Joel Clermont (00:00):
Welcome to No Compromises, a peek into the mind of two old web devs who have seen some things. This is Joel.

Aaron Saray (00:08):
And this is Aaron.

Joel Clermont (00:16):
Aaron, I've been meaning to talk to you that your productivity output hasn't been where I need it. I'm going to ask you to improve that and I thought today's topic could be about how you might do that.

Aaron Saray (00:28):
Yeah, you're right. I keep getting distracted by all of my emails and Twitter and bookface and My Location and Five Square, and all these different things that people use.

Joel Clermont (00:41):
Why didn't you say five pentagon?

Aaron Saray (00:42):
I don't know.

Joel Clermont (00:45):
So we joke-

Aaron Saray (00:48):
Oh, wow. I'm sorry. I don't want to get off track, but is it called Four Square because there's four sides to a square?

Joel Clermont (00:53):
I'm guessing, I don't know. There's a game called Four Square too, but is the game called that for?

Aaron Saray (00:58):
Whoa. Anyway,

Joel Clermont (01:00):
Deep thoughts so early in the day. This is a joke because Aaron is one of the few humans I know that has laser focus when he's working. But if you're a normal person like me, you might relate to sometimes the pull of distraction when you have tasks laid out, you know what you want to do, and sometimes you don't get to them. I thought we might talk through a couple things that I personally have dealt with in the past and some things I'm still working on, because I don't think I'm alone in this.

Aaron Saray (01:33):
Sure.

Joel Clermont (01:33):
Aaron jokingly talked about email, but honestly I think this probably is the biggest distraction that many developers have. Is keeping your email open all day while you're working and what seems an endless flow of messages coming in. Those messages could be work related, right? It could be somebody is having a problem with something you built, it could be somebody requesting a feature, it could be somebody asking for a meeting. Or it could be like, "Hey, there's a sale on this course that you were on the wait list for." And now you go down a rabbit hole of reading the landing page and all the stuff that happens. First of all, Aaron, just come on. Has this ever happened to you where an email's come in and it kind of derailed you from the task you were working on?

Aaron Saray (02:24):
Well, that's not a fair question because has it ever? Yeah, of course.

Joel Clermont (02:28):
Okay, good. That's all I needed to hear. No, further clarification. Hopefully this is resonating for some people and it I think it's the biggest trap because we use email for communication. There's other tools, but email is still pretty entrenched in a lot of organizations. Certainly, for us working with clients, it's the main way we interact. But what can we do about it? One thing I've done and I would say I'm pretty accurate with this. In fact, hold on, I'm Alt Tabbing. Aha, my email's closed right now so I can say this with a clean conscience. But it's just don't have your email open all the time you're working. It's very rare that something comes in to email that is truly urgent that couldn't wait two hours, three hours, right? I mean, that's been my experience. Just by not having it open, you don't see the messages coming in and you're not tempted to read them or reply to them or get off track. One of the reasons I find this important is because even if something is important and does require your attention, if it's not the thing you planned on working that day, then why do it? It's taking you off the goals you established in the morning or maybe even the goals you established for the week. Like, "These are the things that are important. This is where my focus is going to go." Why let some random email interrupt that? Are you with me so far on this, Aaron?

Aaron Saray (03:56):
Well, as with all things I can find arguments for multiple different sides. I don't know the exact word, but it's kind of, oh, arrogant that you think you could plan your whole week and never get interrupted by something that... nothing else in the world would be more important than what you have planned for an entire week. I mean, I could argue against that but for the most part I agree with you. There is one thing you said that specifically stuck out to me because one of the things that I hear from a lot of people has a lot to do with that sale. That sale and that course or whatever you just kind of mentioned in passing there. Is, "Well, I do that because I might save some money or I get deals on whatever, X, Y, Z." I'm going to tell you straight out that the amount of time and waste that you do by getting distracted by your email costs more than the money you're saving on these sort of things. Whether it's opportunity cost or even billable hours or ability to go get stuff done, you're losing that. Now, let's just say that everyone loses 20 minutes out of every hour. We're talking developers, right?

Joel Clermont (05:04):
Right.

