0:00:00Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.
0:00:03Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple, and
0:00:07the like.
0:00:08I'm your host, David Smith.
0:00:09I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.
0:00:11This is show number 101, and today is January 1st, 2013.
0:00:16Happy New Year's.
0:00:17All right, I figured I'd kick off the year with a, I guess you could call it a topical
0:00:21topic for today, given that it's New Year's Day.
0:00:24A lot of people start thinking about their new year, what they're going to do, and I'm
0:00:27tempted to do a couple of shows like this.
0:00:29who knows, I always say that at the beginning of these shows, then I hardly ever do. But
0:00:32I'm going to talk today about what a lot of people would call work-life balance. That
0:00:37term always kind of turns me off just because it's a strange thing. It puts your work and
0:00:43your, I guess, your personal life in tension, I feel like, that you're kind of fighting
0:00:48between those two. And I think there's putting them in tension and having them be almost
0:00:52antagonistic isn't necessarily the right kind of viewpoint. And a lot of what I'm talking
0:00:57about will apply mostly for people who have some amount of control over their work life,
0:01:03I suppose, in terms of if you're an independent or if you're at least semi-independent, those
0:01:08types of things.
0:01:09If you have a very regimented job with a very regimented schedule where you have to be in
0:01:14specific place at a specific time, maybe this isn't going to be as helpful.
0:01:17But if you have any amount of control over your schedule, which according to this in
0:01:23news I've been actually reading recently that is increasingly more and more and more employers
0:01:27have you know, options for flex time working from home, those types of things. So it seems
0:01:31like this is likely going to be broadly relevant. And I was coming up with kind of what I my
0:01:36thoughts on this and kind of what I've done and how I have approached that. And it was
0:01:40kind of an interesting thing because I ended up with three words all beginning with the
0:01:44letter C. And so I have what I guess makes the perfect thing for a presentation or a
0:01:49If I had a PowerPoint, this would be great.
0:01:51So a little bit cheesy to have three words with the same letter, but that's where we
0:01:55are, and so I'll get started.
0:01:57So the first one I have is consciousness.
0:02:00By that I mean, this is based on my own experience and from talking to a lot of people, a lot
0:02:05of friends who are in similar situations.
0:02:08It is impossible to end up with an ideal or a place where you're probably going to be
0:02:15happy about the amount of time, the effort, and where your emotional energy is being spent
0:02:21in a day without being conscious about where that effort is going and where that time is
0:02:27going and being proactive and conscious and intentional about it.
0:02:31It's just one of those things that, in my experience, more likely than not, unless you
0:02:36have something dramatic going on on the home front, if left to its own devices, work will
0:02:41slowly sort of devour all available time, and you'll be left with pouring yourself out
0:02:50on a regular basis into your work, which may not necessarily be what you want.
0:02:55If you have a family at home, you have a wife or kids, those types of things, or even just
0:02:59other interests, hobbies, things that you in many ways would like to do, those constraints
0:03:05are rarely going to be things that will proactively pull at you, in a way that work will almost
0:03:12always do that. There's always the next thing to do. There's always something else that's
0:03:16pressing for your time, opportunities that you need to work on, a boss that's nagging
0:03:20at you. Whatever it is that's going to be pulling on you. If you're not conscious and
0:03:25proactive about how you're going to spend your time, where you're going to be, where
0:03:30you're going to pour yourself into on a daily basis, it's unlikely that you're going to
0:03:34to end up where you want to be.
0:03:37And the next concept, the next C, is constraint.
0:03:41And this is really the reality for most
0:03:43of what you have to think about is,
0:03:46where can you draw lines around your time, around your energy,
0:03:51around your effort?
0:03:52And it's kind of coming at it from the obvious thing,
0:03:54hopefully, but it's worth mentioning.
0:03:57You're starting from a place of limited resources.
0:04:00Your entire life is essentially a question
0:04:03managing and compromising amongst limited resources, whether that's your time, your
0:04:09energy, your, I guess you could, you differentiate your energy and your focus in terms of you
0:04:14being able to be intellectually engaged, your money, all those kinds of things that you,
0:04:20you have to build constraints between these things.
0:04:23And this is, I think one of the things, especially for people who I know who start working from
0:04:28home struggle with the most is drawing very strong constraints and lines around their
0:04:35work.
0:04:36It's very easy when you're working at home to find yourself working too much or working,
0:04:42if not necessarily too much in terms of hours, but to be working too often.
0:04:47By that I mean you kind of find yourself dabbling and dabbling all throughout the day.
0:04:53You're constantly checking things, you're constantly kind of getting involved and thinking
0:04:57about work and getting into it in a way that doesn't allow you to ever really turn off
0:05:03and it doesn't allow you to really invest and put your time and energy into the things
0:05:07that you may want to at home.
