190 What Are Some Work Routine Best Practices?

How do I establish a good routine at work? How do I optimize what I do at work to be the most efficient at my job? What are the best practices around how and when I do certain tasks in order to set good routines? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.  

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

What are some work routine best practices? How can I get in the groove and be better at work so that I can be more effective and at the same time not burn out at work? Let's talk about this in today's episode of Dev Questions. Now, this comes from the suggestion site. So if you have a suggestion, go to suggestions.imtimcorey.com and ask it there. Okay, so let's talk first about my rhythm because I think that knowing your rhythm is important and every person's rhythm is going to be different, but I think knowing my rhythm can help you identify what yours might be and then how you can work with that specific rhythm. So here's mine. I am not very effective early in the morning. Okay. So I don't do well in the mornings. I'm not a morning person. I ramp up slowly rather than having an instant on, you know, appear at work all bright eye and bushy tailed and ready to go. I kind of, you know, slowly work up to it. I'm a little more reserved in the morning. I slowly open up over the day. I work really well in the afternoon. And I'm more easily distracted in the early evening. I, you know, am not great in the early evening, but then I'm really focused in the late evening. So comes late in the evening, you know, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night, that's when I actually get really, really focused and can do some good focus work. So that's kind of my, you know, my rhythm. It's it's up and down and up and down throughout the day. And I've learned that because of that, I can make choices. Now, this wasn't always the case. It for a long time when I worked, I was just kind of at the mercy of my position and never really thought about how to make it better. So I just did what I was told. You know, I showed up at work, I try to get work done, and sometimes it was hard and sometimes it's easier. And I never really thought about how to optimize my rhythm to work with my work in order to be better at what I was doing. It wasn't until I started to identify these patterns and realize, oh, I could make some changes that would just shift things around, but would make me more efficient and more effective and not fight against my body's natural rhythms at work. So let's talk about, you know, when I when I have full control over my schedule, because right now I have full control over my schedule. I am my own boss, I own the company, so I can control a schedule however I want. And this is not normal. This is not how I have lived my entire life. But since I have full control, you can kind of see what that might look like if you could fully control. And they'll kind of back it back into you have a nine to five or you have an eight to five. So what does it mean for being locked into a certain thing? So since I have full control over my schedule, this is how it translates for me. I get up at 9.30 in the morning. Now, that's late. That's really late. That's, you know, some people are like, oh my goodness, I've, you know, got three things done. I've been, you know, up since 6.30 in the morning. That's great. For me, that doesn't work. It just doesn't fit my schedule. It doesn't fit what's best for my rhythms. Because if I get up at 6.30, I can do it. But I'm gonna feel miserable around at 8 o'clock at night. I'm gonna miss that late window because I'll be in bed. And I'll get up at 6.30 in the next morning and still feel miserable. It's not like I'm gonna feel better because I've gotten to a different schedule, I've shifted my day. It doesn't work for me that way. So I get up at 9:30 in the morning. My alarms actually start for nine, but I like to wake up slow. And so I'll wake up, I might hit the snooze once, and then I'll even sometimes lay in bed and check my email because it's really low-key. And I can do something really calm and you know, barely there, even you know, check my Twitter feed and you know, respond to comments on YouTube or something like that. I'll do something really calm to start off my day before I have my shower and get, you know, get into my actual day. Once I'm actually at work, I process email and do other simple work in the morning. I find that email is more mindless or even responding to a lot of YouTube comments, not all of them, but a lot of comments where people are saying, hey, you know, thank you for that, I really appreciate it. I can respond to those without having to really think hard about it. You know, you're welcome. I'm so glad it was helpful. Those kind of things, I don't have to think about code and figure out a good way to respond, or does this work with that? I don't have to do that. Now, some comments require some of that, and so I'll leave those for later. But I try and do the easier stuff that just gets out of the way and allows me to ramp up my brain processing power. I'll also run errands in the morning. So if I have an errand to run, I'll try to do that in the morning. Like I get up and then I go do that errand. For example, once a week I get allergy shots. So I've been on allergy shots for two years now, I think. Um, let's see a year or two, I forget. I'm gonna be on for a while because I'm allergic to everything. And we're working on getting that under control. But that means that once a week I have