Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
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Ruby Conference 201533 / 66
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:18
at three o'clock after the first night of partying.
00:22
Wow, that was really good. I'm super excited. All right, hi, I am Joe Masti, a Ruby dev. I am apparently now a conference speaker, and I also do a lot of work with companies to help them build apprenticeships. And I've got flagrant time management problems, so I'm here to talk to you about them
00:41
and hopefully make all of us feel better about that. Informal survey, there's no, we're all friends here. Who in this room has either done work today or was working yesterday, which, as a note, was Sunday. Raise your hands, me too. That is 50-ish percent of the audience?
01:00
Yeah, so like I said, yesterday was Sunday and half of us were working. So I have this problem, right? So like I said, I want to be these things, I'm a software developer, I have this need to get stuff done, and I feel like I don't do enough. I feel like I need to be productive all the time,
01:21
I feel like I need to be contributing meaningful code constantly, and this is something that's been weighing on me really for the last couple of years because we get this image, right, of people who are constantly producing, and you get like the Zed Shahs of the world and they put out 10,000 books every friggin' year. And so, that's the image that I have,
01:41
and on top of that, now that we're in like the Instagram culture, I feel like this is how it's supposed to look. Like this lady is so put together, I don't even know anything about her. She has a cool hipster camera, I don't even own a camera. Her tea looks really well brewed, I bet she does like thought leader-ing before breakfast, and I am struggling, right? And then on top of that now, if we're in the software world,
02:00
I'm supposed to be this like magical unicorn. Not only should I be productive 100% of the time, I also need to be more productive than everyone else. If companies are only interested in taking the top 10% of programmers, and if this mythical 10x programmer is a thing, which it's not, but they believe it is, and so we're still in this place, I need to be the most productive.
02:23
And that's hurting us. And I think that you have this problem too. And I don't think that just because you showed up for a productivity talk, which thank you for showing up for a productivity talk. I think that you have this because I looked at a bunch of statistics on this, I realize I'm not the only one. We're gonna walk through a couple studies, we're gonna talk a lot about research that's on there,
02:42
this is a talk that's very heavy on cited resources, so you can look them all up online afterwards, I cite all my resources. Gallup poll a couple years ago, 25% of American salaried workers worked 60 plus hours a week. Now, if you back that off to only 50 hours a week,
03:02
it's 40% of salaried workers. 40% of people working 50 hours a week. And if you know anybody, or if you are that poor soul who's working 50 or 60 hours a week, you know that this is not really a Monday to Friday thing. Nobody does 60 hours Monday to Friday and then really takes Saturday off. This is a sort of like low level burn
03:21
all day long, all week long kind of thing, right? More than half Americans have got 12 months without a vacation. So we have this conversation, right, like how much vacation time should we have? It turns out Americans forfeit about 25% of their vacation every year. So if I gave you more vacation,
03:41
it would not matter because you're not taking it anyway. Right? This one kills me. I have such an axe to grind on this one. About two thirds of workers eat at their desk, work at their desk. Maybe people do this, this is like the, you know, I have so much to get done, I'll just grab a sandwich. And so you start to get this picture, right,
04:02
of this out of control situation where because we feel the need to get so much done, we're consuming all of our time. And the result of that is this stunning but statistically accurate number here which is that 13% of workers are engaged.
04:22
So we've got this worldwide poll, 13% are engaged in the, I always forget this number, 24%, almost twice as many are actively disengaged which I can't quite exactly tell what that is but I'm pretty sure that's the point where you're about to burn the building down and walk out, is like 25% of people, about half as many are actually actively engaged.
04:42
Does anyone here work on a team? Anyone work with other people? Okay, thank you. Again, checking that you're awake. If you work on a team, if you are one of these people, that energy spills over into the rest of your team. So not only do you have this problem for yourself, God help you if you're a leader.
