The Productivity Episode

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Boss.

Welcome to Syntax, the most productive podcast in the world.

Rid. That's not it, but, we are gonna talk about productivity today. Tips and tricks and, frameworks and and ways you can approach it and different apps that you can use to help yourself out. We're sponsored today by 3 awesome companies. Storyblock, the headless CMS that will revolutionize your digital storytelling.

Rid. LogRocket, your JavaScript session replay, and FreshBooks cloud accounting. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode. With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinsky, how are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I'm doing good.

Doing good.

Going down a rabbit hole of LED lights, and I've been inspired by all of the handyman West Boss posts about him, you know, turning into Bob the Builder over there, hanging up all those stuff. So I decided that I needed to kick my office. You know, it's been kind of in a transitionary period for a long time. So Yeah. Now that I have some of my, like, finalized rid for here. I'm I'm taking apart things. Wes will see I got the bookshelf that was normally behind me because it was kind of a crappy holdover.

Rid oddly enough, I tried to sell that thing on Facebook Marketplace, and they shut my account down. I I Really? Yeah. I bet they were just like, Listen. You never use Facebook, and all of a sudden there's something for sale on your account on Facebook.

That's suspicious.

So Man. They pulled it down. They're reviewing my account, and it's probably honestly just because I haven't, like, opened Facebook and who knows how long. But that's hilarious. It's just a show. Yeah.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, I'm rid It's funny, like, you talk about productivity, and it's fun to do, like, small little spurts on things. Like, I was talking to you rid About this yesterday where I'm just at the edge of getting sick of working on this place because Yeah. And, Like, I'm going to get it done and dialed in. And, like, maybe in a couple of months, I'll do, like, another another,

like, run of of fixes and upgrades and whatnot, but you can't do forever. Otherwise, you get sick of it and burned out. It's kind of what I did. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. I got it functional. I got it nice. Rid. Yeah. And now I'm gonna take it into phase 2.

Phase 2. Sweet. Well, we'll we'll have to have, we did, yeah, we did a rid We podcast on Scott's Level Up Lodge. Oh, I don't have a name for mine yet. We'll have to do a podcast on it once, once I'm all done. I've got lots of information on soundproofing and whatever.

The boss house. The boss house.

Rid. Tivity.

The we're gonna go through some tips and tricks on how to be productive and and techniques for trying to be productive.

Rid. But I thought we'd start it off with just 2 questions. The first question for Scott and I is, what is a productive day to us? Scott, what's productive for you? Yeah. For me nowadays, a productive day is checking off my large frogs.

So in the past, we've talked about this eat this, Eat that frog or eat the frog book. What's the what's the book called?

Munching on froggies.

Eat this frog.

I can't I can't

I eat that frog. Put me on that. Great ways. Yeah. I could I could come up with the eat the frog and eat this frog, but

That yes.

That frog. Yes. Basically, what I do is I I keep a pretty strict to do list.

Otherwise, I kind of lose track of what my day is about in general. So Mhmm. I I like to really go hard on making a to do list, Sticking to that to do list and then prioritize and making the highest priority things the big frogs on my list. And then I like to start there Check those things off. So as long as the the things that I've set out to do for the day get accomplished, then that's a productive day for me.

Yeah. Mine is similar. I feel like I had a good day when I can look back at the day and say rid. I got these 2 or 3 things done, done, done. Wipe my hands of them. I always like to think of like doing work as like You just send it off into the ether. Basically, like, I am done this project.

There's not like, I'm done, but like, I got to like do 3 or 4 things and rid. I'm done, but I have to paint this one thing or I'm done, but, I have to fix this bug. But just like done, send it off into the ether, rid.

And I can move on to the next thing. And generally, that is 2 or 3 big things I can look back and say, that's good. Like, rid. I contributed to what it is that I was trying to do today. So that is a productive day for me.

And then the second rid. Question we have here is, like, what is a frustrating day? What is an un what does an unproductive day look like for you?

Yeah. An unproductive day for me is is mostly one where I spend a lot of time.

Because for both of us, I would rid that time and not necessarily time itself, but more or less energy in the form of time is, like, our most valuable resource in terms of what we're able to accomplish. So For me, it gets really hard and really frustrating when I spend a lot of time and or energy on something that either is ultimately meaningless, didn't get anywhere, or is mostly spent, hunting down just some sort of rogue bug. Right? Yeah. I I really, really hate spending 3 or 4 hours just trying to bash my head on a wall to break through that wall. Like, okay. I broke through the wall. That doesn't mean I feel good about the result of my day. It it makes me feel like I wasted too much of my energy on something. So to me, that's the biggest Suck of productivity is just feeling like, dang, I wasn't able to get to where I wanted to go today. Rid. Yeah.

