Category Archives: Productivity

A Little More at the End

I recently added 10 minutes to the end of most of my workouts. This lets me get the effect of another workout without having the overhead. In 10 minutes, you can burn close to 100 calories, and in a week, that would be 500. I can’t think of an easier way to do that, but that’s only because I already have these workouts on my schedule.

The same thing could be applied to other things, but probably it’s not as quantifiable. I could code for 10 more minutes after I’m done coding, but when I’m done, I’m usually spent. The same goes for writing. This makes me think my workouts aren’t taxing enough. Maybe the 10 extra minutes will change that.

Progress Bars, not Time Blocks

In Deep Work [affiliate link] (and his other works), Cal Newport has been a proponent of time blocking. He even sells a planner based on his method, which is probably the best place to learn about it. In short, he gives each hour of his day a specific task. In the happy case, this works well, but it breaks down when you get interrupted, get blocked, want to extend your time, or lose energy. He does address all of that, but that’s where I have found his method to break down for me.

Instead, I’ve been doing something my friend Joel Mazza taught me, which is based on the idea of a guiderail made up of 30 minute time blocks. Like Newport’s time blocks, there are things in your day that need to happen at a specific time, usually meetings, so those go on the guiderail in the appropriate place. After that, the system diverges in that we will build up our daily tasks and assign them an amount of time, but not a specific time on the guiderail. We just need to make sure we have a reasonable amount of work that fit in our day (and make sure to have some buffer).

Instead of letting the clock decide what we will do each half hour, we can pick based on our energy (or at least, that’s what I do). I had a half-hour before lunch, and so I am writing this post. When lunch is done, I have a lot of meetings in the afternoon, so I am doing it now, so I can be free after. Earlier today, I tackled some book editing, and I have a 12:30 accountability meeting to get back to it, so that’s why I felt free to switch.

There’s a lot more to it, but the key ideas are progress and flexibility.

Supernote Manta First Impressions

I got my Supernote Manta (A5) two days ago. I haven’t used it much—mostly learning the UI and getting an idea of the features. Mostly, I wanted to get my own 2025 planner on that I made with Page-o-Mat and then get to planning 2025.

Generally, I like it and I still think it is the best choice given my preferences. Here are a bunch of unstructured impressions.

The on-screen keyboard is bad. I hope this can get better in software. Luckily, I think of this as a writing device and won’t want to type much. When I have to, it’s painful.
I wish I could give files names with handwriting (because typing is so bad)
The pen/paper feel is really good—even better than I expected.
The pen doesn’t perfectly make marks all of the time, but no worse than real pens.
The left and right sidebar gestures are ingenious.
Inside of their notes, you can make links to other pages and notes, but you can’t do this inside a PDF. Since standard PDF Annotations supports this, I hope it comes in a software update—I would use that journalling.
I use a passcode to lock the device. I would love it if I could put contact info on that screen so that the journal could be returned if I lost it.

Everything else is as widely reported in reviews. It’s a thoughtful device. I appreciate that I can upgrade the hardware and the software is generally high-quality so far. I am looking forward to having this device for many years.

If code reviews take too long, do this first

Short feedback loops are one of the drivers of productivity according to the DevEx model. On my team at Trello, we had a goal of all reviews being done inside 24 hours. Having that goal drove behaviors that made most reviews complete in a few hours. So, to start, collect data and get on the same page.

If your reviews are taking too long, try these enabling steps first:

Gather metrics: If you use GitHub, try this repository metrics script to get a baseline.
Get consensus: Nothing will happen unless the whole team is on board with this being a problem and that it can be fixed.
Set a goal: I know from experience that 100% of reviews in less than 24 (work) hours is possible. If that seems out of reach, set something that you could accomplish in a quarter.
Inspect outliers: Treat outliers like you would treat an outage incident.
Compare reviews that met the goal to ones that didn’t: Gather statistics about PR’s and see if you can find differences between the ones that did and didn’t. For example: number of lines changed, the author, the reviewer, the number of commits, the part of the codebase, etc.
Put real-time monitoring in place: If you are the lead, just do this manually to start. At the beginning of the day, make sure all of yesterday’s PRs are going to be reviewed soon.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about some common problems and what to do about them.