05:02
If you have people reporting to you, that energy cascades onto those folks. So we have this problem. There's a great quote that I saw on it, when demand exceeds capacity, we make expedient choices. And I think the expedient choices, when we don't really know how to solve this problem, are to start sacrificing
05:21
the parts of the rest of our life, right? Like it subsumes more of your time and your energy and you do the work at home, you do the work in bed, you do the work before you eat, you just don't bother eating. That's how we do it, right? So being the child of the internet that I am, I decided that somebody has probably written about this and that maybe they can help me out.
05:41
Fuck that, I can't even like get into this number. I don't have time for that. And even better about this, by the way, true fact, I discovered I wanted to use a screenshot and I waited a day and I came back and I had written it down and actually there were 300 more of them in the one day between when I decided
06:02
that this was ridiculous and the time I took the screenshot. There's some good advice out there, I'm sure. I decided instead we'll Google around, we'll Google productivity and we'll get some articles instead. And some of the advice was okay. And some of the advice was iffy. This is a list on Forbes,
06:21
known for their intellectual rigor. Five minute list. So this is the context of this tip is if you are brain melt, can't handle doing productive work anymore, here's one fast easy tip to push your face
06:40
against a grindstone just a little bit harder. Thanks, Forbes. There's another article. Evaluate clubs or subscriptions that you remember if time spent on them can't be justified, drop out. Right? I don't get enough done. I still have hobbies and interests and friends.
07:06
This article, this is not even like backwater 2006 of the internet. This article is from last week. So this is like actively up near the top of my Google list. That's how I picked these articles. I went through like the top five and that's where all these are coming from.
07:21
It's no secret that the more time you have for work, the more you can achieve. This is even better if you look at the surrounding text. The actual tip is just wake up earlier and start working earlier. And I don't know about you, I am not gonna go to bed any earlier to accommodate this, right? And so the reality of this tip is just don't sleep.
07:43
Right? And then this is, oh, this is my favorite. This makes me so happy because I found lifehack.org so we're gonna get some life hacks on. Identify your time thieves. What a great metaphor. Like immediately, like it's,
08:00
the problem isn't me, the problem is I have time thieves and they're like little gnomes that come in the night and they take my time and then I can't get enough stuff done, right? And if I can muster up enough energy, I'm gonna be that, I'm gonna chase away my time thieves. And this kind of metaphor though, this isn't a unique metaphor, right? Rescue time is a really common productivity tool.
08:21
Rescue your time from the time thieves. And as another aside, while I was taking this, I looked down on here, this is this like, you know, why you should buy our product. This is where I will tell you when you spend more than two hours on Facebook. So if you need more reinforcement that all of us have this problem,
08:41
man, somebody, this clearly came from somebody's like personal story of just cannot get under two hours of Facebook. That hurts. So, early talk summary. If you wanna be a 10X unicorn, chase your time thieves and rescue your time. And while this sounds like such a, you know, wonderful romantic movie basically,
09:03
it's not effective and we're doing these things, right? And God help you, you take this advice and it's not working and the more that this happens, when this happens to me, the more that I focus on it, the worse time I have of it and I find myself back doing the things that aren't productive and that I feel guilty about not being productive.
09:21
And then when I try to spend time with my family, I feel guilt that I have not spent that time being productive. This is what I want my life to look like. I wanna spend time on work, I love work. I really do love work. But I also wanna spend time on other things that are important to me.
09:41
There's more than goes to the work. And this is kinda where I am, aren't productive. And my contention here is that A, I'm not gonna reclaim that last 1% for hopefully obvious reasons.
10:00
But my contention is that the reason that this is so out of whack is that we are measuring the wrong thing. It is all well and good to not waste your time. But we optimize what we measure. And so we're gonna talk about how to optimize better. We can do better.