to go to town and get and get shots. Well, I do that in the morning because then I can do that. I can, it's really easy to do. And then afterwards, I actually go get lunch. I eat an early lunch around 11 a.m., sometimes 10:30 even, because I don't eat breakfast. So I'll eat an early lunch at 10:30 or 11 o'clock in the morning. And that way I can have all that done and then come back to work because when I hit that noon-ish time frame, I'm really kind of engaged and I'm able to have really good focus time until about 5:30. And in fact, 5:30 is our family dinner time, so that's why I definitely leave work by. But at the same time, I'm, you know, sometimes working right up until it because I'm, you know, I'm so focused and I'm getting stuff done, I'm being really effective up through 5:30. Now in the evening, I relax because again, that's kind of my lull time after dinner where I don't really want to do stuff. And so I might watch a football game or I might, you know, hang out with a family or play a game with a family or do something relaxing. But then my family is usually in bed. You know, my my wife and my one son are in bed by 10 at the latest. My other son's off in his room doing stuff. So I'm usually alone by around 10. So I'll go out to the office and I'll maybe watch a movie or I'll do something, but I find myself typically doing some work between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. Because that is a time when I'm not only very focused, I'm also wanting to engage. So my big engagements are after lunch until about 5:30, and then from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Those are my my windows where I'm really good. And I can stretch either side of either of those, but those are my windows, and that's where I plan to get most of my focused time in. That's when I plan on getting the the work done that takes the most mental energy from me. So that's my rhythm, and that's what I get to control. And that allows me to have a healthy schedule that works well for my body, that makes me feel good, that gives me breaks in the middle of the day, which allows me to see the sun and to you know be out in the world instead of just stuck in my office. And at the same time, do that during the times when I would naturally not be as engaged with deep mental energy. So that's not going to work necessarily for you if you don't have full control over your schedule. But as you can see, by rearranging some things, I get a lot of work done. So how can you do that? So when you're locked into a certain work hour, there's still things you can do to help yourself out. And I've done this at jobs. And I carry some of these over still into this job. For example, number one, the most important thing, the thing that I have found has been so helpful is to work in batches. When I am recording a course, I don't answer email, I don't respond to text messages, I don't even usually have my phone on. I don't do other things. I focus in on that, and I'll do that for five, six hours at a time, where I'm just doing that. And that might be my whole day because I also have to let my voice recover and let my brain recover and just get out of the office. So by working in batches, then after I'm done a course or done recording the course, I might go and go back and go through all my email where I'll respond to a bunch of emails all at once. And then I'll go and talk to my coworkers and have a bunch of meetings and do all that at once. For you, that process might be to go through emails for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon and say that's all the times I'm gonna do email. So if I'm in at 8 o'clock in the morning, I'm gonna do email from 8 to 8.30, and then again from 1 to 1.30. And that's it. Because by doing that, what happens is if you check your email all the time or respond right away to email, well, that pulls you away from something else. And so what you have is this fragmented day where you have little chunks here, little chunks there that are pulled out. And the problem is that when you when you do an email or when you do something else that distracts you for just a little bit, it's not just that little bit of distraction. It's that little bit of distraction plus all the time it takes to get re-engaged back with what you're doing. The one estimate said that for every interruption, it takes an extra 15 minutes to get back engaged. Well, if you answer four emails in an hour, that means you're practically not doing anything but those four emails. That's not efficient. So even just doing one and taking 15 minutes away is not healthy. That's also where a lot of bugs come in with software development, is you've got 10 steps to do and you're on step five, you get distracted, and you come back and do step seven. You totally forget that you missed step six. And maybe that's obvious and maybe it's not. So that's where bugs can come in, is you you forgot and you you didn't you got interrupted in the middle of that 10-step process. So working in batches and saying, hey, I'm going to work on this block for this time, and then I'm gonna do something else for this block and try and block time off that way. Block time off on your calendar and say this is focus time. If your best time to focus is from 1 to 3 p.m., well, then try and block that off in your calendar as much as possible. For me, I have a team, and with a team comes a lot of overhead. It's not just they take work off my plate, which they do, but they also add work to my plate because we have to communicate. We have to have a get on the same page