{"id":4823,"date":"2026-03-02T15:06:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T15:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/?p=4823"},"modified":"2026-03-02T15:06:54","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T15:06:54","slug":"productivity-paper-pomodoro-kanban-tracking-and-actually-showing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/devthink\/productivity-paper-pomodoro-kanban-tracking-and-actually-showing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Productivity: Paper, Pomodoro, Kanban, Tracking, and actually showing up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sure, with all the AI tools we&#8217;ve become more productive (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/productivity\/comments\/1pm3rj9\/has_ai_actually_improved_your_productivity_or\/\">or so they say<\/a>), but there are some old and battle tested techniques that will help you if you&#8217;ve ever ended a workday thinking <strong>&quot;I was busy all day&#8230; but what did I <em>actually<\/em> do?&quot;<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>In this blog post I&#8217;ll summarize the simple productivity systems that kept me sane as a dev:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>writing stuff down on paper (yes, really)<\/li>\n<li>keeping a <em>limited<\/em> &quot;Doing&quot; list (Kanban)<\/li>\n<li>working in short focused sprints (Pomodoro)<\/li>\n<li>tracking where time actually goes (RescueTime),<\/li>\n<li>building habits with discipline instead of waiting for &quot;motivation&quot;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\ud83c\udfa7 If you fancy an audio version, feel free to listen to this DevThink episode: <a href=\"https:\/\/devth.ink\/e002_productivity\/\">https:\/\/devth.ink\/e002_productivity\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>TL;DR<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Pen + paper still wins<\/strong> for planning, because it&#8217;s fast, flexible, and doesn&#8217;t require yet another app<\/li>\n<li><strong>Personal Kanban<\/strong> works because it forces you to limit WIP (work in progress) and gives you a visible &quot;Done&quot; list<\/li>\n<li><strong>Pomodoro<\/strong> is stupid-simple&#8230; which is exactly why it works. Do a <em>real<\/em> one (no email, no Slack, no calls during those 25 minutes), then do eight in a day and see your productivity skyrocket<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tracking<\/strong> (even lightly) is a clear way of knowing &quot;where did my day go?&quot;. Use a free app like RescueTime to learn exactly where your time went<\/li>\n<li><strong>Habits &gt; inspiration<\/strong>. Show up, do the work, repeat.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>!TL;DR<\/h2>\n<h3>Why paper beats &quot;yet another productivity app&quot;<\/h3>\n<p>In the podcast, Shawn and I tried digital systems. Both of us still come back to <strong>paper<\/strong> for day planning.<\/p>\n<p>Not because apps are bad, but because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>we already spend our whole day typing,<\/li>\n<li>paper is <em>offline<\/em> and distraction-free,<\/li>\n<li>and a notebook can be a calendar, journal, TODO list, idea dump&#8230; whatever you need today<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Shawn also explains the <strong>Bullet Journal<\/strong> approach (start with a blank notebook + table of contents and make it yours), while I share the more structured <strong>BestSelf &quot;Self Journal&quot;<\/strong> format (3-month goals, daily prompts, gratitude, wins, lessons learned, etc.).<\/p>\n<h3>Personal Kanban (and the magic of limiting &quot;Doing&quot;)<\/h3>\n<p>If you only take one thing away, take this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Your &quot;Doing&quot; list must be <strong>limited<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Kanban&#8217;s superpower is that you can&#8217;t keep dumping work into the &quot;Doing&quot; column. You move something to &quot;Done&quot; first. That&#8217;s how you stop feeling like you&#8217;re doing 20 things and finishing zero.<\/p>\n<p>Bonus: at the end of the week, the &quot;Done&quot; column is a reality check that you <em>did<\/em> get work done \u2014 even if it didn&#8217;t feel like it.<\/p>\n<p>The tool I use for this is a free app called <a href=\"https:\/\/kanbanflow.com\/\">KanbanFlow<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3>Index cards<\/h3>\n<p>Shawn shared one technique that works surprisingly well for him:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>grab index cards,<\/li>\n<li>write one task per card,<\/li>\n<li>clip them together.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now you can physically sort and prioritize your tasks on your desk like a tiny human Kanban board.<\/p>\n<h3>Getting Things Done (GTD)<\/h3>\n<p>We touch on <strong>Getting Things Done<\/strong> system by David Allen and the big psychological idea behind it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If your brain thinks you&#8217;ll forget something, it keeps reminding you<\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s why you&#8217;re thinking about work at 2AM<\/li>\n<li>A single trusted place to capture tasks calms that down<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even a simple list + calendar can reduce that background anxiety.<\/p>\n<h3>&quot;When in doubt, throw it out&quot;<\/h3>\n<p>I bring up a tip from Brian Tracy (and we drift into minimalism for a moment):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If something has been sitting on your list\/bookmarks\/todo pile for <strong>six months<\/strong>, there&#8217;s a decent chance you&#8217;ll never do it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Keeping &quot;aspirational&quot; tasks around can become emotional debt. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is delete the thing and move on.<\/p>\n<h3>Pomodoro: the simplest focus tool that still punches above its weight<\/h3>\n<p>Pomodoro is basically:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>work for 25 minutes (no distractions),<\/li>\n<li>break for 5,<\/li>\n<li>repeat,<\/li>\n<li>after 4 cycles, take a longer break of 30 minutes<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>And the key rule: if you break focus (check email, respond to a Slack message, answer the call), that Pomodoro <strong>doesn&#8217;t count<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite challenge from the episode:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Try to complete <strong>8 real Pomodoros<\/strong> in a day.<br \/>\nDo that for a month, and after it feel free to thank me for this newfound productivity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3>Tracking your time<\/h3>\n<p>Shawn shares a neat approach: a script that pops up every so often and forces you to write what you&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n<p>I share my &quot;overly detailed&quot; habit of logging work in Evernote (nowadays I use simple Google doc), and why something like Shawn&#8217;s approach can be even better \u2014 especially for long debugging sessions where progress is slow but the work is real.<\/p>\n<p>We also talk about <strong>RescueTime<\/strong> (a tool that tracks app\/site usage) and the very honest moment when it tells you you spent 10 hours on Facebook. Ouch.<\/p>\n<h3>Sharpening your axe (aka: learning counts as work)<\/h3>\n<p>This is a topic we both care about:<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re spending extra time outside work, don&#8217;t just do <em>more of the same work<\/em>.<br \/>\nUse that energy to <strong>improve<\/strong> \u2014 learn, explore, build side projects, read, sharpen your skills.<\/p>\n<p>That helps you <em>and<\/em> your team long-term.<\/p>\n<h3>Habits: do a 30-day challenge, don&#8217;t wait for motivation<\/h3>\n<p>We wrap up with something I love:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>do it for 30 days,<\/li>\n<li>make it small (even one Pomodoro),<\/li>\n<li>and let it become a routine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And the quote that basically sums up the whole episode:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Inspiration is for amateurs. Pros show up and do the work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h2>Full transcript<\/h2>\n<p>Below is the full transcript, in case you wanna throw it into an LLM or something \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Alright. Hello. And welcome back to the DevThink podcast with Shawn and Nikola. Today, we are here<br \/>\nto talk about some organizational and time management techniques that have helped us as developers<br \/>\nto get through the week without feeling like we&#8217;ve done absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Exactly. Welcome, guys.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. So I think we&#8217;ll start. We&#8217;ll talk a bit about the paper version of things such as the the<br \/>\nBullet Journal, Self Journal. And actually, Nikola, I think you and I have probably both<br \/>\nexperimented. We haven&#8217;t talked about this prior to the podcast, but we&#8217;ve probably experimented<br \/>\nwith online or web based systems, and we have both, separately decided on using an actual pen and<br \/>\npaper method. Is there anything you, wanna say about the online versions, why they didn&#8217;t work out<br \/>\nfor you?