In today's episode, we continue Focus Week by answering a listener question about participating in mindful distractions. Today's episode is brought to you by Linode. Linode provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners .
In today's episode, we continue Focus Week by answering a listener question about participating in mindful distractions.
Today's episode is brought to you by Linode.
Linode provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners!
Have you ever heard the term utilization rate? This is a term that was used probably beginning in the industrial revolution, but it's a percentage, a number that basically represents how much time a machine is sitting basically doing nothing. And the utilization rate of a machine, if it's high, then that's a good thing. We can consider that utilization rate of 90% or something like that, that the machine is actually being used and it's actually getting the most, the person using the machine, the operator, is getting the most out of that machine as possible. And of course, the utilization rate is going to be somewhat correlated with how long that machine will last. An unfortunate side effect of this concept of utilization rate is that we've carried it over to humans. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. And my goal on this show is to help driven developers become better at the work that they're doing on a day-to-day basis. And I do this because those people can then turn around and have a positive impact on the people they have influence over. That's the goal. The goal is to help them. The goal is to connect with you, to help you find your underlying career purpose, the thing that you care about, the thing that you can do that provides a significant amount of value, the thing that the market is willing to recognize you for, but beyond just providing monetary exchange value, that it's also providing you with a sense of fulfillment and it is improving humanity. It has a positive impact on humanity. So the quality of the work you do every day, that's going to impact your ability to garner that influence, to capitalize on that influence. And that influence may start out being over only you. In other words, you may not have a huge reach. You may not be influencing a lot of people. And that's okay. Even if you're only influencing yourself, which at the very minimum, you are influencing at least yourself. That is enough. That is enough for you to actually care about this work. So that's the point of this show. I'm saying it over and over again so that the people who are listening to Developer Tea, that you will understand what this show is meant to do. And you'll connect to that and adopt that goal for yourself. So that's, again, that's the whole idea of the show. And today we're talking about focus. This is, you know, this is Focus Week. It's the end of Focus Week. And I want to read a question from a listener that speaks to this idea of, Listener Samula writes in and says, I really enjoyed this particular episode because it comes with a challenge. But there is something more I have realized after listening. I've had the feeling that time left, or days, even months, passed without doing anything valuable. Even when I read self-help books. But your episode perfectly labeled it as mindless time. Now I have one question, though. Kind of a funny question. Sometimes I go out of my schedule and watch a TV series or a movie. How can I intentionally engage in such activities? Regards, Samula. Samula, thank you for writing in. Other people have probably felt this pressure. This sense. That, you know, doing something that is purely leisure, that doesn't really have any direct utilization rate value, that that is somehow mindless. And I'm first going to tell you that it's not mindless. And that, Samula, the way that you can do this mindfully is quite simply by doing it on purpose. Plan for it. Or, you know, be in that moment. Actually enjoy the TV that you're watching. Don't spend your time, you know, watching something that you don't really care about. For example, don't, you know, allow yourself an endless amount of time to just binge on a show that you're not really paying attention to. Be present in the moment. Notice the details about the show. Have conversations with someone about the details of the show. Engage your mind is kind of the idea here. Now, I do want to point out a very simple factor that a lot of people, unfortunately, they've been somehow pulled out of the show. They've been pulled out of the show. They've been pulled out of the show. They've been poisoned, maybe, by the culture of overworking and the culture of turning our brains into machines. Your brain is not a machine. And I'm going to back this up with science in just a second. But your brain is not a machine. So you can't really measure your work with a utilization rate. Large companies, they try to do this so that they can control their losses and their investments. And this is important for them to be able to do that because, you know, it's really hard to understand everybody's unique circumstances. It's hard to understand unique skill sets and the value that somebody is going to provide without having some unified way of looking at it. For example, unifying everyone by a clock. So your utilization rate might be, you know, how many hours out of your 40 paid hours did you actually produce something, right? This is billable work, for example. And this is important for companies because it's extremely difficult to measure everyone in an individual way, especially. So I don't want to demonize this practice of a company trying to, you know, create a metaphorical way of looking at your utilization rate. You do have to justify a transaction, right? The company makes a transaction with you by paying you a salary or by paying you per hour. And it would be unreasonable for them to pay you for something that you're not doing or to pay you more than the value that you're providing back to the company. And there's a lot of ways to measure this, and we aren't going to get into the nuanced details here. But I just want to make the very explicit point that, you know, I'm not demonizing the practice of tracking time, and I'm certainly not demonizing the practice of a company evaluating someone's value delivery to that company in a way that is not specific to the person, but rather is unified across the workforce. What I am saying is, Samula, for you and for your personal convictions and the way that you plan your day, and the way that other people who are listening to this show, the way you should plan your day, recognize that mindfulness and work productivity value are not coincidental. Let me say that again. Mindfulness and working productivity are not coincidental. That means that your work productivity does not necessarily equate to mindfulness. Therefore, when you're not working, that doesn't mean, that you're not being mindful. And in fact, some activities require you to stop working in order to be mindful during those activities. A perfect example of this is exercising. While I'm a huge proponent of listening to audio books and listening to podcasts while I exercise, because I can allow my brain to engage this information, because, you know, the workout that I'm doing may not necessarily require a lot of brain power to process the movement. So I do recommend taking the time every once in a while, at least to be a hundred percent mindfully present, meaning not engaging your mind on any other activity, but the thing that you are physically doing, putting your mind into the physical space that you're acting in. As I said, I'm going to back this up with a little bit of science here in just a moment. We're going to talk about today's sponsor real quick. