717: How to be Productive

Monday, Monday, Monday, open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, Node module, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skills, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest, web development treats, coming in hot, here is Wes, Barracuda, Moss, and Scott, El Toro, Loco, Tolitsky. Welcome to Syntax on this Monday Hasty Treat. We're going to be talking all about productivity habits for 2024, how you can be productive this year. It's the new year, new year, new us, and we're ready to go on all of our productivity habits.

And one of the biggest productivity habits you can have in your code base is by adding error and exception handling tracking, because, hey, if you mess up, it's productive, because you can solve and fix your bugs without even having to think about it. You can put them on your to-do list and your GitHub issues, you can crush them, you can sign them, and you can do all that with Sentry at Sentry.io. This podcast is presented by Sentry, so let's get going. Wes, how are you doing today?

First off, this is our first recording of the new year, so we are getting those shakies off. Yeah, exactly. We're about to record the React Server components after this, and I was like, I don't think that would be a good first one to do right off the bat. Let's get right into it.

Yeah, yeah, we just got to get going on this. So I'm excited to be back. It was a nice break, but I'm stoked that everything started back on track and we're working. Yeah, same.

So I've been, you know, I tend to, like most people, get kind of habit-focused, productivity-focused to come the new year. It's something I like to evaluate throughout the year. It's not necessarily a new year thing, but it's hard not to feel that way at the beginning of the year. Like, all right, you've had some time off.

You're coming back to work. You have big goals. You have big dreams. Like, what are you going to do to hit this stuff and to change the way you're working right now?

And so for me, you know, I'm focusing pretty hard on the habits that I'm doing, my processes, the way that I work. You know, I know Wes, I don't know if this is getting too personal, but I know you ADHD folk. I recently was officially diagnosed with ADHD. I was informally diagnosed with it by my wife.

It turns out, your spouse, even if they're a doctor of psychology, cannot officially diagnose you with anything. So I recently got that done, and, you know, it has got me thinking a little bit about the way my brain works. So I've definitely been subscribing to some ADHD podcasts and been immersing myself in a little bit about how I work to try to improve things. Yeah.

When we talked to Courtney about that, the biggest thing she said was, like, one of the best ways to deal with your distractions and your focus and your productivity is just systems, having systems in place, you know, and finding ways around whatever road bumps you hit and having the software or the processes in place to sort of get around that. So I'm excited to talk about all this stuff today because it's exactly the type of stuff that you've been in place to actually get things done. Totally. And maybe we can even talk about some books because there's a lot of good systems books out there to fill your life with.

Systems work. So I think the big thing is that you want to examine, first and foremost, your current habits. Like, what's holding you back? What are you working on?

What are the types of things in your day-to-day that goof you up? Like, for me, I can tell you very explicitly the things that mess me up on a day-to-day because I'm paying attention to them. And I'm trying to always think about them. But, you know, first and foremost, I've noticed that, you know, my focus is one of my key things that holds me back, where in the short time in which my code is building, I could open up two more tabs.

You know, so being able to, like, really recognize that my focus on a specific task is a problem. I'm definitely a, this is over here, this is over here, this, you know, especially in the code world, people might relate to the fact that, like, you could be working on feature A, and then you see CSS thing is wrong. Let me fix CSS thing real quick while I'm here. The next thing you know, you've forgotten what the actual feature A that you're working on is.

So I've examined that, and I know that that's holding me back. Another one is, like, if I have a task such as writing an email I don't want to write, I will put that off. That's the key number one thing that I procrastinate. Yeah.

I'm not going to procrastinate any code tests. I'm going to dive into that stuff right away. Recording, content creation, exploration, learning. I'm not going to procrastinate that stuff, but it's a little itty-bitty stuff that I don't want to do.

I got to call a contractor about something for our house. I'm going to put that off forever. Accounting stuff is the worst for me with that. It's just like, eh, I feel like I want to do that a little bit later.

My biggest thing that holds me back is just, like, split attention in general is that, I guess that falls under focus as well, but while you are doing something, oh, what's on Slack? Oh, what's on Twitter? Oh, what's on? And often I'll get into that state of, like, and sometimes it happens accidentally, and I realize that I had turned my Do Not Disturb on.