and make sure that we're we're working through the issues and making sure that what I want done is done and what they are doing is the right thing, and all the rest of stuff. And so we have individual one-one meetings with me every week. So every team member meets with me for one hour once a week. Well, that's four hours of team meetings, and you can't really put a team meeting, you know, one meeting next to the other meeting because you need to have some transition time, especially for things to go over or or things, you know, like get a bathroom break in between, those kind of things. So what I do is I put all my meetings on Monday, which is the same day I get my allergy shot. So I get my allergy shot, I get my lunch, I come back, I have meeting one, meeting two, I have some free time, I have meeting three, I have meeting four, the day is pretty much done. But what does that do? It frees up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday where I'm not having those team meetings. So if I just allowed team meetings to happen whenever, well, I'd have one Monday, I'd have one on Tuesday, one on Thursday, and you know, one Friday, well, that's gonna break up every day. I'm not gonna have big chunks of time anywhere because that's not the only meetings I have. I have meetings with my accountant or my lawyer or some you know person that's working for me on a contract basis. Well, you know, if I allow those to happen whenever, then I have a schedule that's dotted with meetings. And some of you might say, yeah, Tim, that looks like what I do. And sometimes you're not in control of that. But you need to work on communicating with your boss and say, hey, this is point number two, communicate with your boss and say, let's see if we can batch these. Let's see if we can send, can optimize this for more work. I see companies where developers spend more time in meetings than they do developing. This is true from large companies to small companies. The problem with this is when to get your work done. You have more meetings to talk about why your work's not being done. And the really reason is because you have meetings. Like you've got to figure out a way to optimize your schedule to allow for work to be done. And so part of that is communicating with your boss, communicating with your peers, and saying, hey, I know you want to do this on Thursday, but can we move us to a Tuesday? Because that's my batch day. That's my administrative day. That's the day I want to try and do all my meetings. And maybe have a team day where everybody in the team is trying to put meetings on a specific day as opposed to whenever they find a free spot. So communicate with your boss, communicate with your boss, hey, I'm gonna block out certain parts of my calendar that are for me to focus. I'm gonna choose the times that work best with my rhythm so that if I'm a morning person, I'm gonna block off eight to 10 three days a week and say, that's my time. I'm gonna come in and focus on just doing this work. So communication is important, batching is important. Number three, try and clump those meetings. That's you know, I've covered it already, but try and get things together so that you have these clumps rather than spread out fragmented calendars. Number four, use small gaps for quick tasks. So you're gonna have fragmentation, you're gonna have gaps, you're gonna have weird areas. On my meeting days on Monday, I try and put half an hour at least in between every one-hour meeting. So sometimes things go over. That happens. But if they don't go over, I have half an hour. Well, I use that half an hour to take a break, take a walk, get a drink of water, or otherwise, you know, just be out and about. But if I have the time, I also try to respond to YouTube comments, respond to an email or two, check my task list and see if there's anything quick I can do. Because I could do those quick things whenever. But if I do them in the gaps, where that's all I can do, well, then I have more free time to do the larger things because those little things have been done. So trying to optimize those gaps to take advantage of them rather than just having this dead time that's really weird and doesn't really work for larger projects. So this principle, these principles apply to your daily routine, they apply to your weekly routine, they apply to your monthly routines as well. Trying to get things lined up so that you're in a rhythm and that rhythm fits with who you are as a person and how you best work. And your team is all gonna be different. So some people are morning people, some people are night people, some people work well right after lunch, some people are horrible after lunch. So figuring out how to work together and figure out how you can optimize, even say, you know what, Wednesdays is just gonna be a messy day because no one has a good rhythm that lines up with everybody else. So we have to have mean time when some people are on, some people aren't. So let's just make Wednesdays a day that we just destroy with meetings. And then we'll try and keep Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, Friday as more free and open times. So that can be helpful. Um, some other things that can help with this uh this optimization of your routine. Add some type of exercise. My preference is to add something at lunch. One of my favorite um places for exercising at lunch, one of the places I worked that was really good at this, was a company where I worked on the fifth floor. And because I was on the fifth floor, there was a bathroom on the first floor. And