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. This whole focus week has been sponsored by Linode. I'm extremely grateful for Linode's sponsorship. And you can know that Linode is helping developers simply because they're sponsoring this show, but they also have a dedication to customer service. They have 24 seven customer service. They don't have to do that. Not every service provider provides this, but Linode provides this because they care about your success and your success equates to their success, right? They provide you a service. And if you, you can use that service effectively, then you're going to keep going back to them. This is basic economics. You have multiple choices and Linode knows that if they provide you with value and they treat you well, that you're going to keep coming back to them. And I believe that Linode is going to do that for the people who, who listen to this show. And that's why I have them coming back all the time. They are supporting the show and I'm supporting them because I believe developers who have $5 a month to spend, there may be no better way to spend it than on a Linode service. Go and check it out. A Linode provides a gigabyte of Ram for $5 a month. This is the best deal on the market, but it gets even better as you increase the brand, the high Ram plans. For example, you can get a 16 gigabyte server. That's their, the bottom tier of their high level plan, 16 gigabyte server for $60 a month. That's incredibly affordable. Go and check it out. Spec.fm, slash, Linode, and you can get $20 worth of credit by using the code developer T 2017 at checkout. $20 worth of credit goes a long way on Linode. So they're not just, you know, they're not just throwing a useless coupon your way. They're actually providing you some value there. And you can use that on any of the plans and services that Linode provides. Spec.fm, slash, Linode. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of developer T. So the human brain doesn't act like a machine. It does in some ways. So we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water here. The human brain doesn't act like a machine in the sense that it doesn't have one thing that it does. Right. A machine does one thing very well. It does it repetitively. It's relatively dumb, but the human brain does a lot of things. It's a very broadly intelligent machine. If you want to call it that a broadly intelligent computational engine, that really can adapt to multiple environments, adapt to multiple tasks and understand things and the way that they're connected. The other reality about a brain is that it's created out of biological matter, right? This means that your brain is living. It has a need to survive. A machine doesn't really have a need to survive. A machine doesn't have the urge to be lazy. A machine doesn't have, the need to sleep. For example, your brain does. Now, this doesn't exist as some inborn evil. It's not something that, you know, is, is a bug in your machine makeup. It's not a problem. It is a reality of the, you know, the nature of the brain. So the first thing you need to do and Samuel to your question is recognize that you are more than just the output. You are. You are more than just the process of working. You also create connections in your brain. You also have a multi dimensional experience in your life. I, this is not intended to be, you know, a hypothetical and it's not intended to be a metaphysical discussion, but rather quite simply, your brain is making those physical connections when you're resting, for example. So if you don't get enough sleep, then you can't, you can't process things that you learned that day. This is incredibly important for students because if you can't process the information that you learned the day before, right? And that's what happens when you're sleeping. If you can't process that information, but it doesn't matter how intentional you were in class. It doesn't matter how long you studied. All of that is going to be degraded by the fact that you didn't take the time to sleep. Now, our intuition or maybe our culture tells us that this, this time that we're using not working is that 0% utilization rate. But I want to challenge this idea and I want you to set up in your mind a different way of thinking about your brain and a different way of thinking about your body even, right? There are multiple kind of dimensions, multiple ways that you need to be engaging your life and work is not the only factor. And here's the interesting thing. As it turns out, these are not separate buckets. You don't have to have a lot of time to think about it. You don't have a work brain and a movie brain and a sleep brain and an exercise brain. All of those things are the same thing. So it stands to reason that your activities outside of work, your activities aside from coding, your activities when you're resting or when you are participating in a hobby or when you're exercising, those activities all have overlap in how they affect your brain. It's important what you do in your off time. So, Samula, to your point, in order to engage something mindfully, first of all, you have to accept that it's possible, right? This is the underlying reality that anything can be done mindfully. Eating, sleeping, walking, anything that you can imagine doing can be done mindfully, even simply being alive, right? The practice of meditation, for example, has you focusing on breathing very often as a fundamental part of your life. And that's what we're talking about today. So, Samula, the fundamental awareness exercise. So when you're watching a movie or when you're sleeping or exercising or when you're commuting to work, all of these activities have the opportunity for mindfulness. The question is, how are you thinking about them? How are you framing them? How are you engaging them? Are you actually doing it on purpose or are you doing it accidentally? I want you, Samula, and I want everyone who listens to this show to eliminate this sense of guilt, or this sense of urgency to get back to work. As if when you're off of work, there's a big switch that you flipped to the off position, right? Your life is lived both at work and not at work. So stop thinking about this utilization rate and instead focus on that mindfulness reality. And focus on the fact that it's very possible that, a positive experience at the movies for you, Samula, may translate into a better working day tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you, Samula, for sending in your question from Pakistan. I appreciate every person who engages with this show at that level. So if you have a question that you'd like to ask, you can always send me questions at developertea at gmail.com and check it every day. And I, I read every single email that comes into that inbox. I want to remind you about the Beyond Bootcamp interview week prep guide. This is a book that I've written for developers who are preparing for an interview. Now, spoiler alert, there's, it's not, it's a non-technical book. And that means that you're not going to get, you know, whiteboarding coding sessions in this book. That's not what it's about. Instead, this book is intended to provide you with ways of thinking about your purpose, ways of thinking, thinking about your strengths and connecting those to the companies that you are applying to work at, that you're interviewing with. So I highly recommend, especially if you're preparing for an interview, that you go and check this thing out. It gives you a week of content to engage on a daily basis, a week worth of exercises that you can engage that are going to prepare you and make you feel more confident for your interview. Go and check it out. Beyondbootcamp.io. You can download that free book there. Thank you so much for listening. To today's episode. Thank you to Linode for sponsoring today's episode. Remember you get $20 worth of credit by going to spec.fm slash Linode and using the code developer T 2017 at checkout. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.