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Okay. So actually, actually, here&#8217;s the thing. The online versions, I still use one till this day.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s called, kanbanflow.com. So, so no affiliation as with, like, probably everything.<br \/>\nkanbanflow.com. It&#8217;s kinda like a Kanban board, but the only reason why I still kinda use it is that<br \/>\nit has an integrated Pomodoro timer, which we&#8217;ll say more about during this show. And that&#8217;s why I<br \/>\nkinda, like, still use it for the tasks where I time them. But, yes, to answer the question why I<br \/>\nstill use my pen and paper for planning out my day is, I guess that maybe the reason is because I<br \/>\ntype so much. I mean, we both type like 90% of our time is that I still like to have a pen, have a<br \/>\npaper, write something in it because know, it&#8217;s kinda like becoming a lost lost art kind of. How<br \/>\nhow&#8217;s the reason with you? And I&#8217;ll I&#8217;ll to add to this, this is something that I&#8217;ve been doing, you<br \/>\nknow, those kinda like to do lists ever since I can remember, you know, like, I would say, you know,<br \/>\nin your version, like middle school, you know? And I love it since.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. I like the the pen and paper tactile feedback. It&#8217;s something that you can do offline. And I<br \/>\nfeel like at the end of the day, I also the thing is it&#8217;s very versatile. Right? So my notebook is a<br \/>\njournal and a to do list and a calendar and, you know, whatever you want it to be. It can be your<br \/>\nyour food journal. It can be your weight loss guide. It can be, you know, your appointment book. And<br \/>\njust taking that with a pen and paper, with a computer screen off, and just doing things at the end<br \/>\nof the day, I think is very helpful. And since you did mention Kanban, and we didn&#8217;t really explain<br \/>\nit, you can just look up Kanban online. It&#8217;s a very simple concept that comes from the manufacturing<br \/>\nphilosophies from Japan. And the short version is, instead of having a single to do list, you have<br \/>\nat least you divide the list into maybe three columns. The first column is the stuff to do. The<br \/>\nsecond would be doing, and the third would be done. And the very important thing, the magic bullet<br \/>\nhere in Kanban is that doing box is limited. You can only have a set number of things. Maybe it&#8217;s<br \/>\ntwo. Maybe it&#8217;s three. Maybe if you have a developer team of 20 people, maybe it&#8217;s five. But nothing<br \/>\nis allowed to be put into into the doing column until something else is moved out into the done<br \/>\ncolumn. And that&#8217;s the basic short version of it. You can make it a lot more complicated, have a for<br \/>\nexample, in software, you can have a QA column. It can go from the doing to the QA column or<br \/>\nwhatever. And it&#8217;s also important to have the done column because at the end of the week or the end<br \/>\nof the month, if you do this, my wife has one on the wall, it&#8217;s just overwhelming. You have a never<br \/>\nending task list of things to do. You always feel like you were super busy all day, all week, and<br \/>\nyou&#8217;ve done nothing. And you can look back at that done column, and you can actually see, yes, you<br \/>\nhave done quite a bit. And you only clear them off when you have to, when you need room. So I just<br \/>\nwanted to mention that, because Kanban is a really great just you could do it for yourself. If your<br \/>\ncompany doesn&#8217;t buy into it, if your team doesn&#8217;t buy into it, you know, just do it yourself. You<br \/>\ncan use that. You can use Trello, trello,.com, which is a nice simple Kanban flow as well. And,<br \/>\nyeah, give it a try.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. There&#8217;s actually so we&#8217;re gonna probably leave the link in the description because I can&#8217;t<br \/>\nremember, you know, the actual name of the book. I think it&#8217;s personal Kanban or something like<br \/>\nthat. I didn&#8217;t read it whole. I&#8217;ve lit I know, kinda like listed through it. I read few chapters. It<br \/>\nwas good, but basically, as you said it, that&#8217;s the gist of it. So yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. Kanban is is really helpful. So I guess I&#8217;ll just briefly mention the Bullet Journal. I&#8217;m<br \/>\nactually not a an expert on the Bullet Journal. I do use, I guess, a modified version of it, which I<br \/>\nguess pretty much everyone who uses the Bullet Journal does. It&#8217;s just bulletjournal.com. You can<br \/>\nuse any notebook you want. And you have, you know, a table of contents. That&#8217;s very important in the<br \/>\nbeginning. And then depending on how strictly you follow it or how you adapt it, you have a section<br \/>\nfor your calendar, for goals for like a week or a month. Then you have, like, a weekly spread, which<br \/>\nI actually don&#8217;t do. And another thing I don&#8217;t do that many do is they decorate their Kanbanes. They<br \/>\nuse washi paper. They use all kinds of different color markers to make everything pretty. But, Just<br \/>\ngo check it out. They&#8217;re a bunch of YouTube videos, and I don&#8217;t really want to go into detail<br \/>\ndescribing it because there are a thousand ways to do it, and you just have to make it your own. And<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s the thing I like about it. You can just make it your own. The important thing to me is having<br \/>\nthe table of contents. And also, you start with a blank notebook. Any blank notebook. It could be a<br \/>\nmolyscheme. Could be they sell one. Page three things. You need page numbers. You need a blank<br \/>\nnotebook with a table of contents. And then everything you do, you write on the next available page.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s not like a premade book where, okay, if I wanna put a journal entry, I have to turn to page 47<br \/>\nbecause that&#8217;s where the journal section starts. Or if I wanna write something on my, you know,<br \/>\ncalendar for the week, I have to flip over to the this week in the calendar. That&#8217;s what the table<br \/>\nof contents is for. If one page has a recipe and the next page has a journal entry and the next page<br \/>\nhas your spread from Monday through Friday for next week, that&#8217;s totally fine. That&#8217;s why you have<br \/>\nthe table of contents. You don&#8217;t you don&#8217;t waste pages, and you can start it any day. You could<br \/>\nstart it March 27, and you&#8217;re good to go.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Cool. Okay. Sounds nice. And sounds like way more flexible than the one that I use. The one that I<br \/>\nuse is, called Self Journal. I honestly don&#8217;t know the exact website, you know, I bet that if you<br \/>\njust Google Self Journal, you know, it will pop up. Actually oh, I see it&#8217;s, bestself.co. So<br \/>\nbestself.co. Here&#8217;s the thing. This one is kinda like specific in terms of its three months, of<br \/>\ntrying to, let&#8217;s say, reach a certain goal. But, also, you can start it any day that you like.<br \/>\nAlthough, to be honest, it&#8217;s very it would be way better if you it&#8217;s actually kinda, like, set that<br \/>\nway that it kinda, like, makes you start on Monday because, you know, it has week note notes in it.<br \/>\nAnd how it actually works is you have your kinda, like, from 6AM to 9PM time schedule that you can<br \/>\nput in, then it has your kinda like notes, ideas. And something that&#8217;s kind of very important here<br \/>\nis that you also have few questions. And this is so you have a question, for example, this morning,<br \/>\nI&#8217;m grateful for, and you have to list three things. I&#8217;m not going to go into the details and and,<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not going to breach into the so called woo-woo kind of, you know, new age, quote, unquote, BS.<br \/>\nBut, honestly, you know, like, just try it, and you&#8217;ll see if this helps you in any way. Also, have,<br \/>\non every kinda like a day page, you have to write your own goal. What your goal is? Well, your goal<br \/>\nis that thing which you kinda like set that you&#8217;re gonna achieve in this try three months. Right?<br \/>\nWhy it&#8217;s important to write it every day? Well, because, you know, if you keep it in your<br \/>\nsubconscious, then also going into that woo-woo BS, it will you will constantly have your mind on<br \/>\nthis, you know, goal that you wanna achieve. And then below it, you have your today&#8217;s targets, which<br \/>\nyou kinda like list three targets or whatever amount of targets if you&#8217;re now very high achiever.