One of this year's goals may be to become a healthy developer. In today's episode, we're giving a few tips to keep you on a path to maintaining a healthy lifestyle as a developer.
One of this year's goals may be to become a healthy developer. In today's episode, we're giving a few tips to keep you on a path to maintaining a healthy lifestyle as a developer.
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I'm going to start today's episode with a moment of very sincere gratitude to you, the people who listen to this podcast. Over the weekend, we surpassed the four year mark. It's right, four years ago, about this time, January 5th in 2015. We started Developer Tea with the goal of creating a short, consumable, easily consumable podcast that started to ask questions for Developer To answer amongst their communities. That was the goal of this show in the very beginning. We've done a lot since then, but we've generally kept that same goal to inspire Developer To have meaningful conversations in their communities to encourage you as a driven developer to connect to your personal career purpose. The only way that you can actually do that is by actually finding yourself in some community, in some kind of relationship with other humans. To connect to that career purpose, do better work and have a positive influence, basically turning around and having a good influence on that same community of people that you're working with, that you're spending your time with, that you're spending a life with. Really that is the goal of the show today to continuously provide some kind of spark, some starting point for you, the listener, to go and think, go and discuss, go and contemplate what we're talking about on this show. This is also why we started Tebrig Challenges here, a different format, but the same kinds of concepts, soft skills, challenges that are delivered directly to you on a daily basis. The whole goal of that is to encourage you to ask better questions, to think more meaningful and more productive thoughts, not just productive in the sense that you're getting more lines of code written or you're shipping more features, but more productive for you to become the kind of person, the kind of developer that you want to become. So I'm very thankful to you for making this possible and the way that you make it possible is by continuing to listen, by actually taking this podcast and sparking discussion with your friends and sharing these things. Also by sending me those signals that this is actually meaningful to you, we've had so many emails over the past four years come in to develop a Gmail and those are so meaningful to me because each and every person's story is different and the fact that we've somehow encountered each other in this digital space of podcasting is nothing short of a miracle to me. So I'm so thankful that those of you who are listening to this show that you've continued to listen, the new people who are coming, I'm incredibly grateful that you found your way to this podcast and I hope that it continues to deliver value to you. I hope it continues to inspire you to become a better developer. Once again, not just become a better developer in terms of the product that you create, the code that you output, but also specifically in terms of how people encounter you in the world, how you interact with other people, how you treat other people, the things that you accomplish in the world, the type of collaborations that you are able to have. These are all the kinds of things that I hope I inspire you to grow in. So happy 2019, everyone. Happy Monday. This is many people's first Monday back into their normal everyday jobs and I'm excited to talk with you today because I have a topic that I think a lot of people are going to be thinking about at the beginning of the year. And we've talked about goal setting in the past. We've talked about how to set good goals, how we can break those goals down and use our individual kind of perspectives to drive those goals, where those goals even come from in the first place. We've talked about all of that on the show in the past. But today, I want to talk about how you determine whether or not you are succeeding at those goals. Now I should clarify what I mean when I say goals. I mean goals in the more traditional sense, the types of goals that are based on your feelings or they're a little bit more vague. They don't have specific numbers attached to them. They don't have specific outcomes. And there's good reason for why we're describing goals this way. Although when you come out from this episode, my hope is that your goals have changed a little bit. And they've changed more towards the types of goals that we've defined in previous episodes. But you'll see what that's about in just a moment. But imagine one of your goals for this year. One of the types of goals that you may have starting this year out is to become a healthier developer. And you may have even done a little bit of work on this goal to decide what does it actually mean to be healthy? Well, I want to be mentally healthy. I want to maybe emotionally or spiritually be healthy. And then I also want to work on my physical health. So you have some kind of breakdown of what it means to be healthy. And then you start your year. And you go throughout the first day and then the first week. And you still have this goal. And it's very strong in your mind. But the problem is that when you're trying to decide how to become that healthy developer, you don't really have a specific proactive action that you can take. And your so-called resolution is reactive. Or at the very least, it's something like improv. Where in a given moment, you're trying to decide how to make a healthy decision. And you may look around you, use some