February/March 2024 Blog Roundup

Personal productivity has been on my mind in the past couple of months because of a new tool I am working on. I shared thoughts in these posts

I also finally started Season 4 of my podcast, Write While True, which is where I share what I am learning about writing.

And I also shared my process for generating Transcripts for a Self-hosted Podcast.

Write While True Episode 42: Keeping Score

As I mentioned in the past two episodes, I’m trying to write a short book, and I want to share the process as I’m going through it. For example, to help me structure my time, I’m using the book The Four Disciplines of Execution.

In the last episode, I shared how I’m applying the second discipline. I defined an activity that I could do every day and a lead measure, a metric of that activity, that I could have as a goal for every week.

The idea is that if I constantly achieve this lead measure, I believe that the larger goal will be achieved. My weekly goal is to spend at least one hour a day on five different days working on the book. It’s a goal that resets every week. That way, a bad week doesn’t derail me. Every Monday, I have a chance to try to win that week. But I have to remember to do it. Keeping this lead measure top of mind is what the third discipline is about. And that’s what I want to talk about next.

Transcript

Write While True Episode 41: The Lead Measure

My wildly important goal is to publish a fifty page book on a topic in my industry by the end of 2024. I defined it using the SMART goal format (S. M. A. R. T.), which means it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This is a good way to define goals, but the issue with SMART goals is that even though you can easily tell if you have reached them, they don’t drive day-to-day activities. That’s where the 2nd of the four disciplines comes in.

Transcript

Transcripts for a Self-hosted Podcast

The latest Apple iOS update included an update to the Apple Podcasts app that added support for transcripts. They claim that they will auto-generate transcripts, but they allow you to provide your own. I have always provided a transcript for my episodes because I believe in accessibility. It’s also good for SEO, and my process starts from a script, so editing it to the transcript has never been a problem.

But, those transcripts are just text that I post on a web page. For the Podcast app, it’s much better to have a .srt file, which is a text file with the transcript and time codes. It looks like this:

1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:15,060
I'm Lou Franco, and this is Episode 40 of Write While True.

2
00:00:15,060 --> 00:00:18,960
Write While True is an infinite loop, and that's because I think of writing as an

3
00:00:18,960 --> 00:00:19,960
infinite game.

4
00:00:19,960 --> 00:00:24,520
A game I play for fun and to get better at it, like a game of catch.

This is a little harder to make manually, so I use whisper from OpenAI. Whisper can create the .srt file directly, and since the format is still text, I can make any corrections I need to. Whisper doesn’t make many mistakes, though, which is surprising because I have a New York accent that sometimes confounds AI.

From there, I just post the .srt file in S3 in the same bucket as my mp3. The Blubrry PowerPress plugin, which generates my podcast feed, lets me provide a URL to a transcript file.

Finally, to get Apple to use it, you need to login to your Podcast Connect account and go the the “Availability” section of your podcast and turn on the option that allows you to provide your own transcripts.

Write While True Episode 40: Let’s Write a Pamphlet

For season four, which I’m starting right now, my plan is to take you through my process as I try to write a short, focused book. I expect it to be about 50 pages. I call this kind of book a pamphlet.

Transcript

PM-led vs. Engineering-led Time

At Trello, on the mobile team, we had a formal way of allocating engineering time to either working on PM-led or Engineering-led initiatives.

A PM-led initiative was something that ultimately rolled up to a OKR that was well-understood by the business. The requirements came from the PM and the PM could assess acceptability. An Engineering-led initiative was something like tech debt, changing our dependency package manager, improving CI build times or anything where the requirements came from the team itself and the PM didn’t know or care about it (and neither did anyone outside the team).

So, let’s say we decided the split was 60% on product manager led initiatives and 40% on what we called engineering-led. The split is arbitrary—the EM and PM agreed on what was appropriate for their team and set it for the year.

Then, any individual engineer at any one time (for a couple of sprints) was on either a PM-led project or an Engineering-led project. We did not want a single engineer to be split across PM/Eng-led work. This made it easy to know we were allocating correctly (without having to track time on individual stories or cases).

So, if it was 60/40 and we had 10 engineers, 6 would be on PM-led, and 4 would be on engineering-led at any one time, but it rotated.

This just needed to be mostly right over the course of a year—on any specific month it could be a little off if over the long-term, it matched.  For example, If the PM didn’t have work ready, we could do more engineering-led work temporarily.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Almost all podcast listening has to be done on an outside walk.
  3. If I have to walk somewhere, I leave a little early and add at least 10 minutes more walking each way.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.