10:22
So I wanna look at one particular study. This was something, this is a Gallup poll. It was a multi-year study. They looked at effective workplaces. There's an interesting side effect if you read this, which is that there's no such thing as an effective company, only an effective work group. It's an interesting side effect. There are a lot of other studies of this sort,
10:40
but this is an easy one. So what made people productive? They felt cared for by somebody at work, got positive feedback, someone at work encourages them. I'm bullshitting you on that last one that wasn't actually on there. So these things, what do these have in common? They're not about time. They're not about efficient meetings, right?
11:00
They're not about how early I wake up in the morning. They're about energy. And so specifically, when we talk about what we're measuring, this is my contention. We should not measure the quantity of time that we put towards these tasks. We need to measure the quality of the energy. And when you start to think through this, when you take this position,
11:22
a lot of the things that we just covered a minute ago start to make sense, right? If you find yourself browsing Facebook for an hour or two hours or something, there may be a reason behind this. If you have employees who are chronically having trouble focusing, the answer to this is not to make it physically impossible
11:40
for them to do anything but focus. This is a sign that things are out of whack. And we need to learn to actually balance those things. So if we wanna get back to this place, let's discuss some tips. I was inspired by those life hacks. I love life hacks.
12:00
I don't really, but this seems like a good way to do it. So here are my contentions. This is how we're gonna break down, I did it again, more and more study on what it is that people found that is effective in managing energy. I think it falls into these three categories. Getting more energy, spending it wisely, and figuring out how to recharge.
12:21
So getting energy, this is probably the easiest one. I'm gonna spend a couple minutes telling you things that you probably know. It's interesting to see how factually these things work, like how the received wisdom works here. Let's talk about sleep. I know, it's a tiny pig.
12:40
I love tiny pigs. So there's a reason I gave you this tiny pig, is because some of you aren't sleeping enough, and I just wanted to give you this lovely list here of things that happened where it was found after investigation that it was due to lack of sleep. Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, Three Mile Island,
13:03
and the Challenger explosion. It's a cute tiny pig. We need sleep, we need sleep. And it's not just about quantity of sleep, it's about quality of sleep. Both of these things are very important.
13:21
This is a surprising statistic to me, although I am clearly within the 80% camp here. I did not think that so many people were. 80% of people sleep with their cell phones. Who sleeps with their cell phone? Is it gonna be like 80%? Literally like either under your, within arm's reach, I think is the answer here.
13:49
Yeah, we'll talk about that. Well, and so here's the thing, right, is that if you are a reasonable person, you use your cell phone for a clock, right? If you have an alarm, it's your clock alarm.
14:02
Like nobody's got that beep beep thing on the side of their bed anymore, right? Yeah? Couple people still have that on the side of their bed. But because we're in this spot now where devices serve multiple purposes, this is a danger. Because as it turns out, you probably, except for you,
14:20
are looking at your screen as you go to bed. I've talked to a lot of people who say that the time when they can get stuff done is right before bed, so you hop into bed and then you stare at your screen for a while and then when you're too tired to continue, you kinda like put your head down, right? But it turns out that using screens, this is about iPads, using screens is enough to suppress your nighttime melatonin.
14:42
So melatonin is, if you don't know, it is the sleepy drug that makes you want to go to sleep. So staring at your screen is gonna slow down your ability to go to sleep. Alcohol, the time when they can, I'm not gonna make you raise your hand. If you are on a team that does a fair amount
15:01
of drinking after work, this is my former team that are laughing really hard. It takes you, you're faster to fall asleep, so this is funny, because maybe you can counteract your cellphone use by being wasted when you go to sleep. But it reduces REM sleep, which if you don't remember
15:21
the research on that, REM sleep is the one that has an effect on concentration motor skills and memory. So if you didn't remember that, maybe you're going to sleep wasted too often. So quality of sleep. Exercise, I know. They're so cute.
15:40
Exercise, that's only nominally about exercise, but that's really cute. So I could tell you that if you don't do exercise, you're gonna die early, but this is not that talk. This is a different talk. I could tell you that if you have depression or if you deal with too much stress, that exercise will help you deal with depression and stress.