Aaron Saray (05:04):
Let's just say that every single developer loses 20 minutes out of an hour because of emails and all those different things. Well, if you don't do that... I mean, this is evil. The man would want you to work then for the 60 hours and I'm saying if you don't get those 20 minutes lost or whatever on that email, you can spend 20 minutes reading something that makes you better at your job so you can get more efficient, you can spend 20 minutes just relaxing. You can do even what I do so people say, "Wow, you have laser focus." But about once an hour I go and lay on my couch for about three to four minutes. I don't fall asleep, but I just go, "Ah," and then I come back to work and I work gangbusters again. There is cost to saving money is what I'm saying too.

Joel Clermont (05:53):
Yeah. That's even assuming that that 30% launch discount is actually ever going to go away and isn't just the normal price of the course, you know?

Aaron Saray (06:01):
Yeah. Then you'll actually do the course too, right? Because who out there has bought courses and books and not used them?

Joel Clermont (06:07):
Mm-Hmm (affirmative). People do that? No.

Aaron Saray (06:07):
I completely agree with you when you say that you should have your email closed and I think it has a lot to do with expectation settings. Also it's not that weird. A lot of times we, "Oh, would it be weird if I did it everyone, else did it?" No, it's just everyone follows what someone was "strong enough" to set up as a precedence in your organization, whatever you're in. And that's what people do. It's not weird to be like, oh, if someone emails you an emergency or whatever, like an hour before something and you didn't see the email or whatever. It's not weird or bad to say, "Oh, I check my email twice a day, I didn't see that. If you want to get a hold of me for emergency, there's more real-time types of communication tools."

Joel Clermont (06:51):
That's kind where I came down to. Because I'd say I had a mild anxiety when I first did this about, what if I missed something that is time-sensitive? Well, first of all I did a test for a week and literally zero things came in that were time-sensitive so I realized it was kind of an edge case. Then what you said, if it happens one time, you know you just explain it and then they can text you or some other means if it truly is urgent and time-sensitive. But just to push back a little bit or to clarify something. You mentioned that maybe a mild form of arrogance for planning and I get what you're saying. It's not all about like, "Here's what I want to do." If you're working on a team or you're working in a collaborative environment with clients, you have to give and take. But what I find is that sometimes it's actually unfair. For us, we work with a variety of clients, sometimes projects overlap. But generally you have commitments and you say, "I'm going to get this done this week," or, "this month," and it requires a certain amount of focus to follow through and deliver that. Now, if some other client, one you haven't made a commitment to, asks you a question or even points out something like, "Hey, this doesn't look right, is this a bug?" The instinct to help them, which I have, is actually helping you or pushing you away from finishing the commitment you already made. It's more about-

Aaron Saray (08:14):
Yeah, that client wouldn't want you to do that to them if you're working on their stuff.

Joel Clermont (08:18):
Absolutely not. Right. So that was one thing. The other thing too, any time I talk about productivity, the end goal isn't to be some robot that cranks out code and is just getting more work. We're not packing, we're not saying like, "Oh, pack 80 hours of work into 40 hours," it's nothing that. But there's a stress I think that comes from context switching and from missing deadlines and from just feeling like, "Ah, I'm not getting done with what I wanted to." It's really about wellbeing, it's about like, "I got done what I set out to do today. Man, that feels good and it builds my client relationships. And it enables me to do other things in the future." So part of this, for me, and maybe this is a segue to another topic, is when you do plan out the day or the week, try not to do too much, right? I'd rather say... You're laughing because I still struggle with this, I do. But the days where I say, "Hey, I'm going to get this one thing done," and then I end up getting two done, it feels way better than, "I'm going to get three things done. Ah, I only got two done." You got the same amount of work done-

Aaron Saray (09:28):
You only got one done.

Joel Clermont (09:28):
What's that?

Aaron Saray (09:30):
You only got one done.

Joel Clermont (09:30):
Or one. Or I got two done but then Aaron rejected one and has made me change all sorts of stuff in my pull request. But it's kind of a little bit of an aside. I think we've talked about this in the past because I really enjoyed your reaction as I was saying that. You were like, "Joel, come on, you do this all the time." And I do but that is part of it and it kind of goes along with that idea of this isn't about productivity for the sake of just getting as much stuff done as possible.

