This week I finished reading Ali Abdaal’s book Feel Good Productivity, and it got me thinking a lot about my own relationship with productivity and work.
I have realised over the years that I have a tendency to obsess over something, work really hard and then burn out. Whether it’s starting a new job, hobby, or a side hustle, I go all-in for weeks or months, neglecting other areas of my life in the process.
Most recently I did this when I started my YouTube channel, I had some time off, so I was producing 2 videos every week. Video editing is incredibly time-consuming especially if you want to add in animations, B-roll and other material. It generally takes at least 4 days to script, record and edit a video. Therefore, trying to produce 2 a week isn’t sustainable.
I eventually had to relent and go down to 1 per week and now that I am working again it is a lot more ad-hoc.
With YouTube, it was easy to see where I was going wrong but in other areas of my life it can be less noticeable.
Life retrospective
If you have a look at your own life, I am sure there are places where you aren’t exactly struggling, but it isn’t sustainable either.
You are essentially treading water. It isn’t particularly difficult to tread water to keep yourself afloat but at the same time it is stopping you from doing other things in your life. What seems easy now will eventually become impossible, leading you to drown or succumb to hypothermia.
Sorry about the morbid analogy!
What I am getting at, is it is helpful to look at your life and see whether there are any areas where you would struggle to stay at the same pace for the long term.
Are there other areas of your life that are suffering (family, health, friendships) as a result of working at your current rate?
As the saying goes:
No one on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at work’.
This life retrospective comes up a few times in Ali’s book.
Write your own Eulogy
Okay, I promise this is the last morbid topic of this week’s newsletter. The idea behind writing your own eulogy is to think what you want to have achieved in your life and what other people might say about you.
Most people would want it to say things like ‘dedicated father’, ‘helped the community’, and ‘raised money for charity.’
Is your eulogy likely to say ‘dedicated father’ if your kids never see you because you are always at work?
Odyssey Plan
A common interview question is “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?“. I always think this question is a bit ridiculous especially in software engineering. The chances of me staying at one company for 5 years is slim especially in this economy.
However, it is a good question to ask yourself to see if you are on the right path. Where is your career currently heading, and do you like the path that you are currently on?
If you are on track in 5 years time to become an engineering manager or a staff engineer, is that a role that interests you? Do those you know currently in those positions look like they are enjoying their work?
The Odyssey Plan gets you to reflect on the following paths:
- Your Current Path: What would your life look like in 5 years time if you stayed on your current path? For example progressing up the career ladder in the current company you are in. Write in detail what your life would be like.
- Your Alternative Path: What would your life look like in 5 years if you took a completely different path?
- Your Radical Path: What would your life look if you took a radical change in your life where money, social obligations and what people think was irrelevant?
The “radical path”, is similar to the question, “What would you do if you won the lottery?“. This exercise isn’t to get you to make a U-turn in your life but to consider what you would rather be doing with your time and whether you can find more space for it.
If money wasn’t an issue I probably wouldn’t work, not even part-time. I have enough stimulating activities with this newsletter, creating videos, side projects, family commitments and hobbies to never get bored. Even though I am currently working part-time, I still don’t have enough time to everything.
Tips for sustainability
Ali’s book covers 3 main areas of productivity which he has outlined as energise, unblock and sustain.
- Energise - when we feel good we are generally more productive.
- Unblock - why do we fail to start things we have always wanted to do?
- Sustain - how do we keep the momentum going once we have started?
I don’t have much trouble starting things. In fact, I have a long list of projects that I have started…
The problem often lies in finishing the things I have started and maintaining momentum once the initial excitement about a project has worn off.
Taking breaks
When I used to work in the office, my work day would be broken up by meetings, chats with colleagues and trips to different floors to make coffee.
Now that I work from home full time I don’t get all these distractions. You would think that this would result in getting more work done, but this isn’t always the case.
I find my main problem is ploughing through work with no breaks. I start off well but after an hour or so I either get distracted or get stuck on a problem for too long.