16:01
This is not that talk. This is a productivity talk, so we're gonna keep it in scope here. It turns out that doing even a little bit of exercise, 10 minutes is not very much exercise. You need an immediate boost to concentration and mental focus. So we're gonna go into it a little bit how we should spend time recuperating,
16:21
but keep this in mind, that even a small amount of exercise, bike into work, walk from the train, even a little bit's gonna be really helpful. There's other research to indicate, I didn't add it to the slides here, but there's other research that indicates that the long-term effects are similar, actually. If you consistently exercise over a long period of time, that those benefits add up. So if, like many of us, you are not precisely
16:43
the kind to go out and get a lot of exercise, remember that you're cutting yourself short mentally by doing so, and you're gonna die early. Adequate nutrition. This is for the World Health Organization. Adequate nourishment. This should be an easy one for us.
17:01
This should be a gimme. So I'm guessing that a lot of us out here have free food at work, right? I'm getting some nods. Is it healthy food? Getting some sneers. Good, healthy food is good. We're in this really interesting spot, right? Like we are white collar, highly paid,
17:20
highly educated workers. This one should be a gimme. Eat the food that your body needs and you will have more energy to get things done. Red Bull may give you wings, but it is not going to help you actually concentrate long-term. And then stress. This was another really interesting one to me. You should have some stress.
17:42
You should have moderate stress. Much like a muscle, if you have moderate amounts of stress, your body becomes capable of dealing with this. You can expand your ability to cope with that situation. If you go way overboard, which is what happens a lot of the time, right? It's kind of what we're talking about here. It doesn't work that way, right?
18:00
Put too much stress on a muscle, it tears and there's some great metaphor there. So, this is where we wanna be. Balanced stress, not so balanced. Spend your time wisely, section two. This is a freebie.
18:22
You ever heard the research that says that willpower can be diminished by using it? You know, if you have a task that takes willpower, you have less willpower. So it turns out that's only true if you believe in it. This is Carol Dweck, who if you haven't read any of her stuff, you should go look up
18:40
pretty much everything she's ever done. My free gift to you for showing up to this talk is that you all get unlimited willpower from here on out. Because as it turns out, if you do the same study that shows that your willpower is diminished, but beforehand you prime people that that doesn't work that way, their willpower isn't in fact diminished.
19:01
You're welcome. Multitasking. Multitasking does not work. It really, really, really does not work. If you are in your seat saying, yeah, but I'm really good at multitasking, research says that you are worse at multitasking
19:20
than people who don't think they're any good at it. The IQ drop, similar to what you'd expect if they smoked weed or stayed up all night. We didn't talk about weed, but I'm guessing this is not gonna be very productive either. So they said that the IQ drop was 15 points, which was enough to take the men in the study
19:42
from wherever they were to buy the average for an eight-year-old, right? Now what they didn't say, and I wish they had, is that means that if you stay up all night and then multitask, you've got the IQ of a stoned eight-year-old. I don't know why they left that out of the study,
20:02
but I'm fairly confident of those results. Multitasking does not work. If you want to use your energy wisely, you need to be single-tasking. You need to get things out of your way and focus on what you're actually working on and then put it away.
20:21
Related one, I don't know about you, I end up with a lot of things in my life where they're not immediately resolvable and I can kinda just push them off on the side of the plate, but they're always something that I'm kinda carrying along. Just remember that there are a lot of things in our lives like that, and if you can deal with them,
20:41
if you take the time, even though it's not efficient use of that time per se, you get them off of your plate and you get them done. This is something that has been reinforced in my life many, many, many times is that when it comes down to it, the stuff that you're avoiding doing, again, you're probably avoiding doing it for a reason. If you take care of it, then you get to spend
21:02
the rest of your life with that thing taken care of. So recharge. We start with energy, we use the energy, we need to recharge the energy. There are two big points in this section. This is the first one. Rest is not the same as idleness. Idleness is not the same as rest.