0:05:09And so that's a really dangerous thing to kind of find your place.
0:05:12And like I said, without being conscious, without putting constraints on your work,
0:05:17it'll just keep growing, I find.
0:05:19I mean, and obviously, I guess if maybe if you're a lazy—sort of like a lazy bones
0:05:22who doesn't want to get any work done, then maybe that's not the case.
0:05:27My guess is if you're the kind of person who's listening to a podcast about independent
0:05:32software development, you're probably not that kind of person.
0:05:34You're probably someone who is, who likes what they're doing and is trying hard to do
0:05:39more and more of it.
0:05:40And so it's important to be proactive about putting constraints in your time.
0:05:44One of the most important things I ever did, I've been independent for years and years
0:05:48now, one of the most important things I ever did was I put very strong hour caps on my
0:05:54work basically.
0:05:55And for the most part, I work 9 to 5.
0:05:59There's a few exceptions to that and things, but for the vast majority of my days, probably
0:06:03about 95% of days, I work between 9 and 5.
0:06:06And there's nothing magical about 9 and 5.
0:06:09It just kind of works out well for my family in terms of it works out well for my children's
0:06:13schedules, for my wife's schedules, for when we have childcare, for them to come and help
0:06:17my wife.
0:06:18Like all those kinds of things line up well for kind of working 9 to 5.
0:06:23And before I did that, my work life would kind of be this fluid thing that no one in
0:06:28my family could kind of plan on or depend on.
0:06:31And this was especially difficult when we had small children for my wife, where it's
0:06:34undefined when I'm coming home, it's undefined when I'm going to work, and having that ambiguity
0:06:39was just kind of putting stress and difficulty on my home life.
0:06:44And so when we decided, "Okay, well, I'm going to work nine to five," and that's what I did.
0:06:49It was rather remarkable in terms of it gave me permission, I think, during work to be
0:06:55100% focused on work in a way that, you know, if you're working an undefined schedule, it's
0:07:01very easy for, especially when you're working at home, but even just in general, it's very
0:07:07easy to be distracted by things, things that are often very worthwhile, things that are
0:07:10very worthy, but things that are nevertheless going to be distracting you from your work.
0:07:16And so if you have a certain amount of time
0:07:18that you're allotting and saying, this is where I'm at work,
0:07:20it's easier to say, no, I'm at work.
0:07:22And you can kind of shut those out
0:07:24because you know there's a definite time we
0:07:26will be able to address them.
0:07:275 o'clock, I'm all available.
0:07:30And then on the flip side of that,
0:07:31it allows you to really focus on the things outside of work
0:07:34when you're not working.
0:07:35It allows you to--
0:07:38basically, other than when my servers or similar things
0:07:43have problems, and I get an alert,
0:07:44you know, an alert comes in that says, "Hey, your server's down," and I need to go and
0:07:47address that. I pretty much turn off work from five to nine every day, you know, sort
0:07:53of on those outside times. And I'm able to rest and to spend time with my kids and family
0:07:56and wife and friends and so on in a way that is much better, I find, than if I didn't have
0:08:01those constraints around myself. And then the last thing I want to talk about, the third
0:08:07C, which is very related to constraint, is context. And this is something that is difficult
0:08:15to make strong recommendations on. But moreover, what I can do is I can speak to my own experience.
0:08:20And by context, what I'm talking about here is I think it's very important that you can
0:08:24create a context, which is really just another word for place or work environment, however
0:08:29you want to call it, the place that you are most productive, and to take that context
0:08:34and move it or separate it as much as you can from the other contexts of your life.
0:08:42So if you're familiar with kind of—there's a term in sort of computer engineering about
0:08:47context switching, where you're in one context and you're switching to the next and switching
0:08:51to the next and switching to the next, which is often a term applied to microprocessors.
0:08:56But I find it very applicable to my life that you're kind of—you're in one place, you're
0:09:00one zone, you're in one sort of line of thinking. And often the place that you're that where
0:09:05you are, for me anyway, strongly, strongly informs that that when I met when I'm at my
0:09:10office, in my fancy chair, looking at my nice setup with my the my exact right keyboard,
0:09:16and I got my Microsoft 400 split format ergonomic, I got my black razor mouse, you know, that's
0:09:23me in my in my productive context. When I'm at home, that context isn't there. And so
0:09:28So I'm not worried about working.
0:09:31And so what I find is it was very important for me as much as early as I could to separate
0:09:37my work context from my not work context.
0:09:40And so for me, actually, I go all the way to the extent that I rent office space just
0:09:44down the road from my house, just a tiny little 90 square feet.
0:09:48Essentially, it's a glorified closet, but I rent it as a separate space that I can come
0:09:52into and I can do my work that's physically separated.