Again, similar with me. I think the biggest thing for me is when you go down rid a certain way to try to figure out how to do something. I'm I'm trying to code a form that submits in this or user submitted warm and you go you go down all these routes and then you figure out like 2 and a half hours in this is not working. Oh, this doesn't actually Covered the use case that I'm working in. Oh, this thing has been deprecated. It doesn't work with whatever I'm doing. And just like, oh, good. I just It's not even that I like I learned something along the way, but I literally just pissed away 2, 2 and a half hours on this type of thing. That's super rid. Refreshering to me. And also when I am trying to fix something and my day ends at 5 o'clock because I have to go up and make dinner for the kids. And, when I am not done fixing it and I know that that thing will now drag into the next ready. Day and start to push all the other stuff that I had planned for the next day. And that is where I get really frustrated with it just because like partially because of like the mental Overhead of trying to fix something and now it's kind of rolling around in your head for that evening or whatever. I do it. I tried to like rid. Put that stuff away. But it's it's not entirely possible all the time.

So that's really that's a frustrating day to me when that type of thing happens. And it does happen.

Rid. But we're going to kind of go into some techniques and whatnot for Becoming productive.

And then we'll go into some tips that we have, some software, and really anything else that that comes our way. Yeah.

So, techniques and like frameworks or whatever. I follow one that is called the Getting Things Done framework.

Rid. If you have not read this book or audiobook this, I highly recommend That you go and give it a read.

There is it's really funny you can tell that this is like a time honored one because there's 2 versions of the book.

Rid. And the old one, the guy's wearing like a suit and tie and like like looks like he works on Wall Street in like the early 2000s.

And then he like he updated it a couple years ago.

I actually should read the updated one. I think he updated it for more like modern practices because, like, the original one talked about, like, getting your secretary and, like, faxing and stuff like that.

And the new one does not. The new one talks more about like email and digital tools and whatnot. But the whole freight, it doesn't really matter about the tools. It's more about the ideas and the methodologies behind it. So the whole idea behind Getting Things Done is that you have a system to capture rid Literally anything that crosses your mind, any ideas, any things that have to possibly be done. So you might be just like sitting right now, On the podcast talking to Scott and you go, Oh man, I forgot to do X, Y, or Z, or Oh man, I need to fix, rid.

The checkout on my website or you see a tweet come across that someone says, Hey, like, there's a spelling mistake here, right? All of that kind of stuff rid. Just clouds your your brain. And the idea is to get it out of your head into your system. That's the thing I say all over and over again is that, rid. You you capture those things.

There's all these different steps capture, clarify, organize, review, and engage. But essentially what it means is that you into some sort of system, a to do system.

You organize them into different areas that they belong to.

You can rid. Review them, organize them. I spend a lot of time moving things up and down in terms of which order I would like to tackle them, And then you simply just do them.

And for me, I found this extremely helpful because my brain is constantly scattered with, Oh, wow, I should Build a barbecue. Oh, man. I need to do this. Oh, wow. I wonder how do fish drink water? You know, like, little things like that. My brain is just always beep, beep, beep, beep, constantly going in a 1,000 different directions. And having a system Where I can just say, like, what do I do next? What do I do? Without having to worry about, oh, I need to remember that I have to fix this one thing.

Rid. It's really great to have

a system where I just look at the next thing that needs to be done and just go do that thing. Yeah. I I feel that very much. And I I think you and I both have the ADHD brain of, like, you know, the the whole squirrel, like, getting pulled into a different direction and just, like, rid. Really not having, just a firm anchor in terms of what we're doing. And I can get into that state where I'm, you know, unable to be Disrupted or anything. But if I have an idea in my brain, I'm really good at coming up straight up with that idea and then, like, ruminating on that idea and then thinking about that idea. And then I'm like, wait a second.

I'm about an hour away from rid. Everything else I've now was doing in the past, I've I've gone down this weird, unrelated rabbit hole of this completely different idea, and I've successfully derailed my Train of thought all without even being cognizant that I'm doing it. So Yeah. Just like you, I have, like you know, I use an app. I'll talk about it Quite a bit in this episode because it really powers a lot of my productivity stuff called Height Height app. It's just like a fancy to do app, and it's really fancy. It's it's really nice. But I have, like, one of my to or one of my height to do list is just called ideas to filter.

And all I do is put an idea in there. And I'm gonna tell you what, I very rarely go back to this ideas to filter list because, so many times in at least in my life, the ideas that just randomly pop into my head at any given point aren't necessarily worth The exploration that I may take the time to go do. But if they are, then I have them sitting there, whatever. I can go back to this list. And If I'm looking for something fun or something extra to work on, I have this weird ideas to filter list of side projects and apps and stuff that I wanna make. But otherwise, it is so important for me to always catalog, log, catalog, log, provide things with, Like, for my my logging system, Wes, is very much I assign something how many points it is, how how much of an effort is this thing going to be.

Yeah. Is this blocked by anything? What's this related to? You know, those types of things so that I can see really quickly. Alright. I have, You know, a heavy thing today. I have a light thing today. Do I wanna start with the light thing? Is the light thing important? If the light thing is super important, it's really easy to just knock that out. Having that that verifiably saying, here's the this the weight and strength of everything makes it so that I always know exactly what to pick up at any given time, and I Totally rely on that. But as far as, getting things done goes, you know, I'm gonna second Wes's recommendation.