<br \/>\nYou list your targets for this date that will help you come next to that end goal that you wanna<br \/>\nachieve. Then you have few, you know, quotes, which is kinda nice. Actually, I&#8217;m gonna read you the<br \/>\none from today. Know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it. It was by Nora<br \/>\nRoberts. Then in the evening, that&#8217;s also important. So, basically, you kinda like use it the whole<br \/>\nday. And in the evening, you list the lessons learned, wins, even, you know, like, even the small<br \/>\nones, you know, I took out the trash. It&#8217;s important to as you basically going back to what you said<br \/>\nlooking at the end of the week it&#8217;s very important to also see what you did and not just always look<br \/>\nat the stuff that you always have things to do because honestly if you&#8217;re let&#8217;s say, an achiever and<br \/>\nyou you are a go getter, then you will always, always, always have stuff that you, you know, have to<br \/>\ndo or want to do. And also, like, finally, you have the tonight I am grateful for, where you also<br \/>\nlist three things that you&#8217;re grateful for. And they also have this thing kind of like, how you<br \/>\ncalled it, week recaps, where you write, how your week went and stuff like that like like that. To<br \/>\nthis, I kinda like added one more thing to this where I do one thing from the book called the<br \/>\nmiracle morning. I don&#8217;t know. You probably haven&#8217;t mentioned this before, but I did I believe I<br \/>\nmentioned this book to you. And, you know, I&#8217;m not sure, but you&#8217;ll tell me you kinda like didn&#8217;t<br \/>\nlike it, but I like it. And what I take from it is the so called SABRS. So SABRS is an acronym for,<br \/>\nsilence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, read, and scribe. And to not go too deep into it,<br \/>\nlike, s is for silence, and honestly, I&#8217;m not very good about it. I only do one minute of quote<br \/>\nunquote meditation. I know everybody is someone who&#8217;s doing the meditation will laugh, but, you<br \/>\nknow, gotta start somewhere. A is for affirmations. Again, breaching into the, you know, Google<br \/>\nstuff. I have my list of affirmations that I read to myself. Am I crazy or not? Let&#8217;s just not go<br \/>\ninto it. I think that it may help you, you know, but I&#8217;m gonna keep this one for myself. V is for<br \/>\nvisualization. So you have your goal. Right? And if you try to visualize yourself I&#8217;m not gonna go,<br \/>\nyou know, run the burn on people and say, you know, you just have to visualize it and what it will<br \/>\nmanifest. No. Not none of those none of that kinda, like, bullshit. Oh, I don&#8217;t know if we&#8217;re<br \/>\nsupposed to say bullshit here, but, you know, I guess we can do whatever we want because it&#8217;s our<br \/>\npodcast. And, to be honest, you know, you have to work in the end, you have to work on it. And<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s just, you know, we we are both wired on it. We are gonna, I guess, speak more about it and<br \/>\nhow we do stuff, but not to try to drag this one way longer. The e is for exercise. I honestly do<br \/>\njust you know, if I can, go for a walk for, ten minutes in the morning and listen to my Audible,<br \/>\nwhich I love, by the way. R is for read. I try to read every morning, at least ten minutes of<br \/>\nsomething, you know, I try to make it positive and whatnot, because during the day, I read all the<br \/>\nstuff that I read is concerned, with software development. So this in the morning kind of stuff,<br \/>\nit&#8217;s something that&#8217;s not related to software development, but, you know, may maybe a book, you<br \/>\nknow, whatever. And then finally, describe part is where I reflect on my day before. So, literally,<br \/>\nI have my action. So for this, I have my other book because so this one this Self Journal is just,<br \/>\nyou know, as I said, for three months, and I have my totally blank, very big a four kinda big,<br \/>\njournal where I write things that happened for the next past day. Why? Because, well, I want to have<br \/>\nit as I want to put as much stuff in it because then it&#8217;s very, very I found it to be very rewarding<br \/>\nto go back and reread the stuff that I wrote, let&#8217;s say, two year I actually have entries that go<br \/>\nway back like two years ago. And that&#8217;s kind of very rewarding to go back and read what you were<br \/>\nthinking at that time, what were your struggles at the time, \u2026. Anyway, not to, you know, prolong<br \/>\nthis answer too much, but yeah, I&#8217;m currently I&#8217;m sticking with this self, best self Self Journal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Right. So, and just to clarify it, I, I didn&#8217;t like the book, not because I had a problem with the<br \/>\nmessage, but because the entire book came across as a giant infomercial for itself. So it was<br \/>\nwhatever. A couple hundred, three hundred pages, whatever. And from the amount that I read, it seems<br \/>\nlike it could be about 10% of its length and just tell you what it wants to tell you, instead of<br \/>\nevery other paragraph telling you how great what they&#8217;re telling you is going to be for you, and how<br \/>\nexciting and awesome it It&#8217;s like there&#8217;s a hard sell in the book you&#8217;re already reading. So that<br \/>\nfrustrated me. And then to finish off the paper thing, there&#8217;s also a fun little thing called I&#8217;ve<br \/>\nseen it referred to as the hipster PDA. And all that is is you get a stack of index cards and a<br \/>\nbinder clip that you may have seen as one of those typical, you know, black triangle things. And you<br \/>\njust put them in the clip. That&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s the entire thing. And then on each one, you can write a<br \/>\ntask. And what&#8217;s really cool about that is when you sit down at your desk, you just came back from<br \/>\nlunch or you just came back to work after on on Monday after the weekend off or whatever. You came<br \/>\nback from a meeting. You&#8217;re completely out of the zone. You have no idea what you should be spending<br \/>\nyour time on. Boom. You take out your index cards. You look at them. They&#8217;re physical items you can<br \/>\nmove around, put on your desk, reorder, you know, make notes on. And it&#8217;s really nice because then<br \/>\nyou can look at that and say, okay. This is the one I should probably be spending my time on now.<br \/>\nAnd I really enjoy doing that. As a matter of fact, I started doing that again recently. I didn&#8217;t<br \/>\nhave any index cards with me, I did have a deck of cards, of actual playing cards. And so I took a<br \/>\nmarker, and I wrote on the cards, like, on the borders, on the edge, just tasks. And I was able to<br \/>\nsit down multiple times throughout the last couple weeks, pull them out, reorder them, prioritize<br \/>\nthem, group them by ones that I&#8217;m gonna do in the near future, ones that I should be doing today,<br \/>\nones that I would still like to do, but they&#8217;re just not gonna be anytime, anytime soon. And that<br \/>\nhelps you schedule things on your calendar. Maybe I know I don&#8217;t have time for this now, but I&#8217;ll<br \/>\nschedule it every Tuesday at 10:30AM and leave it there until it&#8217;s done, which is actually,<br \/>\nsomething that I just did last week. I filled up my calendar with a bunch of things from my cards,<br \/>\nand I schedule them as recurring to happen every single week. And I know they&#8217;re not gonna get done<br \/>\nevery time, but they can stay on there until they&#8217;re done or I decide they&#8217;re no longer necessary.<br \/>\nAnd that is a good way. All of these things, by the way, psychologically, there&#8217;s a book called<br \/>\nGetting Things Done by David Allen, which I recommend everyone at least take a look at and skim. I&#8217;m<br \/>\nsure actually, probably everyone listening to this has probably read it or heard about it. The<br \/>\ngeneral idea is that you are not allowed to have many sources of to do lists. You can&#8217;t have<br \/>\neverything in your email inbox, plus a bunch of post notes on your fridge, plus, you know,<br \/>\nhandwritten notes in your pocket, plus voice mail messages. You need to put every single thing that<br \/>\ncomes into your life into one place, whether it&#8217;s an electronic system or paper, doesn&#8217;t matter, but<br \/>\nonly in one place. And then it gets processed. It gets put onto a you do you do it if it&#8217;s less than<br \/>\ntwo minutes. You delegate it if you can&#8217;t if you if you can delegate it, or you schedule it, put it<br \/>\non your calendar or something. And the general idea is that if you have anxiety because you have too<br \/>\nmany things that you know you need to do and you know you haven&#8217;t been doing them, your mind,<br \/>\nbecause it&#8217;s uneasy with that, is going to keep bringing them into your into your thoughts. And<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s why you can&#8217;t fall asleep at night. Because you&#8217;re laying there, and you can&#8217;t fall asleep<br \/>\nbecause you&#8217;re thinking about the 50 things you didn&#8217;t do. If you take those 50 things, write them<br \/>\ndown, put them on a calendar, say, okay. I&#8217;ll do this one next Tuesday. I&#8217;ll do this one tomorrow<br \/>\nnight at, you know, 08:00. I&#8217;ll do this one noon. Once your brain knows they are handled, even<br \/>\nthough you&#8217;ve done nothing but schedule them, your brain knows when your calendar alert comes up,<br \/>\nit&#8217;s gonna be you&#8217;re gonna be reminded at the right time. It&#8217;s not gonna slip away, and you&#8217;re not<br \/>\ngonna suddenly, you know, show up at the airport without having bought your tickets or whatever.