I have, like, a hotkey on my desk here. I've got a little, oh, my camera's over here now. I've got this little keyboard here, and one of the hotkeys is my recording key, and part of that process, it turns on my Do Not Disturb, and I start to just free recorder all in one, and sometimes I also have another hotkey to stop the recording that doesn't take me out. Sometimes I press them in the wrong order, and then I got a whole bunch of work done, and then I realized, oh, shoot, I missed, like, 80 emails, and it's a 60 Slack messages, but I got so much done, and I often need to find myself getting into that sort of flow state a little bit more often.

Yeah, I get that. The Do Not Disturb features for me are, like, both a blessing and a curse, because, yeah, I have blocking text messages from literally everyone except for my wife, and because of that, I do miss, like, texts from friends and stuff, and I maybe just don't even see them, because I have a hard time, like, going back and looking at stuff like that. For me, it's the, like, missing a meeting is always the kill for me, because, like, I go into this deep Zen state, and I either totally miss a meeting, or I'm, like, a couple minutes late for it because I totally forgot. I've got 18 reminders set up, and that's really frustrating.

Or the opposite, where I'm trying to get into the flow state, and I keep having these little, like, did I miss it? Did I miss it? Did I miss it? You know?

And that's why, we'll talk about this in a second, but that's why I love having days where I have nothing on the board, because I know I can just get lost in it, and I'm not constantly thinking, do I need to get out of this? Yeah. I know. Since I'm stepping into the role of executive producer at Century, I have very few of those days anymore.

I have a lot more meetings, which, you know, it's one of those things. But it is tough, and I've had to put on my workflow notifications for my calendar, which I use Kron as the calendar. It's a nice little app. I have to have those notifications persist through no matter what, unless I'm recording.

I'll turn that stuff off, or I'll make myself private or something. But I need to have a reminder 30 minutes before, 10 minutes before, 5 minutes before. And then when the meeting starts, I just need it. I will do the same thing.

I totally get that. Yeah, that two minutes before, I'll often just sit in an empty room, 5 minutes early, just so I know I'm not going to totally miss it. Yeah. So, you know, what do you do for habits?

Well, you know, I really like to track my habits. I was a guy who didn't consistently floss at some point in my life. I'd gone through life being like, yeah, I'll occasionally floss. You know, I'd brush my teeth twice a day.

I was good doing all the other things, but flossing for some reason was hard for me. I don't know why. So I set up a habit tracker, started doing my streaks. Next thing you know, flossing all the time.

Big time flosser, right? No problems there anymore. And so for me... And you built a...

Sorry, I've been seeing on Instagram, you've been hacking a little app for habit tracking? Yeah, so habit tracking is like big time for me. And for the most part, I've always used this app called Streaks on iOS. But you know what, man?

Habit tracking apps, for some reason, people are like, this has to be a $9 a year subscription for a habit. Oh, tell me. I hate those guys. You've got to be joking.

And I understand server costs and stuff. So yeah, I built my own and it's at habitpath.io. If you go to habitpath.io forward slash waitlist, I have a waitlist right now. I'm going to open this up for the public because I initially just made it for myself and there were no user accounts.

Everything was just saved to the database as a habit. And then I got so many people saying, hey, I would use this. The interface looks great. So I rolled my own auth.

I wrote my auth from scratch by hand. And now I have user accounts. And what was really great about rolling my own auth is that I could do things like, oh, if you have a special pin, you can actually make an account. All those things were really easy to do.

Also, I tried some built-in auth solutions before. I decided to roll my own and like, man, that's still a problem. I'll tell you what, even the ones that are branded as being like, you can do your own, you know, just bring in your own auth. The hard part with auth is that they all want to control your database.

They all want to do this or that. And they all try to do too much. I'd rather have one that just takes care of some of the intermediary steps. And maybe I'll open source some stuff that I'm doing there.

Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day. And unfortunately, I think it's going to get even harder with the past keys because of all the back and forth that needs to happen. It's similar to Stripe where you need to like send a request and get it back and then get a token and send it back. But that was a good episode, by the way, as just aside the past key episodes.

It's a great episode. Go listen to it. You know, another thing, you know, I actually really like Clerk as an auth solution, but I just didn't want to pay for something, right? Yeah.