21:24
So it turns out that when you are doing nothing, like for real nothing, I think they define it as not focused on external stimuli, your brain goes into this thing called default mode, which is neat because it also shows why we think, you know, we think computers are like brains, so we have mode versions for it.
21:43
It's like insert mode. So your brain does really different stuff, and the research shows that default mode, this processing that your brain does when you are for real's idle, is important to your actual cognition when you are not idle, is your brain doing maintenance tasks.
22:00
Which means that this is the problem when we talk about the two hours on Facebook. And this I think is one of the really fundamental ones. When we don't really disengage from what we're doing, when we fuck around on Twitter, when we're going on Facebook, when you're doing all these things, you're playing games, you're focused on external stimuli,
22:21
you are not actually resting. And so the reason why there is no amount of Facebook that you can consume to actually get back to being focused is because you're not resting, you're just not doing work. That's a big one. I have trouble with that one. So there's a wonderful parable that this reminds me of.
22:43
It's a Zen Buddhist story, and there are two monks, very young, and they're bragging at each other, which is what monks apparently do when they meet up. And they're talking about their masters, and the one says, my master is so powerful, he can walk across this river without even using a bridge. Right? And the one says, that's nothing. My master, when he chops wood, he chops wood.
23:02
When he carries water, he carries water. I love that story. I love the power of that thought, that we can actually be present in the things that we're doing, including when we're doing nothing at all. So when I say to you,
23:20
you should eat breakfast, and you should take a walk, and when I say to you, you should listen to music, what I'm saying to you is not, you should consume your RSS feeds or your podcasts while eating breakfast, or that you should read the newspaper while listening to music. You need to take these times to disconnect, and that disconnection is what's gonna get you ready
23:40
to actually be productive again. And the second big idea is the bigger version of the last idea. You need to alternate activity and rest. So activity is what we're doing all the time. We get a lot of that, we have plenty of activity, but we're not really taking rest. So think back, we said we're not,
24:01
where two-thirds of people are eating lunch at their desk, right? We're saying 50% aren't taking vacation. We're saying we're working 60 hours a week. What we're saying, what we're wagering is essentially this. I bet I can work 95% of the year for 60 hours a week with no breaks for 50 years. That is idiotic, and yet,
24:22
that's clearly implicitly what we're doing. And I think that the reason for this is that it doesn't look like you're making this wager. Nobody says this out loud because it sounds stupid. What you say is I'm doing professional development, I'm going to meetups, I'm writing a blog, I'm expecting to have passion projects because I'm a programmer,
24:41
and so we never take that downtime, and this is implicitly the wager that we're making. So my girlfriend is a contractor as well as I am, and she was talking to friends of hers who work standard jobs, they say, it must be so great, every day is like Friday. And she said, no, it's not quite like that, every day is like Tuesdays,
25:01
an infinite string of Tuesdays. I think this describes the situation really well in that I feel like this was the goal, right? This is what I wanted, was 100% output all the time. I'm going to be like a machine, I'm going to be like the people that they write those bullshit Forbes articles about, it'll be great.
25:23
When in reality, what we need is this. We need significant uptime, we also need significant downtime. So what I'm saying is, take some damn time off. And when I say that, I mean for real, like off off, which means not answering your emails and not answering the work slack and all of that, right?
25:46
So, recap, pay attention to energy. This is the real currency of what we're doing. It doesn't matter what your time looks like, or at least it's just not the primary thing
26:00
to pay attention to. Get some energy, take care of your body. Otherwise it'll stop working, especially when you get old. Spend it wisely and recharge better. I think that, I don't think that I'm going to turn into a magical productivity unicorn because unicorns don't fucking exist. But I think that, but I think that they don't exist.
26:22
But I think that this is a better life worth living. Thank you very much. And I believe, I definitely have time for questions.