Aaron Saray (09:59):
I don't want this to be an excuse for people not to take advice from people that may be doing this for a while. But we all are different so there are different things. The point of all this is just to kind of challenge maybe some of the assumptions that you have about how you're doing your day-to-day work and see if you might change it to a different way that actually works better for you. Now, there's really rare amount of people... and when I say rare, I mean you're not one of them. Unless you really know you are, that can actually context switch and multitask. Most people think they can but they can't. It's perfectly fine to admit that you can't and it's perfectly fine to do different things. One of the jokes that Joel always says is, "Oh, Aaron has laser focus." You know, growing up and earlier in my career too, when we started out this topic I just said like, "Well, just work then." Like, "Don't get distracted by email, just work." But I've found over the years that I'm not better or worse than anyone else, I just happen to be really good at focusing. I'm not great at having conversations on Twitter, that's the thing that maybe Joel is. He has more outreach for us. Whereas I'm just like, "I don't understand how to talk to humans," or whatever is wrong with me, right? But there are different types of people, but this is all about just kind of pushing yourself to understand that what you're doing probably could be better for you and here are things that work for most people.

Joel Clermont (11:20):
Yeah, that's always a good disclaimer to put with any advice of this sort. One more thing I just want to throw that I've seen and I've experienced to a certain degree as a distraction is social media. Because you mentioned Twitter in passing and for whatever reason I still find some level of enjoyment and value from Twitter. There are forms of social media. If you're just posting memes or joking around or whatever, or just scrolling endlessly, clearly that's a distraction from your work. But for us we've obtained or made some relationships, met new clients on social media, right?

Aaron Saray (11:59):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joel Clermont (11:59):
It's sort of like email where there's this business justification or this even a productivity justification. Like, "Well, this is actually part of my work." "All right. Fine, I concede that it is too, we'll promote this podcast on Twitter." We'll announce our next book or course or whatever on Twitter and that's fine. But does it have to be open during the day? I would say even more so than email, it should be something you very selectively dip in and out of and even establish some guardrails. Like, you know what? I'm going to do some marketing or I'm going to engage with the Laravel community, I'm going to do it for 30 minutes. And actually hold it to that and do it maybe at the end of the day, not in the middle of a task. Or sometimes I'll even do little things like this when I'm in between calls, right? If we're recording the podcast and I know when we'll finish, I have another call in 15 minutes. I'm not going to open up PHPStorm and dive into a deep feature, but maybe that's the time to block 15 minutes on social media.

Aaron Saray (12:59):
You might time block it or time cube it or whatever, yeah.

Joel Clermont (13:01):
Time cube. Yeah, exactly.
Recently, I'd say over the last five, six months, I've been making an effort to sort of get back to my pre pandemic weight. That is to kind of undo the harm of being cooped up for months, years. One thing, of course you pay attention to what you're eating. You know how every food has those nutrition labels on it, right? You look at that. Maybe you're looking at calories, maybe you're looking at carbs, whatever it is.

Aaron Saray (13:40):
Potassium.

Joel Clermont (13:40):
Yes, exactly. What, you want to eat as little potassium as possible or as much as possible?

Aaron Saray (13:47):
I mean, your mileage may vary.

Joel Clermont (13:49):
That's right. Yeah, this is not medical advice. But it's no secret food manufacturers really manipulate those nutrition labels. One of the ways they do that is with the serving size, right? You might get a pack of Reese's peanut butter cups and there's two of them in there, but a serving size might be one. It's like, all right, come on nobody's going to open up this package and eat one. Where I found one recently that really had my head scratching... Because first of all, it's not an unhealthy food and it was just such a preposterous serving size. It was one of those giant pickles that's in a bag, you know what I'm talking about?

Aaron Saray (14:32):
Yeah.

Joel Clermont (14:32):
Okay. If I remember right, calories was five, right? There's no fat, there's nothing bad in it.

Aaron Saray (14:38):
It's a pickle.

Joel Clermont (14:39):
Most people on any sort of diet can eat a pickle. Maybe if you're watching sodium that might be the thing. But what do you think the serving size was for a pickle in a bag, Aaron? How many servings are in the bag?

Aaron Saray (14:51):
Well, I'm going to say two.

Joel Clermont (14:53):
There were five. It said five servings.

Aaron Saray (14:56):
What?

Joel Clermont (14:56):
The thing that cracked... I was sitting at lunch with my family opening this up and I said, "I guess we have to pass the pickle around because there's five servings." Then my son is like, "Dad, it's not even a resealable bag. How would you eat one serving and then not just have all the juice fall out?" That was probably one of the more preposterous ones.

Aaron Saray (15:20):
Did that pickle say it was family size?
While we're recording this podcast, I had my email open and there was 36 emails that came in all saying what a great website this is.

Joel Clermont (15:40):
Which website? Masteringlaravel.io. If you like it, head over there, click Contact Us and send Aaron another email.