What's This One About?
This week, Mike and Matt sat down to discuss how good habits can make developers more productive. The duo go over how habits are not a one size fits all situation, but instead should be tailored to each individual that is looking to boost their productivity - whether that's simply setting up a meal plan, choosing to cut off your work hours at a certain time, or just getting to bed the same time each day - we are all different, and so not every habit is best suited for our unique needs.
Show Notes
What are habits and why are they important?
- Habits are set behaviors or routines that we perform almost instinctively (subconscious)
- They are usually formed after long periods of repetitive tasks
- There are both good habits and bad habits
- Good habits
- Showering every day
- Brushing your teeth and flossing everyday
- Eating healthy
- Bad habits
- Biting your nails
- Eating too much
- Sitting too long
- Good Habits can take you disorganized routines, unproductive days and struggle to learn, and flip the script.
- Find the motivation that you can use to start establishing a new habit
- For me it is being more productive so that I can complete work faster and have more free time
- My goal is to go down to a 4 day work week of 6 hours of work a day
- I can’t do that overnight, and it would be irresponsible to just flip that switch and leave my clients with less production for the same amount of money
- This is why I dove into building better habits
I took stock of my day
- I initially didn’t change anything, I just started paying more attention and recording what I was doing
- I noticed that while I do have sections of productivity, they were not consistent
- One day I might have deep work for 3 hours and another only 1
- The time between my deep work sessions was random and some days I would go with no deep work
- I would get distracted easily by notifications that could be coming from clients
- I would almost cringe and anticipate that any ding (email, discord, skype) could be coming from a client that needs urgent help
- Of course most of these dings were unrelated to work but they would still derail me
- My YouTube was almost always open and playing videos that would distract me
- For me YouTube isn’t the best background noise, I’m too interested in the videos of the creators I subscribe to
- My meeting times were random throughout my day and would derail me before and after the meeting
- It would take time for me to prep for a meeting and also wind down from one
How I started to change my routines/habits
- When I was productive I noticed that it was usually when
- I wasn’t expecting any calls/notifications (after or before work hours)
- I was fairly calm/relaxed
- I had something fun planned for after work
- My working session was planned out with a accomplishable* todo list
- I took these findings and started to try to ‘emulate’/adjust to them
- I would tell clients/team members I’d be unavailable at certain times
- I would do something relaxing before starting (reading, going for a walk, cleaning)
- I’d plan some time to hang out with my wife or friends after work
- I started to write small todo lists before starting a working session
- I started to create a morning routine
- Wake up, make breakfast for my wife and I
- Do yoga
- Make coffee
- Check my todo list
- Do w/e for 15-30minutes
- I created a after work routine
- Check todo list
- Create todo list for the next day
- Commit and push all code
- I started to notice when I’d get distracted
- Instead of going on reddit or YouTube I’d get up and do something else (clean, shower, pushups)
- I turned distractions into something positive
- I started to write days off
- Every once in a while I’d have a bad day where nothing would go right
- I started to recognize when that was happening and just stop work for that day
- This usually resulted in a ultra productive next day as I felt rested and didn’t feel bad for the day before
Tips
- Start tiny
- If you can’t focus, get up and do something else
- Keep task management super simple
- Set short spurts of focus initially (10-20min)
- Create a simple morning routine
Books Mentioned
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
Atomic Habits by James Clear
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