This is like a little work, you know, a little fun project. I'll keep it all in my database. For tracking, though, track the stuff that actually you want to improve. Like if you brush your teeth every day, don't put that in your tracking app.

Because why? Like it's just going to clutter. So track the stuff you're actually interested in doing. I'm doing like a dry January.

I want to track that. I'm going to put that in my tracking app because it's something that I want to see the progress on. If you're motivated by streaks, the app called Streaks is actually really good for this. I'm going to add streak tracking to my app eventually.

But, you know, streaks can be really effective for anything because like you're using Duolingo or, you know, doing workouts in your workout app. If your workout app is like you hit your goal, you know, 52 consecutive weeks, that's going to make you feel great. And I'm personally motivated by seeing those numbers go up. My wife, she does not care.

The streak, she doesn't care. The Apple Watch rings, I don't give a single crap about the rings closing or any of that stuff. I use a workout app called StrongLifts and it tries to show you. And I don't care, you know, it's a color circle.

Give me those colored circles. Give me those numbers. I want them. I want to collect them all.

Yeah. Digital hoarder, yeah. So another kind of interesting thing about habits is this idea of neural pathways in that your brain gets used to doing things, whether it's good or bad. And sometimes you have to try to pave good neural pathways.

And sometimes you have bad habits. Like for me, I'll tell you right now is I can mindlessly type in TweetDeck without even noticing. Sometimes I close TweetDeck and open up a new tab and just type TweetDeck and go directly to it. And the same thing with like, you might just pull out your phone when you have a split second.

That's because your brain is smooth. You know, you got a lot of smooth parts in your brain that are, that's the easiest path for the brain electricity to go through. So figuring out how do I interrupt those paths, whether it's throwing up some sort of focus app on your computer or whether it's literally just putting your phone in the other pocket. If something's slightly different, then you have a chance to start to catch yourself.

Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, the, it's like a subreddit, I think it's called the desired path or something. Yeah. It's just, yeah.

It's just like you could see paths in the grass where people have walked that like, Hey, that's the, that's the way people are actually walking. But if you, if you walk a path repeatedly, it erodes away at the ground and your brain down works the same, right? Those desired neural pathways become further ingrained, which is one reason why, you know, as people get older, you always hear that like people get more like deeply ingrained with their flaws or maybe just who they are. You know, if you're not like examining those things, you just end up becoming a much more intense version of the way that you were your entire life because the habits that you cultivate are the habits that we continue to cultivate and grow through our entire life.

And for me, it's funny because in dance, right, as a dancer, I tend to always practice the things I'm good at and the things I like to practice. And therefore those things continue to get better and the things that I don't practice, I never get any better at them because I don't like to practice them. It's kind of similar, right? Let's talk about to do's.

To do's is probably the number one thing you can do to actually sit down and get stuff done. Scott and I have been major fans of using to do apps as well as we've talked many times about the getting things done methodology. That's a fantastic book by David Allen that I would recommend that you read. He's updated it a couple of years ago.

Whatever you use to do your apps, I use the things application, which I find really nice. It has a decent integration with the Siri reminders, which I really like because so many times I think I'm, I'm driving home or something like that and I'll remember, oh, I need to do something and then I'll just, hey, X, you can't say the words, you'll set off everybody's thing, but hey, sourcey, remind me in 15 minutes to do X, Y, and Z and then I'll automatically import into my things app and then I can drag them up and down in my list for the day. And I absolutely love that because I am the worst for forgetting stuff like that. Yeah.

You know what? I just started using Siri for things. It's funny. I always use Google Assistant when I was on Android for a long time.

And then when I moved to Apple, I completely stopped using it because I always just felt like Siri wasn't as powerful. But you know what? I've been using it for setting reminders. I've been using it for setting timers when I'm cooking, just like little things here and there.

And I've got to see, the app I use for to-dos is called Height. Height.app is the URL. And it's a really nice, lightweight to-do tracker. I really like it.

It feels nice to use. I know people really like the app Things as well. There's like several of these. Either way, the best to-do app is the one that you actually use.