<br \/>\nYou&#8217;re able to sleep. So, yeah, that&#8217;s just you know, I wanted to mention GTD, so that&#8217;s all I have<br \/>\nto say about that for the moment. Anything else on calendars and paper and pen, or should we move on<br \/>\nto some of the day to day techniques?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Actually, yeah, I remembered one thing now as you were saying about GTD. And if you like, this is a<br \/>\nvery good tip from Brian Tracy. I&#8217;m gonna mention his I quote, unquote read why I said, quote,<br \/>\nunquote, because I listened to, the audible version of the time management made simple by Brian<br \/>\nTracy. And that&#8217;s kinda like a book, where he has all the stuff that he kinda like wrote about time<br \/>\nmanagement condensed into one, let&#8217;s say, book. And it&#8217;s very good. Like, this is the book, that I<br \/>\nreread or re listened most amount of time. Because here&#8217;s the thing, I believe that we need, you<br \/>\nknow, to hear these things over and over again just because, you know, if you heard it one time and<br \/>\nyou think it&#8217;s great, but then you try it and maybe you kinda, like, forget it, it&#8217;s good to be<br \/>\nreminded about it. And one thing that just, you reminded me of is so you have your stack of, you<br \/>\nknow, tasks or whatever, or you as you said, you file stuff in. And then if after six months, you go<br \/>\nin and you revisit that list, and if for example some, you know, or maybe this is okay, this is an<br \/>\nawesome, example. I have bookmarks. Right? I have so many bookmarks that I need to kind of like<br \/>\nlook, But then again, if you see that some bookmarks or some files that you need to kinda like look<br \/>\ninto or read through are still there after six months, probably you should just toss it away. He has<br \/>\nthis cool thing. When in doubt, throw it out. And it&#8217;s actually honestly true because if you&#8217;re if<br \/>\nyou haven&#8217;t looked at it in six months, probably, you know, it&#8217;s not worth your time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> You know, that&#8217;s not only true for I don&#8217;t wanna take the podcast on a whole left turn, but real<br \/>\nquick note about minimalism, which you&#8217;ve been to my house. I am not a minimalist by any stretch.<br \/>\nBut I have acquired multiple books on minimalism, which is ironic. And one of them is called The Joy<br \/>\nof Less. And the author says that you should only have things in your home if you either believe<br \/>\nthem to be useful or sorry, know them to be useful or believe them to be beautiful. And know them to<br \/>\nbe useful. It means you have to use them. If you have some, you know, implement in your kitchen and<br \/>\nyou never use it, I mean, probably three or six months is a good amount of time. You should get rid<br \/>\nof it and believe it to be beautiful means you not only like it, but you have to have it on display.<br \/>\nSo if you have, like, an old thing that your grandmother left you that, you know, some dishware or a<br \/>\na picture that a painting, if you don&#8217;t have it hanging up for everyone to see, it needs to go. So<br \/>\nyou decide. Do you really need it in your life? Do you really need to pay money to store it, to<br \/>\nclimate control it, to clean it, to even just the space it&#8217;s taking away from you being able to move<br \/>\naround in your home and be comfortable and spend time with the things and people that you want to<br \/>\nspend time with. Is it really worth all the overhead? And the answer is no. And the same thing with<br \/>\nall these aspirational things we buy. How many people listening right now have a guitar or some<br \/>\nother musical instrument that they bought to learn, and it&#8217;s been sitting untouched for more than a<br \/>\nyear? I know I just struck a chord with a lot of people. Or, you know, a juggling set or a set of<br \/>\nskis, or you know<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Set of exercise equipment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> These are these are called aspirational items. Like, and I&#8217;ll tie us back into our our actual<br \/>\npodcast topic in a second. These are what&#8217;s called aspirational items. Every time you look at it,<br \/>\nyou say, if I get rid of that guitar, then I will not end up ever end up being a guitar player, and<br \/>\nI want to be a guitar player. I see myself as someone who I would like to be a guitar player. And by<br \/>\ngetting rid of this, by selling it, put it on Craigslist, not only am I giving up on that dream, but<br \/>\nI&#8217;m also now officially a failure. As long as I keep it, I might get to it one day. But if I get rid<br \/>\nof it, I&#8217;m admitting to myself and the world that I&#8217;m not capable or I&#8217;m not good enough or<br \/>\nwhatever. And that&#8217;s just not true. That&#8217;s just a mental block that you&#8217;d have to get to. And so, to<br \/>\nbring it back around in a circle to us, as a developer, we all have ideas for side projects and<br \/>\nbusinesses we wanna start, and features we wanna add to our company&#8217;s product that are gonna get us<br \/>\nrecognition and make our coworkers love us or some process that we wanna automate. And we have so<br \/>\nmany of these ideas to the point that it becomes crippling when you look at the list because you<br \/>\nrealize you haven&#8217;t done it, you don&#8217;t have time for it, and you&#8217;re probably never going to do it.<br \/>\nSo now you feel like a loser just because you were actually trying to improve the world. You know,<br \/>\nyou came up with these ideas. You&#8217;re like, wow. That would be great. That would be great. That would<br \/>\nbe great. And then every time you look at it, it&#8217;s another reminder that you didn&#8217;t do it yet. And I<br \/>\nthink you gotta throw the stuff away after a while. You know? I mean, I know you wanna contribute to<br \/>\nthat open source project. I know you want to completely, replace this the, proprietary software at<br \/>\nwork that you hate because, you know, it&#8217;s written in Java and you hate Java, or because, you know,<br \/>\nyou hate the configuration tool, or you would just love to rewrite and make. You know, we all have<br \/>\nthose things. You know, I wanna rewrite my own calendar system because I don&#8217;t like Google Calendar<br \/>\nor whatever. You know, you&#8217;re not going to. And even if you did, it&#8217;s not worth your time other than<br \/>\nas a learning experiment. And for the amount of time it would take to do well, you might as well<br \/>\npick one of your other side projects. So yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Awesome. This this was great. This was great. Just like a quick question. Did you read the book? I<br \/>\ncan I don&#8217;t know the exact name? I mean, the title, the magic of tidying up or something like that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Because it was very similar to what you were saying to the other one.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Anyways, cool. Called Swedish death cleaning. You should just Google that real quick. Swedish death<br \/>\ncleaning. Apparently, it&#8217;s a tradition in Sweden that as you approach a certain age, from like maybe<br \/>\n50 or so, that you start getting rid of things over time, so that when you die, your family doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\ninherit a house full of stuff. Interesting. Yes. Alright. So we&#8217;ll go back, move on to the the next<br \/>\ntopic here, which is Pomodoro. I&#8217;ll describe the Pomodoro Technique because it&#8217;s so easy to describe<br \/>\nbriefly. The short version is, you set a timer for, let&#8217;s say, twenty five minutes. You work only on<br \/>\none thing for that twenty five minutes. You take a five minute break, then you do another twenty<br \/>\nfive minutes, another five minute break. And the very, very important rules are, once you start,<br \/>\nthere are no distractions. If someone comes and interrupts you, they have ruined that cycle of the<br \/>\nPomodoro. If you go to Facebook or your email, you have ruined that Pomodoro. You focus intensely<br \/>\nonly on the one thing for twenty five minutes. Take a break. Repeat. Once you&#8217;ve done three or four<br \/>\nof these, you can take a longer break, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty minute. And the twenty five<br \/>\nminutes, five minutes is entirely that&#8217;s, like, kind of the standard. But you can make it anything<br \/>\nyou want. You can do ten minute Pomodoros. You can do one hour Pomodoros. Probably neither one of<br \/>\nthose are those are probably both a little extreme. But, yeah, that&#8217;s basically it. And I&#8217;m gonna<br \/>\nassume that 80% of the people listening to this already know the Pomodoro Technique and have used<br \/>\nit. And, Nikola and I both really like it. So I&#8217;m sure you have some stuff to add to that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Pomodoro rocks. I mean, actually, as I always say, right, here&#8217;s a challenge for you. I<br \/>\nchallenge you to do eight true Pomodoros. You know, don&#8217;t don&#8217;t try to fake it. Yeah. I just<br \/>\nanswered that email now. True Pomodoros, I challenge you to do eight of them in a working hour. Yes.