I I read Getting Things Done maybe twice or listen to it, I should say, a couple times now. And every single time you listen to it, you're like you find holes in your productivity game. You find holes in your Your workflows or your your helpers, the things that you have in place to help you get your stuff done or stay organized. So for me, getting things done and eating the frog, Are the 2 biggest books Eat That Frog. Okay. Sorry. Eat That Frog are like the 2 best books in terms of helping me get my productivity on track. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think

rid. What Scott said is it's important to keep time for that exploration because like I would say we're creatives. Ready.

And for me at least, I come up with some of my best stuff when I have this unstructured time to just fool around and goof around with stuff. So that's important as well because if you just slam yourself 100% with work to do that is rid Just on the list, then you don't leave yourself open to those exploration as well. So if you do have ideas, Like, you can have a system for being unstructured. It's just that, okay, now I have the rest of the day. I'll often do this on like a Friday afternoon. It's like, it's 2:30.

I'm not ready to start anything new right now. It's time to do something fun. And you can dip into those lists of, rid. Alright. What are the a 100 things that I listened to this on syntax 6 months ago and I've been meaning to check it out. Now's the time to do that. And You don't have to spend that 2 hours figuring out what you want to check out because you have a list of possible things that you can check out. Yeah. Yeah. Just knowing where to go when you need to Have something to look for

rather than spending your you know? Exactly.

So that's Scott and I have a very similar system or the same system.

I don't I don't do,

Like, weights or anything like that. Are you able to talk a little bit more about that? Because maybe that's something I should start doing. Yeah. So when I'm adding things to my list, rid which I'm doing all the time. I'm I'm constantly adding things to my to do list for for just about any any given point of time. It's like one of the any pieces of software that I I never close. And anytime I add something to my to do list, I kind of force myself to, rid. If it's you know, I forced myself to add in these types of details.

And the points thing, I believe, comes from rid. Renting. Like, a sprinting type of mentality in terms of, like, how, people assign their things and within a sprint. I can't speak on that entirely because I I've never done, like, a relief we do a sprint style over at level up tutorials, but it's not like a formal agile or anything.

Either way, what we're what I do is anytime that I have something, I I give it a point value, And that point value starts at 1 goes to, like, 10. Right? And 1 being the easiest thing and 10 being the the hardest thing. And this is often in terms of energy or time commitment. So if I'm looking at a feature and the feature is fix a typo, that's gonna get a one. If I'm looking at a, feature and that feature is, like, write a carousel, that might get, like, a 3. If I'm looking at a feature and it's like, rip out Our entire database, that's gonna take a 10.

So, you know, basically, you know, I'm assigning these things as a point value that I can read and understand, and it's all relative of me, but I do this for all of my to do's, and then I give them all a a a due date. And then I have, like, an automatic to do list that automatically rid. Shows me the things that at the very top are the ones that are non blocked and overdue.

Yeah. And then below that is The stuff that's on time then sorted by points. So that way, if I have something that's overdue, that gets, like, my number one attention. It's sitting at the very top of my list. And having that list auto sort based on points, priority, is another thing I have. So I have points, which is how difficult it's going to be, Priority, which is just meet media low, medium, high, and then due date, and then whether it's blocked. And Based on all of those criteria, it automatically sorts my to do list to have it all set up so that I always look at the top of my list to see what exactly do I have to do. Rid. That's that's really interesting.

I should probably check-in to see if I can do something like that. I Like my I don't have like a massive, like, system. It's literally just I guess we'll talk about that when we hit software. But, rid. Yeah. It's it's kind of interesting. Like, I I think when people read that book, they go, oh, man. I would spend my entire rid. Day just doing the system and not actually doing my stuff. But I think if you follow it for a couple weeks, you You can start to flow into the ideas in in your own system that is sort of based on that.

Yeah. Because

Oh, no. I I was gonna I was going to agree and take it even further to say, like, the the hardest part about having a system is that initial setup.

But, yeah, if if you approach it to spend, like, the first 15 minutes of your day with the system, just maybe even, like, tuning it up or making sure that you have, rid your stuff for the day set, then that's all you need. It's just a tiny little bit. I I spend way more time than that futzing around on the Internet than I do, you know Yeah. Working in the system.

So the other technique we get asked about this a lot is the Pomodoro technique.

And this is a technique where you decide a task that you want to work on. You work on it for 25 minutes, and then you have a timer that goes off. And famously, people have these like rid A pomodoro. It's a tomato tomato timers on their desk, and you work on it for 25 minutes.

And then it rings. You take a 5 minute rid Break where you go do something else. People will literally walk away from their desk and go do something.

And then after 4 Pomodoro cycles, so that is rid. 2 hours.

You take a 15 to 30 minute break and then kind of repeat the cycle.