There have been several instances where I find a bug in my code and keep grinding until I figure it out. This approach works well for quick fixes, but for those elusive bugs, taking a break would have given me some much-needed perspective.
There is a study mentioned in the book around software developers (👋) to find out which group of people are the most productive.
The workers who were most productive were not the ones who chained themselves to their desks. Nor were they the ones who gave themselves a healthy-sounding five-minute break every hour. The most productive workers gave themselves an almost unbelievable amount of time off: a work-to-break ratio of fifty-two minutes of work to seventeen minutes of rest.
This makes a lot of sense. I find I often work best in bursts. I can get a lot of work done in very little time, but that needs to be broken up with rests.
To accomplish a better work-break balance I have started using the Pomodoro technique this week.
If you are not familiar, the idea is that you work for 25 minutes (1 pomodoro) followed by a 5-minute break. Every 4 pomodoros you take a longer 15-minute break.
So this would be 100 minutes of work with a total of 30 minutes of break (100:30 = 50:15). Which is pretty close to the 52:17 ratio mentioned in the study.
It does take quite a bit of discipline to follow this technique. Quite a few times this week I have gone over the 25 minutes because I just needed to “finish this one thing”. Which often resulted in working for an hour and half without a rest.
Recharging
My last main takeaway from Ali’s book is on taking the right kind of breaks both at work and in your own time.
When taking breaks at work the idea is you should get up and walk around, make a coffee or chat with a colleague. If your idea of a break is scrolling through Instagram Reels for 5 minutes then that is not a proper break.
It is important that you find activities that are going to recharge you rather than drain your energy. If you work from home you have a few more options available to you.
On my 5-minute breaks I generally do a few of the following:
- Go make a coffee or a cup of tea
- Have a chat to my wife or kids
- Do 20 push-ups
- Have a stretch
- Meditate
- Listen to music
In your own time it is important to pick activities that are going to recharge rather than drain you. Draining activities might include:
- Doom scrolling through social media
- Binge watching shows on Netflix
- Ordering an unhealthy takeaway
Recharging activities might include:
- Going for a walk
- Playing a musical instrument
- Drawing or colouring
- Reading a good book
- Doing some exercise
- Meeting with a friend
If you always feel like you are lacking energy then it might be due to picking the wrong activities in your downtime.
I personally need to get better at this. I have started by deleting Instagram on my phone. I will get round to deleting my account this year.
❤️ Picks of the Week
📝 Article - U.S. Justice Dept. Sues Apple, Claiming iPhone Monopoly in Antitrust Case - Apple is really under fire at the moment, first from the EU and now the US. I really like Apple products, but they would definitely benefit by being more open.
🛠️ Tool - Difftastic, a structural diff - I have always been frustrated with how GitHub shows diffs. It can show a whole line has changed when really it is just the whitespace that is different. If only this was the default for GitHub reviews.
📝 Article - LEGO price per part over the years - Everyone loves Lego, I found it surprising that prices per part hasn’t changed that much over the years.
🛠️ Tool - Godspeed - I am a bit old school when it comes to to-do lists and prefer pen and paper but for those that like apps this one looks nice.
📝 Article - Lightweight search in Eleventy - I am diving deep with Eleventy at the moment while I redesign my website. This is definitely going to be useful when I come to implement search.
📝 Article - 900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability - I have never used Firebase but if you use it you might want to give this a read 😬.
📝 Article - The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - IV is 4 in Roman numerals, isn’t it? The clock in my living room shows IIII though. I thought this was interesting!
💬 Quote of the Week
“There was no hustle culture. That’s the interesting thing. When you go back and study people producing things of real value, using their brain, they were smart, and they were dedicated, and they worked really hard, but they didn’t hustle, and they didn’t work 10-hour days, day after day. They didn’t work all-out, year-round. They didn’t push, push, push until this thing was done. It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the same time, and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality.”
From the Tim Ferriss podcast with Cal Newport.