<br \/>\nThat&#8217;s if you calculate less than four actual hours. But, honestly, remind remember me when you do<br \/>\nthat and when you look back on your day that day, you will feel like, oh, man, I really did a lot of<br \/>\nthings today. Trust me. Try it. You&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. And if you&#8217;re using the hipster PDA or if you&#8217;re using, you know, the Kanban method or<br \/>\nwhatever, at the before each Pomodoro, look at it and say, where should I be spending my time?<br \/>\nShould I be working on the thing that I did right before my last break because I was getting on a<br \/>\nroll or because it really needs to get done because I have a deadline? Or should I look at, you<br \/>\nknow, item two on my list, which I haven&#8217;t touched in five days that is coming up due as well? You<br \/>\nknow, that&#8217;s all gonna be decisions you&#8217;re gonna have to make on the fly. But it&#8217;s really nice<br \/>\nbecause another well, nice for many reasons. One of the things that really helps me, and I&#8217;m sure<br \/>\nwe&#8217;ve all done this, is you have some kind of problem. It&#8217;s not working out. You&#8217;re trying to write<br \/>\nsome code or trying to fix something. Fix a bug. You can&#8217;t find the bug. Or you think you fixed the<br \/>\nbug. You deploy it to production and it&#8217;s still not working. If you take a step back and look at it<br \/>\nwith bring someone over with fresh eyes or you stop working on it until tomorrow, which you can&#8217;t do<br \/>\nwith a production bug, it helps a lot. If you put a limit okay. Here&#8217;s a twenty five minute limit.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m fixing this bug. For the five minutes, you should get up away from your desk at least, you know,<br \/>\nwalk 10 feet away. Go to the bathroom. Get a hot drink. Do whatever it is you&#8217;re gonna do. When you<br \/>\ncome back, you will probably realize a lot of the time that you&#8217;ve been going down a rabbit hole.<br \/>\nLike, you had a thought process. You had an idea, and then you kept iterating on that idea until you<br \/>\nwere straying off from being productive because you think you&#8217;re almost there. Oh, let me oh, let me<br \/>\njust try it this way. Oh, let me just try this. And it turns out that wasn&#8217;t the right solution, but<br \/>\nyou&#8217;re never gonna see that. You could have stayed at their desk for three hours with a full bladder<br \/>\nand a head full of stress and a headache just trying to beat this thing into submission. But if you<br \/>\ndo a Pomodoro and get up and come back and sit back down, you look at it and you say, oh, wait. What<br \/>\nabout this? Or try this. Or at the very least, I was clearly beating my head against the desk with<br \/>\nthis. Let&#8217;s look for another approach.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Definitely. Agreed. Although to touch on one point, as you said, okay, let&#8217;s move to the item<br \/>\nnumber two. Here&#8217;s the thing. Yes, that&#8217;s a good point. Although I&#8217;m gonna link back to the Brian<br \/>\nTracy again. I actually like that guy very much. He has this book called eat that frog, where he<br \/>\nbasically says, if the first thing in the morning that you do is eat a frog, Well, probably during<br \/>\nthe day, nothing worse will happen. Well, your frog is your task, you know, that it&#8217;s hard that you<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t do. You&#8217;ve been at it for like maybe even, you know, a week, a month, whatever, and you just<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t make the progress. No. Don&#8217;t go do anything else. Try to do force yourself to go and work on<br \/>\nthis, task slash project first. Because, yeah, if that&#8217;s the worst thing that you do, probably you<br \/>\nwon&#8217;t have anything worse during the day. Although, to give credit to your idea, yes, it&#8217;s maybe<br \/>\nsometimes good to, you know, just switch the thinking process to something else because you may get<br \/>\nanother idea, back on the one that you couldn&#8217;t solve. But, yeah, just just be wary of, you know,<br \/>\nnot pushing the main ticket or, I mean, ticket project to the sidelines.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. And there&#8217;s there&#8217;s no right answer to this. It could be that eating the frog first is the<br \/>\nright answer for you 99% of the time. It might also not be. And just to take some learnings from<br \/>\nmore artistic things like writing and music and create creative things or drawing. If the advice<br \/>\nthat I&#8217;ve heard and read from multiple sources from authors and things like that is, if say you<br \/>\nwrite something, you don&#8217;t immediately critique it. You put it in a drawer for a day or a week, and<br \/>\nthen you read it. And then you&#8217;ll find out if it was good or if it was crap. So you might just be<br \/>\ntoo close to it. You might need to take a break from it in order to take a have a clearer mind about<br \/>\nwhat the next step should be or whether it&#8217;s even worth continuing at all. So oh, and I should just<br \/>\nmention real quick, the pomodoro pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, and it got its name from a<br \/>\ncollege student who was having trouble studying. And I forget his name, but if you look up Pomodoro<br \/>\nTechnique, you&#8217;ll find the creator. And he had a kitchen timer shaped like a plastic tomato. And so<br \/>\nhe named this the Pomodoro Technique. So there&#8217;s the mystery solved there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Those who like apps, there are multiple versions of Pomodoro. Thousands.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Chrome plugins, web browser pages that do it with JavaScript, Android, iOS. I mean, you can get<br \/>\nlittle standalone timers. I mean, a standalone kitchen timer that makes a loud ding at the end, you<br \/>\nknow, might just be the thing for you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Usually, you know, nowadays, especially it seems like we&#8217;re trying to, you know, complicate<br \/>\nthings. This one is so simple. It&#8217;s almost as in, hey, this can&#8217;t work because it&#8217;s so simple. But,<br \/>\nyeah, most of the times, simple stuff, that&#8217;s what works. Right? Because, will you use a system that<br \/>\nyou have to go through 15 steps of configuration or setting or what whatnot? Yeah. Maybe you will<br \/>\ntwo or three times, and then it&#8217;s back to the old habits. Right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. And so to move on to the next topic while also slightly hanging onto the Pomodoro, if you do<br \/>\nPomodoros and you track them on paper or in whatever Pomodoro app you&#8217;re using, you have the ability<br \/>\nto go back at the end of the week and evaluate what you&#8217;ve done, sort of having a the version of the<br \/>\ndone column in the Kanban board. And something that I have done, learned from a friend of mine,<br \/>\nRupa, he wrote a bash script which would pop open his editor every, I think, every hour or something<br \/>\nlike that. And he would just type in it when it pop when it popped up and interrupted him, he would<br \/>\njust type what he was working on. Then he can go back at the end of the week, and he can, you know,<br \/>\nsee what he&#8217;s doing, how he&#8217;s spending his time. And I don&#8217;t know what his end goal with that was,<br \/>\nwhether he was just trying to improve and see if he felt like he was wasting time, or he just wanted<br \/>\nto keep track of what he had worked on for the purposes of, you know, employee evaluations or<br \/>\nwhatever. But I really like the idea, so I stole it. And I have, from time to time, actually made it<br \/>\nevery fifteen minutes, sometimes half an hour. And it&#8217;s really good because when it pops up, and you<br \/>\nhave to type what you&#8217;re doing, and you have to type, I was instant messaging with this guy, or I<br \/>\nwas on Amazon researching a purchase I wanted to make, it snaps you back to, oh, yeah. I should<br \/>\nprobably be doing something productive. And when you are being productive, a lot of times, you don&#8217;t<br \/>\nrealize at the end of the day where your time went. It turns out, I was working on, you know, a<br \/>\nproject, and someone had a problem and they asked me if I could look into it. And I&#8217;m digging into a<br \/>\ndatabase, I&#8217;m doing some, you know, little bit of research where I&#8217;m answering a question, and my<br \/>\nlittle thing pops up, I&#8217;m like, oh, I helped so and so with this thing. Whereas if you would ask me<br \/>\nan hour later or especially at the end of the day or week, what I worked on that week, I would have<br \/>\nnever realized it, but that person may have taken thirty, forty five minutes of my time. And it&#8217;s<br \/>\ngood to keep track of that for your own sanity