kind of convenience heuristic and choose something to do to satisfy that feeling that you want to maintain your healthy habits. The problem is you didn't define any healthy habits in the first place, number one. But for the sake of today's episode, the most important problem is you don't have any particular way of measuring whether or not you are a healthy developer. There's no definition of success. But perhaps even more importantly, the types of things that you're using to determine if you are a healthy developer are the more intuitive ones. This is problematic for a lot of reasons. And we're going to get into it in just a few minutes. But first, I want to take a moment to thank today's brand new sponsor, Clubhouse. Clubhouse is the first project management platform for software development that brings everyone together so that teams can focus on what matters. Having products, their customers love, Clubhouse provides the perfect balance of simplicity and structure for better cross-functional collaboration. It's fast, it's intuitive. The interface makes it easy for people on any team to focus in on their work, on a specific task or a project, while also being able to zoom out to see how everything is going, how the work that they are doing is contributing towards a bigger picture. Clubhouse also has a simple API and a robust set of integrations. So everything that you already work with is probably going to work with Clubhouse. Clubhouse also seamlessly integrates with the tools that you already use every day, getting out of your ways that you can deliver quality software on time. Listeners of Developer Teahave a very special offer from Clubhouse. Basically Clubhouse is going to give you two free months after your 14-day free trial. If you're doing the math at home, that's basically two and a half months for free on Clubhouse. Head over to clubhouse.io slash Developer Tea. That's clubhouse.io slash Developer Tea. All one word. Thank you again to Clubhouse for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So you're setting your goals, you're going through your resolutions, whatever your particular way of doing a reboot for the new year. Most people have some kind of process that they follow. By the way, if you are listening to this and you don't believe that the new year should be such a big deal, there is some support that our brains do see the beginning of something as a good time to do this kind of thing. It's not just a way to sell gym memberships. This is actually there's some good evidence to show that we really do benefit from this kind of clean slate kind of thinking. So I encourage you to take advantage of this stuff and don't just push against it because it's the popular thing to do, but instead to find some value in it. So if you're doing whatever ritual it is that you perform to try to figure out what is it that I want out of this year, what is it that I want out of my life. There's plenty of topics on Developer Teain the past where we talked about finding those things. But in today's episode, I specifically want to focus on how setting those goals and figuring out how you measure them can be absolutely critical to your success. Here's the reality. If you measure the wrong thing, if you choose the wrong metric, if you are, for example, let's say that you decide that your health is going to be measured by strictly your weight, your body weight, you're going to measure your health strictly by your body weight. And perhaps you're going to measure your physical health by your body weight. You're going to measure your mental health or your emotional health by the number of fights that you have with your coworker or your significant other. And then you're going to measure your mental health based on the way that you feel, kind of an arbitrary measurement. You're going to gauge it just as you go along in any given moment you kind of check in with yourself and you decide that's how you're going to measure your mental health. The issue that you may run into is that these numbers are not necessarily going to gauge those health metrics properly. Your weight could drop as a result of you going on an unhealthy crash diet, for example. You could be avoiding conflict with your coworker or with your significant other. And this could actually be even more detrimental to your relational health than the fights that you may have had otherwise. In a given moment, you may be affected by, for example, hunger or a positive emotion. You may be affected by euphoria. Maybe you just experienced some kind of, some kind of win. And so if you're gauging your mental health based on some kind of arbitrary feeling, in that moment, while the swings can be pretty wide, right? So how do we set better goals? How do we set better ways of measuring our goals? Here's what I'm going to suggest. I suggest that you start by envisioning a rich and complete picture of what that success looks like. The sounds maybe a little bit cheesy or a hokey. Maybe it sounds like a motivational speaker is telling you to envision your best life. But the truth is, if you can envision whatever you're successful, accomplishing of this goal is it's much more complete than trying to sum up that goal in a sentence, right? It really requires a lot more description than just a sentence. To say that you want to be physically healthy is not as complete of a picture as you imagining the types of things that you may do, for example, when you are physically healthy. So this is how it's going to work. Instead of imagining the road to get to your goal, right? Instead of trying to force yourself down that goal, I want you to think about what is true about the success state. What aspects of that successful outcome are true? Now when I say true, I mean, what are the