0:09:56And before that, I used to, you know, I had essentially a place in my particular desk
0:10:02in my office downstairs.
0:10:03That was the work desk.
0:10:04And we actually had a separate space, a separate orientation in that office that was for non-work
0:10:11things.
0:10:12That was for, you know, just doing regular household business in that office.
0:10:16We found that very helpful.
0:10:17There's something nice about having that physical place that I find when I'm sitting, when I
0:10:24down, I'm able to focus more than I would if I just kind of grabbed my laptop, sat down
0:10:30at the dining room table, and started working.
0:10:33And similarly, you know, if I was doing my work at the dining room table, it would be
0:10:36easy to get sucked back into that or pull out of it during the day.
0:10:41And so it's important, I think, to have that strong sense of context, to draw those lines
0:10:46between things and to try and not, as much as you can, blur the lines between that.
0:10:51You know, it's like, if you're going to watch a movie, you should probably watch that in
0:10:54your living room, your den, whatever it is in your house.
0:10:57You're not going to want to be watching that on your computer, sitting down at your desk,
0:11:01where you're going to be doing work.
0:11:02These are just some of these things that I found that, in my experience, are really helpful
0:11:06for kind of drawing those lines.
0:11:07And at the end of the day, it's just a question of trying to decide what you want to accomplish
0:11:13and how, you know, what are the things that are important to you.
0:11:18You could talk about it as priorities, you could talk about it in a lot of ways, but
0:11:22it's trying to make sure that you're being very thoughtful and introspective about how
0:11:29far would you want to allow your work to bleed into your overall life in terms of the energy
0:11:35that you have.
0:11:36You wake up every morning with a certain amount of energy.
0:11:39How much of it are you willing to spend on the acquisition of money and respect from
0:11:46your peers, basically, which is largely what work is for most people. And you have to decide
0:11:51that and you have to be conscious about that. I remember my wife and I had a conversation
0:11:56early on when I was independent about the tricky part of it's easy. It's like, what
0:12:01are we trying to do here? Because if I want to, it's like, if the goal is to make as much
0:12:05money as possible, then you make a lot of very different choices and you can spend a
0:12:10tremendous amount of time. If I wanted to make as much money as possible, there's a
0:12:15a good chance I would just do hourly consulting
0:12:17and I would work 80 hours, 100 hours a week,
0:12:21and at a solid hourly rate, you could make a ton of money
0:12:26that way, but that was a decision we decided.
0:12:29No, the goal is not to make as much money as possible.
0:12:31The goal is to feel like you're applying yourself
0:12:35and using your gifts and talents
0:12:37in a reasonable and responsible way,
0:12:40but at the end of the day, it's almost like
0:12:43to work the smallest amount possible
0:12:45to provide for the lifestyle that we would like.
0:12:50And then beyond that, to enjoy, to seek to limit
0:12:54the amount of energy that is put into work
0:12:57that could be put into other things,
0:12:58other things that I personally would value a bit more
0:13:01in terms of the time spent with my wife
0:13:04and with my kids, with my family, those types of things,
0:13:08or just making myself a better person
0:13:10in terms of personal development.
0:13:12So anyway, it's a bit of a hand-ravey thing, but it's technically a holiday so I can take
0:13:19a vacation from the more technical topics.
0:13:21And hopefully it's interesting.
0:13:23I brought this up on the first because I thought it would be interesting to have something
0:13:28to think about, something for you to think about as you're going through this next year.
0:13:33Look back on 2012 and say, "Am I happy with the way that's gone and the way I've separated
0:13:39my time and my focus and my energy?
0:13:41Am I happy with that?"
0:13:42If you are, fantastic.
0:13:44If you're not, well, this is as good a time
0:13:47as any to do something about.
0:13:48You even get a--
0:13:50there's a new digit at the end of the year, which apparently
0:13:53is motivating and helpful to some people.
0:13:56All right, that's it for today's show.
0:13:58As always, if you have questions, comments, complaints,
0:14:01concerns, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith.
0:14:04I'm on app.net @davidsmith.
0:14:06There's an email address for the show on the website for it,
0:14:10developingperspective.com.
0:14:12And otherwise, I hope you guys have a good new year.
0:14:15Have a good and blessed 2013.
0:14:17And I'll probably just mention it again.
0:14:20I really appreciate it whenever anybody asks questions.
0:14:23That is a great place for me to go
0:14:25to collect topics for the show, to give me
0:14:28thoughts and insights.
0:14:29So if you have anything that you're thinking about related
0:14:31to development, related to being independent,
0:14:33related to anything like that, just let me know.
0:14:35In any one of those means, I just mentioned,
0:14:38just because it really helps me kind of guide the show
0:14:42to where it's most helpful.
0:14:44All right, have a great day.
0:14:45Happy coding.
0:14:46And I'll talk to you later this week.