when you look back at how little you&#8217;ve accomplished<br \/>\nand realize, no, you&#8217;re doing things. You&#8217;re just getting interrupted. And if you are in any way<br \/>\nreporting up, which actually, I recommend this. This isn&#8217;t something that I I would never want to<br \/>\nwork at a job where I was record required to track my time and justify forty hours worth of work in<br \/>\na week. However, I do keep track of what I do in a given week. And at the end of the week on Friday,<br \/>\nI send out email to certain people in the company telling them that what I worked on. Because I want<br \/>\nto, you know, show where I&#8217;m adding value. I want to get feedback if I&#8217;m going in the wrong<br \/>\ndirection. I wanna throw out ideas for things that I wanna do, which might cost developer time or<br \/>\nmoney. I&#8217;m in a management position, so I might have ideas along those lines. And, you know, let<br \/>\nthem know it&#8217;s coming. Let them know to expect it. Get feedback from them, or just tell them when<br \/>\nthings got accomplished. Or tell them when when things are going wrong. You know, we we didn&#8217;t get<br \/>\nas much done or we had a problem in production or whatever the case may be this week. And the reason<br \/>\nis because our developers don&#8217;t have resources a, b, or c. Or, you know, another department did this<br \/>\nwhich affected us or whatever. And it&#8217;s really it feels good to me. I have that now in my email<br \/>\noutbox archive, and they have it. And I can look back on that and kinda see progress. Especially<br \/>\nwhen you see you know, you don&#8217;t wanna see repeated topics coming up, because that means that they<br \/>\nweren&#8217;t addressed. So I use it, and it&#8217;s just a Bash script that opens up an editor if you use, you<br \/>\nknow, leaf pad, notepad, g edit, text mate, whatever you want. You can, you know, write a little<br \/>\nscript. I have mine append the date time to the bottom of the file automatically and then open it.<br \/>\nSo when I when I see a pop up, I scroll to the end of the file, type a couple sentences, and I close<br \/>\nit. And it&#8217;s not exactly the same thing as, Nikola uses, so, tell us about your your rescue time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Actually, two things. I&#8217;m gonna, talk about the rescue time plus Evernote. Although I immediately<br \/>\nimmediately have to say, you&#8217;re gonna send me that back script, and actually, can share it also with<br \/>\npeople because and here&#8217;s why because. So, as you know, you know, I&#8217;ve been freelancing for a very,<br \/>\nvery long time, and you have to do your reports as in, you know, almost honestly, I mean, some<br \/>\npeople may not do it. I&#8217;m crazy, and I did it literally in a minute. So for example, I started<br \/>\nworking on something and I write started work. So 1625 started working on this and that. 1628<br \/>\ncommitted this, 1754, did this, did that. And when I stopped about, to people about this, they were<br \/>\nlike, woah. This feels way, you know, over the top. And I was when I thought about it, I was like,<br \/>\nokay. Maybe you&#8217;re right. But here&#8217;s the thing. It became such a habit for me that I don&#8217;t even<br \/>\nthink about it. So it&#8217;s it&#8217;s second nature to me to when I did something, open up, Evernote and<br \/>\nwrite for that date, what I did, and that&#8217;s it. But to tie into your, what you&#8217;re doing, I<br \/>\nabsolutely love this because, you know, every twenty five or whatever minutes, it&#8217;s way better<br \/>\nbecause I don&#8217;t know, I think I like it, and I wanna try it. As you know, when I hear something, I<br \/>\ntry it without any, you know, how do you say, thoughts about it. And then I see if I like it or not.<br \/>\nBut after doing it, giving it a proper shot to tie back to our last episode, yes, at Vorak, I love<br \/>\nit. Now it&#8217;s my third third week, I believe, and I&#8217;m starting to really, really love it. And, of<br \/>\ncourse, the type matrix keyboard, it&#8217;s awesome. But yeah. So what I do is, as I said, I use Evernote<br \/>\nfor my notes. Literally, I&#8217;m crazy. I do when I write something, I put the time and what I&#8217;m doing<br \/>\nor, for example, what I committed. But here&#8217;s the thing, and here&#8217;s where things may here&#8217;s where<br \/>\nyour bash script may very, very much help me. What if I&#8217;m working on something and debugging<br \/>\nsomething, and I didn&#8217;t make any freaking progress for, you know, two, three hours? What then I&#8217;ll<br \/>\nhave only two entries. Right? For example, 7AM, start working on this, and then, you know, thirteen<br \/>\ntwenty five finished this. Someone reading that kind of a report will be, oh, the guy was slacking.<br \/>\nBut if I every fifteen minutes, right? Oh, I tried this. It didn&#8217;t work. You know? And then you have<br \/>\n10 entries where you wrote, hey. I tried this. Didn&#8217;t work. Try this. Didn&#8217;t work. Maybe even this<br \/>\njust kept popping my head. Maybe even if you read through that yourself, you&#8217;ll be like, hey, dude,<br \/>\nbut I didn&#8217;t try that. You know? So I definitely see value in your, you know, constant popping pop<br \/>\nups. And I actually think yeah. Sorry?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> One thing to that because the one of the biggest problems, challenges, whatever, that developers<br \/>\nhave is every time someone says how long will something take, we either grossly underestimate it, or<br \/>\nwe say we don&#8217;t know, and then we do it for however long it takes. And the other people in the<br \/>\ncompany are saying, well, that&#8217;s taking way too long. It&#8217;s such a simple task. And the fact is, you<br \/>\nactually start working in the surrounding code and considering other things that will break, things<br \/>\nuntil then, you&#8217;d have no idea how complicated something is. And if you are able to keep track, as<br \/>\nyou were just saying, Nikola, you will find that you can show this to someone and say, look, we it<br \/>\ntook this long for this reason. Or you can even say, hey, you know how I&#8217;m always telling you I<br \/>\nwanna, you know, take a week and refactor, you know, some some code here. Or instead of taking an<br \/>\nhour to do this in a really crappy way so that I know I get it done for you, if I could take two<br \/>\ndays to do it, you get the same end result, but maybe the next five tickets after that would take<br \/>\nhalf the time they would have otherwise taken. And without documentation, without evidence, without<br \/>\nsomething that they can understand, you&#8217;re never gonna get that. So, you know, if you do a seven<br \/>\nhour debugging session and you actually had problems because there was some bad code and you found<br \/>\nsome other bug along the way, and you noticed that if you were to fix this, it would actually break<br \/>\nsomething else, and you can&#8217;t just do it the straightforward way. You have to go and, you know, redo<br \/>\nsome refactoring, or maybe even talk to someone who&#8217;s in a more product owner type role to get<br \/>\npermission to change the behavior of the application. I mean, this isn&#8217;t it&#8217;s not just fix a bug, go<br \/>\nfind the place where it says less than two and make it less than three, and boom, you&#8217;ve fixed the<br \/>\nproblem. And those kind of bug fixes are exceptionally rare.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> True. True. So to add one more thing, you mentioned, you know, that we don&#8217;t know how productive we<br \/>\nwere. Well, now you can. There&#8217;s a tool that I use for, honestly, like, maybe more than three years<br \/>\nnow, or maybe even more. I honestly don&#8217;t remember. It&#8217;s called rescue time. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s<br \/>\ncool. I mean, I saw on other podcasts that what they do is they spell out the word, but, you know,<br \/>\nGoogle rescue time and you&#8217;ll find it. You You install it on your computer and it does something<br \/>\npretty freaky. It tracks everything that you do. So people who don&#8217;t like that will have a problem,<br \/>\nbut here&#8217;s the thing that it does for you. It tracks all your apps that you&#8217;re using, and at the end<br \/>\nof the week actually, well, you can anytime you log into their dashboard on their website, you can<br \/>\nsee how is your day going, what apps are you using. And it&#8217;s smart enough to know that, for example,<br \/>\nVisual Studio Code or Facebook.com is bad for you, and Visual Studio Code is good for you in terms<br \/>\nof productivity, meaning that you&#8217;re probably doing something, you know, productive. And what it<br \/>\nsends you, only one email per week where it says, you were this productive during this week. And<br \/>\nthere&#8217;s no, you know, fooling yourself. Hey. If it says that for this week, you did ten hours of<br \/>\nfreaking Facebook, then my man, something&#8217;s wrong. Right? You&#8217;re being not productive. You&#8217;re lying<br \/>\nto yourself. And if your productivity level is, you know, 50%, honestly, dude, you can do way<br \/>\nbetter. So, like, to be specific, I just looked at my mind for this week. It was just a sec. I just<br \/>\nhad it opened.