You know, for me, for a long time, pen and paper was it. I really liked, and I used that remarkable e-ink tablet to do this, you know, just physically checking things off. The only problem is, like, if you have to-dos that persist for multiple days, it's harder to track and it's harder to assign values and have them swords and stuff like that. My wife loves the physical calendar in the kitchen and a list of to-dos.

And I'm just like, it doesn't exist to me if it's on this whiteboard in the kitchen. You know, it needs to be in my calendar. I said that about the whiteboard in the kitchen, too. I said that same thing about the whiteboard in the kitchen.

Because I do, like, physical things like that. But the whiteboard in the kitchen, particularly, to me, does not exist at the calendar. It does not remind me of things. It doesn't tell me the location or what time I'm supposed to leave.

I would love to get, like, a monitor in the kitchen. It's a massive touchscreen. But, like, that's easy enough to add stuff to. And so, like, one day, I'll do that project.

I know. I've had it on my brain for a long time. I've been talking to my neighbor about it because he does stuff like this as well. So we've been sharing some things.

And what's cool about our house, Wes, is that there's, like, an old security system, like, one of those old-school security systems. Yeah, us too. Yeah, so we have the power wired throughout the house. It's 12 volts.

Yeah, you can easily hook that up to a tablet, the power tablet, and then mount a couple tablets throughout the house if you could get them cheap enough. Yeah. I thought about doing that for a long time. If anyone is listening and is curious how that works is your security systems throughout your entire house, the keypads, at least the keypads.

Sometimes the sensors will also have 12 volts, but the keypads themselves will have 12 volts running to them. And then you go on Amazon and buy one of these 12-volt to 5-volt USB converters. And those are very popular because 12-volt is your car battery. 5-volt is most USB devices.

So you can just twist the wires together. It's low voltage, so it's allowed to be in your wall, at least in Canada and the States. And then you can just plug a tablet into that, and you have unlimited power. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying about it? Yeah, I know. To me, yeah, that seems like a cool thing. Either way, with your to-dos, I think a really important thing to do with to-dos is to assign to-dos, like, due dates.

Assign them, maybe, like, sometimes you can give them points, like, if they're, like, how difficult, how long of a task this is going to be. If an easy task, it could be, like, one point. And that way, you can easily visualize, like, hey, I got it. You know, I can do this thing in very little time or very little effort.

And priority, too, is a good thing to assign. A lot of these apps will just have that built in as columns for your to-dos. I will assign dates to things that need to happen in the future. But for my day of, I'll just do a self-bubbling, which is I'll just look at everything, and I'll just reorder them top to bottom in which order I think I should do them.

And then I just know exactly what to do next. Totally. So, I mean, the big thing about to-do lists is you've got to use it. You've got to maintain it.

Sometimes people do eat that frog, which is where you find the biggest, baddest to-do on your list, and you do it first. Get that thing crossed off the list. Make sure the highest priority. It should always be the thing that you need to accomplish for the day.

I like that methodology. I am not the best practitioner of it. Again, I mentioned that the scariest things are oftentimes the easiest for me to procrastinate, even if they're not, like, the most difficult. They're still, you know, scary to me.

So, yeah. I always say, like, sort your to-do list by, like, anxiety. Like the things that you just don't want to do, just do them first, because it's incredible how much better you feel after you actually get it done. You realize, oh, wow, I just spent three weeks procrastinating that task.

That took six minutes. Yeah, I know. I hear you. All right.

Well, we got to do this. And I think it's important to have these things. But I think really that, you know, to do's are a good tool. Habits are a good tool.

But to me, the best tool in your tool chain for productivity is the calendar. The more and more I work, the more and more I realize that my calendar is the baddest guy around in terms of keeping me on track. Why? Because, hey, it can block off time.

It can make it so that I'm not available to other people at various points. It can tell me what to do at any given point. And it can even schedule time for scheduling an upkeep. So what do I use my calendar for?

I use it. I schedule email. Hey, when am I going to actually look at my email? I'm going to block off an hour for email.

And during that time, I'm going to get to inbox zero every single day. I try to do that every day. What do I do? I take care of emails I need to take care of today.

I dismiss. I have them be done or archive the ones that I don't care about. And then I snooze the other ones. I use an app called Superhuman.