characteristics of what that success looks like versus where you are today? A healthy person, for example, you could ask yourself, what a healthy person have gotten healthy by going on an unhealthy crash diet. And hopefully, and this is where your tools of intuition should kick in, you can start to create some guardrails for yourself on how you can achieve those goals rather than just trying to hack your way to those goals, right? Rather than trying to take the steps that seem intuitively like they're going to get you there, instead think about the kind of the identity changes that are necessary, right? This isn't about changing specific behaviors. If you only change your habits and specific behaviors, you're going to end up very frustrated because if the underlying kind of way that you view yourself, way that you view the world, if you can't start at that stage and adjust at that stage, then ultimately those habit changes are going to be layered on top of your existing kind of self-described identity. Right? Now, in other words, if you are thinking about improving your relationships and the way that you're deciding to measure that is by the less number of fights that you have the healthier you are, well, imagine what a healthy relationship looks like. You may be right that a healthy relationship is marked at least partially by not having a bunch of fights, but what else is it marked by? For example, a healthy relationship may be marked by very good communication and that happens to be true, right? So whatever it is that you are targeting, whatever change you're trying to make, whatever identity shift you're trying to make, think about the things that are true, not just one particular metric, but the supporting metrics, the supporting realities, the whole picture, and instead of trying to measure one thing, I encourage you to measure a couple of things. Create those guardrails for yourself. Create the things that you will not do in order to become healthy, right? These are kind of the anti-habits. For example, you will not go on a crashed diet. You will not create a relationship where you're avoiding conflict in order to kind of game whatever that one metric is for you. It's the key. The key is not just about the things that you do and the things that you don't do. It's about the identity shift, but if you can get an idea of what that identity is, kind of grasp around the truth about that identity and try to backfill your way. Where are you now? And how are you different from that future version of yourself? Now how do you go from where you are today to that point? What are the guardrails that you're going to set up for yourself? What things can you safely measure and simultaneously avoid kind of manipulating and trying to game those measurements so that you can make yourself feel better about becoming whatever it is that you've set out to become? You're not going to impress anyone, including yourself by just achieving those metrics. But kind of achievement will only last so long. You're pride in that achievement will only last so long. Ultimately what you're shooting after goes beyond something you can measure. It goes beyond something that you can show that you've achieved. So if you take nothing else away from today's episode, I want you to take this. When you are deciding the kinds of changes that you want to make, I want you to think about it in as vivid and clear and complete detail as possible. One of the things we did on the show a while back, I had you do a visualization. Now this is something that we don't do very often. But the visualization forces you to think about the small details. Think about in that future version, whatever that changes that you want to make. Think about something specific related to that change. If you're thinking about becoming healthier and losing some weight, for example, you may think about the clothes that you have now that won't fit. And you may think about actually taking those clothes and donating them. And you may think about the physical activity that you can't engage in today, that you will engage in then. These are the kinds of details that I want you to have in mind when you're making these resolutions. And once you've identified those, then go forward and figure out how do I decide if I'm actually succeeding? What can I measure? What can I target? What kind of behaviors can I cultivate to achieve this? Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is a little bit more of a broadly targeted episode. Of course, it's not only specific to developers. If you're not a developer and you listen to the show, then certainly this applies to you as well. But developers have a specific desire to be able to track things, I say, developers. A lot of developers, because we have the skills to track these things, because we have tools that are disposal that we can use to gain more insight into that data, right? We have a tendency to want to track these things more directly than the average consumer might, right? So I encourage developers specifically to be careful with the metrics that you're tracking when you're talking about behavior change. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to Clubhouse for sponsoring today's episode. Go and check it out clubhouse.io. You're going to get two and a half months. That 14-day trial and then two months after that for free. Head over to clubhouse.io slash Developer Tea to get started today. If you like today's episode, then you will certainly love the Tea Break Challenge. If you haven't signed up yet, go to tebrachallenge.com and get started today. It's a daily soft skills challenge that gets delivered directly to your email. We also post it on tebrachallenge.com every day. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.