2025 Pre-Planning

In 2024, I applied The Four Disciplines of Execution to my life and business. I detailed the process for my 2024 plan in a blog post for each discipline:

4DX: Applying the First Discipline (pick a goal)
4DX: Applying the Second Discipline (identify and work on the leading indicators)
4DX: Applying the Third Discipline (build a scoreboard to tell you if you are winning)
4DX: Applying the Fourth Discipline (review with accountability)

The first discipline is to pick a single Wildly Important Goal (WIG), but that’s because they imagine that you are doing this only for work. I do it for three completely segregated areas of my life that I can stop from interfering with each other: Work, Personal Growth, and Fitness. I can always make time for each those three independent of the other two. This is important, because the enemy of your WIG (in the book) is the Whirlwind of activities you need to do just to keep going. My work Whirlwind will interfere with my work WIG, but (for me) it doesn’t stop me from working out or working on my personal growth WIGs.

This is just a brain dump of possible WIGs for 2025 in each category.

Personal: I have sold 0 copies of Pay Tech Debt to Go Faster Now (it’s not done), so I want to have it available for sale by end of Q1 2025 and sell 1,000 copies by the end of the year.

Alternatives: (1) Outsource the end tasks of the book and start a new one (2) Sell whatever I can and build a course based on the book that is the focus (3) Sell whatever I can and try to do workshops at tech conferences based on it.

Work: I have a working, but not useful MVP of a new web application, and am mid reconfiguration into a simpler (and somewhat different) mobile web app. I am trying to get to a new MVP by January 2025. My goal is to have paid customers by the end of Q1.

Alternatives: (1) Give up on this idea and try something else (2) Give up and don’t try to make a software product — e.g. turn the book into my business

Fitness: I am in a fitness stasis, which might be what I have to live with for my age. It’s fine. But I still want less than 20% body fat by the end of the year. The way to do it is radical change, which I will think about and perhaps aim for 20% by the end of Q1. The rest of the year will be about maintenance and sustainability. The answer is probably a combination of regular exercise (easy), daily walking (takes time, but could multitask with something), and a more significant calorie deficit accomplished with more careful eating (hardest).

Alternatives: (1) make maintenance the goal and just be happy with my level of fitness (2) make having fun the goal and go for more varied experiences.

This year looks a lot like 2024, but geared more finishing (where 2024 was about starting).

Identity is a Powerful Habit Totem

In my post, Environment Hacking, I wrote about a problem I ran into with BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model:

One of BJ Fogg’s insights is that you already have habits that are completely automatic, so he suggests using those as prompts for a new habit you are trying to build. You repeat to yourself, “After I do [some automatic habit], I will do [some tiny version of a new habit]”. For example, “after I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth”. In this case, the environment is your existing habit.

This works great, but I have some habits that I can’t easily tie to existing one (or at least I haven’t been successful at it yet). For these kinds of habits, I have been thinking of “habit totems” I can put into the environment to prompt me.

In that article, the idea was to place objects in the world that remind you to do things when you see them. I called those objects “Habit Totems”. A Habit Totem works because it’s always present at the place where you want to do the habit, and it prompts you to do it.

Your identity can be a powerful Habit Totem because it is always present, and it changes how you perceive the environment such that it turns everything into a prompt.

I have an identity as a programmer. I program all of the time without prompts, because everything reminds me about programming. I also have an identity as someone that eats plant-based food—no prompt needed at the grocery store or restaurant because it’s just a part of who I am.

But I struggle with my aspirational identities. I want to be a writer, but I still haven’t assumed that identity enough for it to be a driver on its own. I want to make my plant-based identity more specific by becoming “whole-food plant-based”, but I haven’t made a lot of progress.

What I am trying now is to try to internalize that I have already become the identity I aspire to be. I walked through the grocery store last weekend just repeating “I only eat whole plant-based food” and managed to leave with a cart more aligned to that identity. I am writing this blog because “I am a writer” and a writer writes. When I thought about my experience at the grocery store, I was more compelled to write about it.

It’s only been a few days, but it feels very powerful so far.