A lot of apps do this. Any kind of email app that you can do to snooze an email will really improve your inbox because that takes care of the stuff. I don't need to do this right now, but I don't want it in front of me. And then the next time you open your email app, hey, that's all the stuff you got to look at.

And everything that's not there is not something you got to worry about. I need that. So calendar. So I'll schedule time to do email.

I'll schedule time for deep work. I'll schedule time for upkeep and planning. That's like looking at my to-do list. That is looking at my tasks that I have to do.

That's pruning things and adjusting my systems. I think it's very important to just block off time to do your work. I know developers, sometimes I think managers and people that have meetings don't necessarily understand that in order to get good coding done, you need large uninterrupted sections of time to sort of get into the headspace and do it. And if you're trying to, like if your main thing is making coding and you're trying to squeeze your main thing in between meetings and little huddles and whatnot, you're not going to be doing a very good job.

You're not going to be getting as much work done as you want. So just if you are going to have it, squeeze them all into one day or one afternoon or something like that. And then just hopefully you can have as big of a chunk open as possible. Totally.

Yeah. And that's one thing I really, when I used to work at Ford, they had a lot of meetings. And I always remember being, I had to sit in meetings with Ford executives where like, I literally did nothing in that meeting. I'm just sitting in this meeting.

Ford executives are there talking, you know, with their fancy, expensive watches and suits and stuff. And I'm the guy wearing the beanie in the back, like, you know, on a computer. Like, I hated having to like leave my code time to go send to those things. And it was always so disruptive.

So yeah, block off the time and people won't schedule you for things. But likewise, like you said, group and batch the things that you have to do all together as much as possible. Uninterrupted time is your biggest asset when you're trying to be creative or focused. And likewise, that brings us to focus.

So Wes. Yes. We've talked about using focus apps quite a bit in the past, and I've never been able to make them stick. What these are, are applications that you can use to, they operate out like a system level of your computer and they will block or they'll rewrite DNS, which is domain name, right?

You can just, you can block a domain name and you won't be able to unblock that in a certain amount of time. So I think that, do you still use one of those? I know HeyFocus was the big one. Yeah.

You know, so HeyFocus is Mac only, unfortunately. So Windows folks, if you're listening to this, hit us up on Twitter with what focus apps you like for Windows. I'm curious because I don't use Windows, so I don't know what's hot in that world. So we'll give you a retweet on this.

But I do use HeyFocus.com. I still use it. They just had recently a really nice update that added like Pomodoro tracking and stuff like that. But I very consistently, when I do use focus, which more and more I'm needing to, I get so much more done.

Because the one thing it does is it stops those mindless neural pathways, as you mentioned, right? The muscle memory of doing Command T and then typing in Twitter, right? Yeah. It stops that because you hit enter and all of a sudden you're, for me, HeyFocus works, like you mentioned on a, like, I think it modifies your host file.

And so it will send you to like a page that has a quote that's like Sun Tzu or something like that. So, you know, you end up getting, you kind of feel bad about it. You read the quote and it's like Benjamin Franklin being like, I did this on this day. And you're just like, ah.

See, like that kind of stuff again, I find that so cheesy. But like, that's, that's me. Like I have friends that like post quotes on Instagram and about like, like what they're going through and stuff like that. And like, like, I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time.

And like, certainly that helps you go for it. But I, I've never once like seen a quote and been like, hell yeah, let's do it. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not much of a quote guy typically.

The quotes to do in HeyFocus is they make me feel bad. Yeah. It's like kind of like a finger wave. Like it's like a, it's like a, they're, they're not like inspiring me to work.

It's like Benjamin Franklin is looking down at me and kind of giving me the finger waves. Like, you know. My other tip for focus is, actually I have two here. The built-in OSX focus modes are actually pretty good.

They're pretty configurable. I actually like them. I have them turn on. I think at like 830 every single night.

And you can, of course, I have my recording ones. So I guess I do use focus mode more than I thought. I have them scheduled. Yeah.

I schedule mine. I wish they blocked websites. Yeah. I don't know if they do actually.

That'd be kind of cool if they did. But I have mine scheduled on a very strict schedule. So like during work time, the work one's on. You know, bedtime, bedtime, one starts at nine o'clock or whatever.