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> And while you&#8217;re looking that up, there is a thing that I just heard about today or yesterday, I<br \/>\nforget, in a podcast, where they&#8217;re talking about people working forty, fifty, sixty hour weeks<br \/>\nplus. And the the saying that they brought up was, work will expand to fill the time available. So<br \/>\nif you have to get something done in forty hours, you probably can. If you&#8217;re spending sixty hours<br \/>\nin your week, I can almost guarantee you, unless you&#8217;re like a sweatshop laborer, that&#8217;s because you<br \/>\nspent twenty or thirty hours of your week on Facebook and talking to coworkers and, you know,<br \/>\nforwarding memes to other people. So, you know, find a way to to cut that down. You know, use rescue<br \/>\ntime. Use pomodoro so you can actually track your time. Use the pop up timer to log what you&#8217;re<br \/>\ndoing, you know, multiple times an hour. Alright. So your productivity for this week is?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> 78%, which,<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> to<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> be fair, is not as always so high. For example, last week, this is, an 11.4 increase from the<br \/>\nprevious week. So how did this happen? Well, last week, I saw okay. So it&#8217;s, like, 60, what, 7%.<br \/>\nAnd, usually, I&#8217;m way like, I&#8217;m almost almost always over 70%. I was like, okay. Past week, I was<br \/>\nnot so good. I&#8217;m gonna, you know, double down this week, and, well, it happened. I did 78%, which is<br \/>\nkinda like good. Considering that I logged, and that&#8217;s also what you get, it get it says, over the<br \/>\npast week, you logged this amount of hours. And for example, for me, this week was forty eight<br \/>\nhours. So now you&#8217;ll be like, oh, you&#8217;re overworker, whatever. No. We&#8217;re gonna do a podcast show<br \/>\nabout this. I just you know, I like to learn stuff. And, yes, I do work over weekends, but as we<br \/>\ntalked, you know, if you wanna work over the weekends, just work on something, you know, that&#8217;s<br \/>\nprogressing you as a dev because at the end, you will be helpful to your company, \u2026 blah blah. Yeah.<br \/>\nSo yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I&#8217;m very happy with this week, by the way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Cool. Yeah. I mean, I just wanna say something about because we in our recent meeting that we had,<br \/>\nwe talked about the concept of sharpening your axe, the the parable of the the woodcutter who could<br \/>\ncut down, you know, 10 times as many trees in a in a workday as everyone else. And eventually, it<br \/>\nwas five times as many, and then twice as many, and then equal, and then he was doing half as many.<br \/>\nAnd the other woodcutter said, hey, you know, why don&#8217;t you sharpen your axe? And he says, can&#8217;t you<br \/>\nsee I don&#8217;t have time? And the idea for developers in sharpening your axe is improve your skills.<br \/>\nYou know, learn new language, learn a new framework, learn more about the way your current language,<br \/>\nyou know, works. And when I have seen developers that I work with committing things or doing things<br \/>\non weekends, I see things popping up in GitHub and whatnot, I have actually individually spoken them<br \/>\nand said, you know, hey. Is this necessary? Like, if something&#8217;s broken in production, you know, if<br \/>\nthe boss is asking for something, absolutely, you gotta do what you gotta do. But I shouldn&#8217;t be<br \/>\nseeing you committing code every Saturday. If you&#8217;re that motivated to do something, you have<br \/>\nnothing else you&#8217;d rather do, fine. Do a side project, take an online class, do something. Because<br \/>\nif you just do the same thing on the weekends and evenings that you do during the workday, you&#8217;re<br \/>\nnot gonna come in fresh. You&#8217;re not going to do your best work at work. And if you don&#8217;t continue to<br \/>\nexpand your skills in our industry, you are not going to be all that you could be as a developer on<br \/>\nmy team. And I want someone who&#8217;s going to not only want to learn for themselves, but bring those<br \/>\nideas to the rest of us. Maybe Nikola&#8217;s gonna, you know, do some research or read a book tomorrow,<br \/>\nand he&#8217;s gonna come in the next day and say, hey, guys. Hey, check out this really cool thing. And<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s what I value a lot over almost anything in a developer. I don&#8217;t wanna be I listen to<br \/>\npodcasts. I read blogs. I go to conferences. I follow certain people in various ways. And I get<br \/>\nexposed to what&#8217;s going on in the communities that I value. And I get excited about things and talk<br \/>\nabout them and bring them into work and bring them into my friends. And all I want is for others to<br \/>\ndo exactly that. I mean, everyone has permission. It&#8217;s not like only the manager, only the boss,<br \/>\nonly the team lead, only the guy who&#8217;s been here the longest, only the guy who wrote the original<br \/>\nversion of the software. You know, it&#8217;s not like only that guy can make improvements, can bring in a<br \/>\nnew technology, you know, can maybe change the way we do things. Because every single person, even<br \/>\nthe most junior person that we have in the company or that, you know, we have yet to hire, knows<br \/>\nsomething I don&#8217;t. They know multiple things I don&#8217;t about some things I don&#8217;t care about at all,<br \/>\nand some things that would make me more effective. So, you know, everyone just should feel free to<br \/>\ndo that and improve themselves for their own mental health, for their own well-being. And and if<br \/>\nyou&#8217;re really trying to look good for the boss or trying to be more productive for the company, that<br \/>\nwill still make you over the long term more valuable than just continuing on your your work tickets<br \/>\nfor the week. And back to what we said before, maybe you spent 20 or 30% of your time, you know,<br \/>\nbrowsing websites around Facebook, and that&#8217;s why you&#8217;re working on Saturday, you know, think about<br \/>\nit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yep. Totally agree. Totally agreed. It&#8217;s I would say that when people do that and install it and<br \/>\nthey, you know, try it for, you know, a week, a month, as they say, or I think I read that<br \/>\nsomewhere, truth will set you free, but first it will make you angry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Nice. Yeah. I do have to say, I would never install or use it because I will not install some<br \/>\ntracking thing on my computer knowingly that reports out. If it did its collection locally and gave<br \/>\nme a way to view it locally without sending it to them, I would consider it. But yeah, there&#8217;s no<br \/>\nway I&#8217;m giving that out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. I&#8217;m way more liberal, with that kind of stuff.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. No. Just no.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. Cool. So I guess we&#8217;ve covered a lot of stuff. One thing that we haven&#8217;t touched on, and,<br \/>\nactually, there&#8217;s we&#8217;re gonna make a whole new show about it, and it&#8217;s since we&#8217;re both fathers, you<br \/>\nknow, something this question always comes up. Okay. How do you, you know, juggle your family slash<br \/>\ndev life slash I wanna improve kind of life? You know? And this is something that we&#8217;ll definitely<br \/>\ntalk about because we don&#8217;t wanna go too overboard with this show.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> This is by far our longest podcast to date, and so we should probably start to wrap it up. But I do<br \/>\nwanna kinda wrap it up by talking about some of these things that you&#8217;ve heard in this podcast, and<br \/>\nwe probably listed way too many. You probably have to go back and listen to it and take notes. We<br \/>\nshould have given a disclaimer at the beginning, have a notepad ready. But you may wanna implement<br \/>\nsome of them, and you will forget, or you will try one day and then forget, and never do it again.