so I would do is I'd walk down those stairs to go to the bathroom and come back. Now that takes me about, you know, 10 minutes, but it's the equivalent of a smoke break. But instead of smoking, I'm walking five flights of stairs. And for lunchtime, I would use the stairs and come back. And my goal was 50 flights of stairs a day. And by doing so, it was a little thing, but it got my blood moving. It got me, you know, spending time on the stairs thinking. And so we're not talking about going to the gym and exercising, which that could be great, but it's just a matter of getting up and moving and getting the blood flowing and getting a different perspective, getting fresh air. Those kind of things are all important for resetting your brain and helping you get back in the groove for the afternoon. So I love lunchtime, especially for some type of movement, some type of get out of the chair and get to doing something. Um, the second thing that really helps the routine and helps you get into the groove is noise canceling headphones. You've heard me before talk about it, but noise canceling headphones have been huge for me. I bought a pair of Bose QC25s, I believe. Um they are wonderful. When I put those on for the very first time, I was amazed by how good the noise cancellation was. So my my work wouldn't pay for it, so I paid out of pocket for them. Now later they reimbursed me for it. It's a whole thing. But what that allowed me to do is when I was in focus mode, I would put those on even though I was in a busy office, even though people are coming in and out, I could put those on and I could listen to something and not hear anything else. That allowed me to focus on what I was doing. Now, with that, one of the things I found is that I don't do well. This is maybe me personally, but it's up to you to find out as well. I personally don't do real well with normal music when I'm programming. There's certain times when it works great. Now, there's certain times when I really want to have a heavy beat, I want to have something upbeat, I want to have something a little loud to play while I'm doing something. But for other times, I have found that I'll catch myself singing along the lyrics. I might be going, oh, it's a new song, I want to hear that. Um, those kind of things, you they pull you back out of your focus. So finding distraction-free music or sounds. I have found that I think it was Brain.fm was doing a uh a thing through uh some giveaway site where they were giving lifetime access to their um their music tracks, which are not really music, it's more like a sound track. It's musical-ish, but it's just uh for focus. And so I've used that for years, where I'll put that on and it's just it has no lyrics, it has not even really a melody, it's just sounds. But what it does is it distracts me from being distracted. You know, it kind of stops me from thinking about what I'm hearing and allows me to focus on what I'm doing, but yet still has something in my ears, which tunes everything else out because if it's something that's playing in your ears, you don't hear people talking, you don't hear people walking by, a lot of things. So that's been helpful for me as well. Another thing is a consistent task list. Figure out what works for you. For a number of years, I've used Notepad, which Notepad is not a task list per se, but it's worked really well for me. And one of the reasons why is because too often people get so caught up in having a perfect task list, a task list that is prioritized, that has start dates and end dates, that has subtasks, that has all these features and you know, has swim lanes that drag things around and automations and all the rest. That can be good. But it might be overkill for what you're doing. And that's where I found that Notepad really works well for me. I just type something in Notepad, hit enter, and I'm done. I don't think about reorder it. I just have that list and I work off that list. So I found that having a consistent list that you work off of can also be helpful for focusing you on what do I need to do today. A big one that is we talked a little bit about last week, but it's it's really valuable for doing is plan the next day's tasks before you leave for the day. This is huge for setting yourself up for success. When you walk in the door and you know exactly what you need to do and what the priority list is, even for that next day, that's huge. It allows you to walk in and just start working rather than walk in and figure things out. So having that task list and saying, hey, I want to accomplish these things tomorrow. It also helps you to identify what is important to do tomorrow, what is the next thing that I need to do? And you're already in that work mindset so you can better think it through and identify what those priorities should be. That allows you to just get right into the next day and start moving right away. And especially for me, where the morning is not my great time, I can just look at a list and go, okay, that's what I do, and just follow that list. So there's some suggestions, there's some things to help you, some best practices for helping that routine of work, whether it's a daily routine or a weekly routine, where you really optimize what you're doing to get the most out of yourself without just adding more hours or adding more effort, but instead doing things smarter, not just working harder. Okay? I hope it helps. Thanks for listening. And as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at Iamtimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.