Dinner time, one starts at five. Like I do have them all scheduled. Another thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately. So I'm playing around with my monitors here.

So I have a 32-inch 4K. And then I have a 27-inch 4K. And then I have my 15-inch laptop open all at once. And I have the same setup at my cottage.

But I don't have the secondary 4K monitor. And every time I go there, I'm like, you know what? Maybe I don't need this many displays. A second one, certainly.

Because sometimes I need to throw stuff on a second display and reference it when I'm recording. But sometimes it's really nice when you just have one. You're just zoned in. And you don't have the other stuff distracting you.

Do you ever feel that way? Absolutely. The most productive I am is when I'm at a coffee shop. And I have one display right in front of me.

That's my laptop. That's the most productive I ever am. I do feel like I need two screens when I'm recording for various reasons. But if I'm not recording and I'm coding, I don't think anything feels as better as when I just have that one screen in front of me.

And I'll zoom way out on the windows to get more real estate. You know, one thing, one mode I started using in VS Code a lot, which I never did before, was the, you know if you double-click on a tab? If you double-click, if you have two tabs up in VS Code, like side-by-side, and you double-click on the tab itself, it turns it into this, like, where that one tab takes over the focus, but the other tabs just get pushed away. And then if you click or tab over into the other tab, all the windows kind of reshuffle, instead of keeping two up.

If you keep two up on your laptop and then you've got your browser window over the side, maybe you're trying to code side-by-side, that gets to be a bit of a pain. But I like this mode where it allows you to focus and shift the windows a bit. Yeah, that's another thing. It's like, air down your editor as much as you possibly can, because, again, you're just focusing on the code.

There's something, at least for me, there's something about just having it, like, zend out as little distractions as I possibly can. Have you seen this extension for VS Code? And this might be getting a little too in the weeds. You might end up spending too much time on this.

It's APC Customize UI. No. Okay. This is a great, great extension.

And I've been using APC Customize UI. And it basically allows you to, one, customize electron aspects of the UI with properties of VS Code, but it also allows you to write CSS to customize VS Code. That's what I just made. You made an extension to do this?

So I hadn't seen this one. There's another one, which is, like, custom CSS for VS Code. And I had tried it, and it always wasn't working properly. And I was like, screw this.

So I wrote a WebSocket server that watched a CSS file. And when you change the CSS file, it would inject it into your workbench.html, which is VS Code's index.html file, right? And then I wrote client-side JavaScript for workbench.html so that when the server detects the CSS has changed, it sent the CSS to the client and did a live refresh of it so that you basically have live reload. Because the old one was, like, you have to restart the editor or, like, reload the window every single time.

You make a single change, which is dog's load. That's crazy. Yeah. But I'll check this out as well.

Can you do any CSS? It looks like it. It's pretty amazing. And, you know, one of the things I did is I changed the fonts, but I, like, made the tabs smaller and I got rid of the top bar and I moved.

Like, I really went to Tom Pairing down my VS Code setup over the break. Oh, that's cool. Christmas break, you got time to write CSS for your text editor. Yeah, I think everybody sort of tweaked their editor over the holidays because it's the one time you have a little bit of time to fuss around.

Yeah, totally. All right, well, last thing we have on here is momentum. Like we've mentioned, you know, procrastinating and things like that. You got to get the ball rolling.

You just got to start. Starting's the hardest part. Everybody always says that and that doesn't make it any easier. That's the thing I hate.

You know, people are always like, starting's the hardest part. You just got to start. But, like, that doesn't make it any easier to start. It just makes me upset that you're saying that, you know?

It makes it easier to do the hard things once you've done it three or four times. That momentum and that good feeling you get from when you accomplish and finish something, it becomes easier and easier and you'll get addicted to it. Yeah, totally. So that's what we got.

That's how I'm going to be productive this year. I think I'm really interested in improving my habits overall and dialing down my processes. You know, I am not working for myself anymore. I am not, you know, before when I was, when I was working for myself, any shortcomings in my day-to-day.

Hey, man, the only people that affect me is me. Yeah. Now I'm part of a bigger team and, you know, I'm ready to step up my game. All right, thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

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