretty good tips in here so I don't work the hours that I used to work I used to put in 16-hour days very regularly and that included weekends so I had to find a way to really break up my day and keep healthy throughout that process so I'm just gonna go ahead and get right into it and I have my computer here so I'll go over my notes but the first thing is again I talked about breaking up the day into sections so what I would try to do is mentally trick myself into work in these long hours but feeling like my day was actually very sure so what I would do is make a single day so if it was a 16-hour day I would break it up into two parts to where I would have a long enough break in between so it felt like I just had two half days and I was mentally refreshed so the day would always start off here I'll just go through the timeline I would always start the day off around 5:00 a.m. and I'm not one of those people that thinks everybody should do this I know some people sleep in a little bit and then work late into the night but I would start off at 5:00 a.m. and the first hour of the morning was critical for me this is the point where I can Center myself and I would go take my morning walk this is where I would meditate focus on things throughout the day and try to keep things very light I wouldn't go directly into work I'm just not to jump onto my computer right away but allow myself some personal time to Center myself and get some fresh air and it was usually still dark out in the morning very cold so it's nice to breathe in a little oxygen and spend about an hour from 5:00 to 6:00 just for myself and doing what I needed to do and get some exercise and just meditate for a little bit so once I was done with a walk I would normally come home sometimes this would be this would be a run but I would come home from the walk and I would spend my time usually somewhere in a more relaxed environment so I wouldn't go into the office directly I would go into my kitchen or living room somewhere I can just kind of sprawl out a little bit maybe sit on the couch and this is where I did preparation for the day this was very light work maybe finishing up a task from the night before or prepping what I need to do for this for that coming day here so I normally wouldn't try to check emails because that can start throwing me off and send you into this reaction mode where I'm responding to everybody so I always made sure to keep the workload very light and this was normally between 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. those quiet hours I wanted to keep it that way these were still my personal hours so once we would get right into about I think I was around 9 8 or 9 a.m. so usually 2-3 hours in the morning to myself this is where my productive hours were I worked from home in most cases when I was even working at the lab but I would have my home office and this is where what I would do most of my heavy lifting here and 9:00 to 1:00 where my power hours this is where I would get the most amount of work done so this is where airplane mode goes on my phone is away from me and I get to work my headphones go in and I do the heavy lifting so I have my dual screens I have the whiteboard I have all the tools that I need and I get to work so at this point I put in about 3 4 maybe 5 hours of just coding and powering through everything now in that time there were times where maybe about two hours into it three hours into it I would allow myself these little breaks so I would go outside go for a 15-minute walk and get some fresh air and get right back into it but when I'm on that walk this is still work mode so I don't I don't let myself really get away from work I still focus on what I'm doing but just let my brain unwind for about 15 minutes and then get right back into it and get to work so right after 1:00 this is usually where I allow myself a social and physical break so depending on the day if somebody wants to meet up for coffee for lunch I'll go ahead and do that or I would spend this time maybe go into the gym we have a basketball core in our in our neighborhood here so I'll go and just you know shoot some hoops and get some physical exercise maybe go take a walk with my wife go to the park but this is where this is where the first part of my day would end so I just put in from 5:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. I just put in these hours and that is almost a full day but because I allowed myself to ease into it slowly with my walk and meditation and those light hours I was able to in a sense end the day get my physical exercise and sometimes even actually take a quick you know power nap in this time maybe a 20-minute to 30-minute nap or just lay down close my eyes reset and then part the second part of my day starts so this is right around I have it listed here around 3:00 p.m. so 3:00 p.m. is kind of like my 6:00 a.m. here so I get back into it I go take a shower I and I get to my either either to the kitchen to the living room set on my laptop and do another about hour to hour and a half work and this is normally where I'm finishing up what I was working on for that day or just prepping for the second part of the day so about an hour and a half of just sitting on the couch just doing some light work maybe at this point I'm responding to some emails and then I usually get myself about half an hour to drive out to a coffee shop or maybe the local library and I spend the second half of the day in another location so because I'm working these hours I don't wanna have to spend it stuck in my office this can really wear you out and make you feel like you're some kind of prisoner just trapped in your little cubicle so I allow myself to spend the second half of the day normally in some kind of area where I'm surrounded by other people and it's a little bit more of a relaxed environment so I get a cup of coffee and I put in a few more hours of work so I'll get to the coffee shop around around 5:00 5:00 p.m. at this point so from 3:00 to 4:30 I'm doing the light work 5:00 p.m. I normally get to a coffee shop in my case I go to downtown Portland a lot and there's a few coffee shops I like to go to that are open pretty late and I start working from five and to nine is another Power Hour so I have my headphones in and I am back to work but it's a little bit more laid-back than the morning session so at this point I work those hours and my day is normally done at this point or for my current work schedule it's usually done around 9:00 p.m. now when I was working those 16-hour days I would normally end there that's another four hours of work and I would go home and usually work until about 1:00 to 2:00 in the morning I stay away from that now but that's where I would power in the rest of the rest of the work day so that's the entire work schedule and I have a few takeaways I want to kind of bring up at this point and the trick that worked for me was and I mentioned this earlier but it was to break up your day and trick your brain into feeling like this is some form of social event here so because you have this half-day your brain doesn't feel like it's you know staring at the same screen all day and it doesn't your eyes don't get dreary so allowing yourself to physically take these breaks and also break up the schedule kind of tricks your brain into feeling like it's a new day so you feel like a it's a fresh start and it keeps me motivated the whole time and I just feel energized and I almost forget that I even put in that first half of the day because I had that time to take a break so I'll recommend staying physically active as much as you can somebody asked me if I take any medication for staying focused I am I don't take any medication I don't take ibuprofen not even when I was even when I played football I'll come home with bruises and I'm just banged up I stayed away from that I think that just being mentally sharp and physically sharp does the trick for most people so that's what I would recommend and the last thing a lot of our a lot of us developers can really throughout this process you really can you start feeling very isolated from everybody it's very easy to get into your own rhythm and just feel isolated from the rest of the world so it's very important to try to allow those those hours to spend some time with somebody for me it was meeting up for beers with my brothers or I'm just having a cup of coffee with my wife taking a walk but allowing myself to interact with people and get away from code and actually communicating with others and just staying in touch and one of the things that that does is when I used to end my day at you know 1 p.m. where at 1:00 a.m. I used to go to bed right after work and so I would have finish the day crawl into bed and just just pass out for the night and the problem with this was when I went to sleep my mind it was usually still on what I was working on the day before or not the day before but what I was just working on so I'm not getting good I'm not getting a good night's rest anyways and my mind's still working the whole time so it's really it's really important to try to break up the day to where before you go to bed you're allowing yourself to either talk to somebody maybe you'll watch a TV show do something that is completely separate from code but allows you to unwind and go to bed without having to continue thinking about what you are working on and normally you'll still do that I still go to bed thinking about maybe a problem I'm trying to solve a bug I'm trying to fix but it's not so severe as when I'm coding and then go right back to bed so that's it for this video thanks for watching I hope this I hope you can take something away from this and really help you on your schedule and somehow apply it to what you're doing

Channel: Dennis Ivy

Views: 79,987

Keywords: Programming, Software Developer, Dennis Ivy, Dennis Ivanov, Coding, Schedule, working long hours

Id: EmTPTj5jyz8

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020