26:43
I do have stickers, I am on the Twitters, and I would like to talk to all of you. So, are there questions? So there's a question about, there's this rule on your to-do list, right? If you can do it in under five minutes, go ahead and get it done.
27:00
So, three minutes. I suspect that that's somewhat orthogonal. If you're being productive, I think the idea is don't put off things until later and then end up with an infinite list. I think where we get in trouble is the idea that I can be this kind of big productive and then once I can't handle that anymore,
27:22
that's when I'll fit in all these other things. And that I think is where that trouble happens is that you're never taking that time to actually disconnect. Does that make sense? Other questions? The definition, so in that small loop,
27:41
in the disconnecting and taking breaks, the definition was whether you're primarily paying attention to external stimuli, or whether your mind has an opportunity to sort of wander off and internalize and when you're imagining stuff, you know, when you're relaxing in the shower and just thinking about stuff, right? In that big loop, the difference between
28:02
activity and rest, it's a good question. I don't have a precise definition for you on that. I can say sort of informally that when you're, one of the things that I've taken that makes it easier for me to have rest is I go out and I do climbing trips. I love rock climbing. Not paying attention to work, not trying to be productive, it is not particularly mentally strenuous,
28:23
and that, I think that's the obscenity style definition, I'll know it when I see it, but I don't have a great definition for you on precisely what works there. Computer games? That's a good question. I haven't seen research into that. I know that on a lot of these other fronts,
28:42
I wouldn't say, so, computer games, you're in this situation, you're still responding to external stimuli, and so I think that in that small sense, it's not rest. Can you take a vacation that is composed of video games? I'd like for that to be true,
29:01
but I don't know if I have any facts to that basis. Your question's over here. I've been looking over there. You, sir. It's hard. I'm sorry, how do you not feel guilty about not doing work? It's very hard. The best recourse that I have,
29:21
the reason that I back this up with stats and not just with, like, hey, good life, is that taking time away from work is ultimately more productive in an absolute sense, so that the taking a 60-hour week thing, you're not actually being more productive. It's like more sound and noise. It's more ass and seat time,
29:41
but it's not actually more productive, and so taking that time away is what's preparing you emotionally and physically and mentally for the times when you're productive, so saying if you bill by the hour, the customer enforces it for you. I think sometimes that's true. So as a contractor, I've got clients who definitely would be happy for me
30:01
to put in a quasi-infinite number of hours, and even when I explain to them that I'm not effective past a certain point, charge more. You know what? I'll take that advice. You can always charge more. So he was saying that he had heard a definition of the difference between activity and rest, where it's higher-order brain function
30:20
versus lower-order brain function, which seems pretty plausible. If you want, so it's hard always to do everything all at once. I think if you want one real takeaway, I'm sorry, so it's when I get out of here, like, this is great and all, sounds lovely, I'm gonna leave, and then life's gonna happen, and then I'm gonna be right back where I am,
30:41
and I think that that's a good idea, and that's a very real concern. I'll say that I bounce between doing these things well and doing them not well. If you want one thing that you can remind yourself of, it's that if you find yourself avoiding doing the work that you need to by screwing around on the internet, which I think is sort of endemic, that there's a reason that you're doing that. Have the knowledge that when you do that,
31:01
it's because you're dulling from what you need to do, and to take that opportunity to truly disconnect. Right, and it's not because you're a bad person. You're not actually worthless. I love you all. It's a Ruby community, I can say I love you all, and it doesn't sound weird. Yeah, so she's saying that, like a lot of places,
31:22
people start to really brag about how busy they are. It's like, yeah, I haven't slept in a week, man. Like, how cool am I? And that advocating for that and the reality of that situation helps. I find it helps to shame them about it. Yeah, just tell them, you're gonna make mistakes because you don't feel like eating lunch.
31:42
Screw you, go eat lunch so that you don't inflict your bad decisions on me. Maybe it's just me. I think that's it, I'm gonna be around in the hallway. Like I said, I have stickers. Thank you.