Gray Time

I’m working on a task management app called Momentum and we just implemented a thing we’re calling “gray time”. This is what we call all those tasks we need to do just to keep things going, but they aren’t the most important things. At home, I need to make dinner, go grocery shopping, etc, but the two things I want to get really right in my personal life this year is to lose some body fat and publish a book. In my work, Momentum is the most important thing I am doing.

I know that a big part of my day could be gray. The goal is to get some non-gray time too. If I want to make progress on my most important goals, I have to make sure to acknowledge that everything else is gray.

Sometimes this hurts. I spent a lot of time yesterday working on little tasks—a bunch of them are meaningful to my happiness, like planning a trip and helping my produce my wife’s radio show. It’s not that I didn’t want to do them or that I’m not glad I did, but marking that time as gray makes sure I don’t stuff my day with too many of these tasks at the expense of the main things I am trying to do.

Win the Week

I use weekly metrics to reach bigger goals. I love this because I get to reset every week. If I fail one week, I haven’t derailed my entire progress, I just reassess and get back on track Monday. Sometimes when I have nothing to do on a Sunday, I try to win the week by catching up.

But, just like in Win the Morning, I try to front-load successes, so Monday is a big day for me. I try to make a lot of progress on my weekly metric. Today is Sunday, the end of the week for me, and I only have a little more to go on my main fitness goal, which will be easy. This is possible because from Monday to Wednesday, I did a lot. Since I actually do have a lot of time today, and my goal is walking, I’m set to overachieve for the week.

My work goals need to be finished up by Friday, so I make sure to never having meetings Monday and Tuesday unless it’s impossible otherwise. I try to book everything for Friday afternoon, where I’ll be trying to wind down anyway, and not looking to do a lot of focussed work.

I was never this way when I was younger. I was always procrastinating and cramming, which was especially bad in college. I got through it, but with a lot of unnecessary stress. After decades of tinkering, I hacked it so that procrastinating is something that happens at a weekly cadence, if it happens at all. By booking away the end of the week, I don’t give myself time to cram, so I have to get to it.

Double Down on Things that Work for You

At the end of January, I realized that the actions I decided to take for my fitness goals weren’t working, so I decided to add more light-impact cardio.

So, it appears that for me, I might need more cardio. From my research, I know that this may inhibit muscle growth, but that effect is because of calorie deficit. So, I will add more cardio (but low stress activities like swimming, rowing, and the elliptical) and I need to find a good healthy source of extra calories

Right after I wrote that, I realized that more walking might also help and was very easy to fit into my days. It’s only been two weeks, but the effect was obvious enough that I decided to do much more walking than I planned.

I started with a daily goal of 12,500 total steps, but now I get over 20k most days. The extra walking is hundreds of calories, which I eat because I am trying to build muscle.

To get this many steps, I have added the following practices:

Almost all of my reading or video watching is on a treadmill. I don’t need to make time for this. I do it in whatever clothes I’m wearing and keep it at a slow enough pace.
Almost all podcast listening has to be done on an outside walk.
If I have to walk somewhere, I leave a little early and add at least 10 minutes more walking each way.
I installed Pedometer++ on my iPhone/Watch and use their widgets as my scoreboard. My current steps is in a complication I see all day.
I try to get close to 10,000 steps in the morning (to win the morning).

20k might unsustainable long term, but I always dedicate the first thirteen weeks of the year to try to make big changes in my life so I can see what the impact would be. Then, I size it to something I can keep on doing.

Win the Morning

Using The Four Disciplines of Execution, I am trying to reach my goals by “playing a winnable game”. The strategy is to develop a lead measure that you can act on at any time (see 4DX: Applying the Second Discipline). But, I find that I win this game more often if I act in the morning.

For fitness, I am doing more strength workouts, incorporating long walks into my day, and eating a healthy high-protein breakfast. I work out at around 7am and eat breakfast soon afterwards, so this is usually done by 9. If I get up early enough, I do a long walk to the gym.

My other two goals have dedicated time allocated to them. I front-load that as much as possible, and move anything that could be distracting to late in the day (especially meetings). I want to work on the important tasks when I have the most energy for them.

According to When by Daniel Pink, for most people, the morning is good for deep work and the afternoon is better for collaboration and ideation. I am clearly one of the “most”, because this works well for me.