<br \/>\nSo how do you actually do something like this, make it a habit, and get started? And I I don&#8217;t know<br \/>\nat all how to be successful in creating a new habit, but one thing that I suggest is trying to do it<br \/>\nas a thirty day challenge. A lot of people have done thirty day challenges of exercising every day<br \/>\nor not having sugar or you could make it doing pomodoros. You can make it whatever you feel lacking<br \/>\nin your life. So if you wanna do pomodoros for thirty days, you wanna log your time for thirty days,<br \/>\nyou wanna run rescue rescue time for thirty days, you wanna keep a journal for thirty days of what<br \/>\nyou&#8217;re grateful for and what you&#8217;ve accomplished and go back and read it once a month or once a<br \/>\nweek, you know, maybe commit to doing it every day for thirty days. Put it on your calendar so you<br \/>\nget a reminder every day or a text message every day or whatever, you know, type of scheduling<br \/>\nsystem you use and give it a shot. And actually, that would be amazing if we got some feedback on<br \/>\nthat in about thirty days from the day this podcast goes out, people telling us what they did, you<br \/>\nknow, what change they made. Because it&#8217;s only work until it becomes a habit. Once it becomes a<br \/>\nhabit and it&#8217;s part of your routine, then you that you&#8217;ve had that for free now for the rest of your<br \/>\nlife. So you can add a second habit. So you can practice guitar for thirty minutes a day. You know,<br \/>\nyou can do pomodoros at work. You can spend more time reading to your kids. Whatever it is that that<br \/>\nyou value, that you secretly feel ashamed as a person because you can&#8217;t do, at least I assume it.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m either revealing way more about myself than necessary, or I&#8217;m speaking the truth that we all<br \/>\nfeel inside, you know, you look at, you know, either not spending enough time with your kid, or not<br \/>\ndoing a good enough job at work, or not paying enough attention to your spouse, or not cleaning up<br \/>\nenough around the house, or, you know, being an impatient driver in traffic. I don&#8217;t know what your<br \/>\npet peeves or psychological blocks are, but, you know, I think we&#8217;ve all had most of those at least<br \/>\nat some point. So, you know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yeah. And so in terms for, you know, habits, you&#8217;ll read all over the web that it takes twenty one<br \/>\ndays or thirty days to form a habit, blah, blah, blah. Yes, true. But here&#8217;s the thing, you actually<br \/>\nhave to see value in it for you to be able to go through it. And what will happen in some habits, it<br \/>\nwill be hard. Honestly, it will be so freaking hard. But here&#8217;s the kicker, you know, somewhere I<br \/>\nread or I even experienced that, for example, I&#8217;m on and off this sugar roller coaster or whatever.<br \/>\nYou know, I as you know, I like chocolate. Like, I would probably, choose chocolate over, like, meat<br \/>\nevery day, but yeah. And I know it&#8217;s not good. So here&#8217;s the thing. Let&#8217;s say ten days in, it&#8217;s so<br \/>\nhard. It&#8217;s painful. You know? But then you kinda, like, start getting used to it. Then at day<br \/>\ntwenty, you&#8217;re like, okay. I&#8217;m feeling this. You know? I don&#8217;t need it anymore. At day 30, although<br \/>\nto be to be fair, some habits may take not thirty days, but three hundred days. But here&#8217;s the<br \/>\nthing, when you achieve that, you kinda like tip of the iceberg, right? And you are on it, you&#8217;re<br \/>\ninto it, You will ask yourself, you will honestly ask yourself, how could I have ever been that way?<br \/>\nBut trust me, yes, it&#8217;s hard work. And probably like with everything I like to say, everything worth<br \/>\nfighting for, everything that&#8217;s worthwhile is worth fighting for. Something like that, you know?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It&#8217;s we all take the path of least resistance. If you you only have so much<br \/>\nwillpower in your life. So on a day to day basis, if you refrain from making a smart ass comment<br \/>\nthat you know is gonna upset somebody, it&#8217;s gonna be that much harder for you to have a salad at<br \/>\nlunch instead of pizza. If you manage to not have the salad instead of the pizza, you&#8217;re gonna be<br \/>\nthat have that much less left in you to really do serious work your last half hour at the office<br \/>\ninstead of slacking off. So if anything you can make a habit that you don&#8217;t have to waste that<br \/>\nwillpower reserve is just going to be one more thing that&#8217;s gonna help you improve as a person.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> True. And just like the final probably note, it doesn&#8217;t have to be so so so so for example, writing.<br \/>\nRight? You don&#8217;t have to write, you know, you&#8217;re okay. I I have to write a book. I have to write a<br \/>\nbook. No. Because if you&#8217;re thinking about it in a way of, okay, I&#8217;m gonna sit for the next month or<br \/>\nthree months and write a book. Well, that&#8217;s mentally hard. But if you say, every day, I&#8217;m gonna<br \/>\nwrite at 7AM, the so the first thing that I do when I come to, quote, unquote, work, I am going to<br \/>\nspend 1 Pomodoro writing. That&#8217;s it. 1 Pomodoro. And trust me, one year later, you&#8217;ll be like, oh, I<br \/>\nwrote three books. How come? Well, that&#8217;s how. You know? That&#8217;s You<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> have written books, so I should point out. Yes. Yes. Books have you written at the<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> time? Two.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Two books. Yeah. And it&#8217;s, you know, the old joke, how do you eat an elephant?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> One bite at a time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> That&#8217;s it. So you wanna write there&#8217;s a a challenge I heard about where people write a novel in<br \/>\nNovember. And if you write a novel, I forget, I think they said something like 50,000 words, and<br \/>\nit&#8217;s like 1,666 words a day or something, which is totally doable. It won&#8217;t be a great novel,<br \/>\nprobably, unless you&#8217;re already an established author trying to, you know, pump another one out. But<br \/>\nyou can say you wrote a novel, and your next one&#8217;s gonna be better. And same thing with reading. You<br \/>\nwanna read textbooks and get better at what you&#8217;re doing, and I&#8217;m just repeating something Nikola<br \/>\ntold me. This is not my thought. If you spend ten minutes a day, how many pages is that? At the end<br \/>\nof thirty days, how many pages is that? Ten minutes a day is nothing. You waste that amount of time,<br \/>\nyou know, looking at your hand. I don&#8217;t know. So I don&#8217;t know what people do, you know, chewing gum.<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t know. Listening to the radio for the extra thirty seconds when you park your car instead of<br \/>\ngetting out and going into the office. You know, you waste that time already. It&#8217;s nothing to do ten<br \/>\nminutes. Imagine what you could do with 20 or 25. You know, like Nikola said, one Pomodoro. So yeah,<br \/>\nlongest podcast ever coming up on an hour. I think there&#8217;s a lot of great stuff here that we didn&#8217;t<br \/>\nplan. And that&#8217;s what makes makes it so magical.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Absolutely. And yeah, as, it&#8217;s like Stephen King, I think it was he who said it, probably like<br \/>\npeople go in and they say, you know, the new resolutions and whatnot. And okay, so people say, okay,<br \/>\nnow I&#8217;m gonna, you know, do one Pomodoro of writing every day or exercising every day or whatever.<br \/>\nAnd then a week after, they fail over off the roller coaster. And, like, I have no more inspiration.<br \/>\nAnd then he says or if I&#8217;m misattributing, then I apologize. But it goes along the lines of<br \/>\ninspiration, that&#8217;s for freaking amateurs. Pros, come in, clock in, do the work, period. And that&#8217;s<br \/>\nkind of mentality that you have to you don&#8217;t get that. You have to train that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yeah. Yeah. No. There&#8217;s, I I read an article. It&#8217;s like, forget inspiration. What you need is<br \/>\ndiscipline. Look it up. I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll find it. And what Steve one thing I specifically remember<br \/>\nreading Stephen King wrote was that he doesn&#8217;t wait for the muse to whisper in his ear. He shows up<br \/>\nat his desk at the same time every day, you know, no matter what, and then the muse knows where to<br \/>\nfind him.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yep. Yep. I I mean, I can&#8217;t say I&#8217;m too into, let&#8217;s say, the genre that he&#8217;s writing, although I<br \/>\nvery much liked few of his books, The Stand being one of them. I mean, I loved it. But, yeah, you<br \/>\ngotta give the man credit because he knows something, and that is hard work always wins.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yes. Alright. And that&#8217;s a good good place to end it. Hard work always wins. And thanks for being<br \/>\nhere, Nikola. It was a great one.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Yes. Thank you, Shawn. And thank you guys for listening.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Yep. See you all next time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nikola:<\/strong> Bye bye.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn:<\/strong> Bye. Thank you for listening to the DevThink podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sure, with all the AI tools we&#8217;ve become more productive (or so they say), but there are some old and battle tested techniques that will help you if&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-devthink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}