Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:05 ◼   ► news of note in iOS development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm

00:00:09 ◼   ► an independent iOS developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 61, and today

00:00:13 ◼   ► is Thursday, July 5th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's

00:00:18 ◼   ► get started. All right. Today's question comes to me via Eric Wielander via Twitter. And

00:00:25 ◼   ► And he basically asked an interesting question that I think implies almost anybody who does

00:00:31 ◼   ► work at a computer these days.

00:00:34 ◼   ► And specifically, he said, how do you balance work and a constant stream of tweets, blogosphere?

00:00:41 ◼   ► Generally I think what he's asking is, how do you stay focused and get things done in

00:00:46 ◼   ► the context of either feeling like you need to, or just feeling like you want to be distracted,

00:00:53 ◼   ► that you want to be constantly watching,

00:00:56 ◼   ► seeing what's going on on Twitter, seeing what's going on.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Your RSS reader, you have sort of the universal things

00:01:01 ◼   ► like your email are also kind of falling into this category,

00:01:03 ◼   ► talking to coworkers.

00:01:06 ◼   ► And it's always this tension between your work

00:01:09 ◼   ► and keeping up with what's going on.

00:01:11 ◼   ► And I mean, to some degree, I'd say

00:01:13 ◼   ► that keeping up with what's going on is part of my work.

00:01:17 ◼   ► You can certainly get carried away with that.

00:01:18 ◼   ► But what I do requires a certain amount of familiarity

00:01:23 ◼   ► with what's going on in the community, what's going on with the App Store.

00:01:26 ◼   ► You know, if there's new things like right now, like as I'm recording,

00:01:29 ◼   ► there's this whole thing with App Store update corruption

00:01:32 ◼   ► that's kind of been going around, and it's important that I know about that.

00:01:36 ◼   ► And I know that it's like, okay, today is not a good day to release an update.

00:01:39 ◼   ► I don't have one particularly, but it's good to know that, in general,

00:01:43 ◼   ► this is a bad time to do that, and it's good to be aware of that.

00:01:46 ◼   ► And if I had been submitting an update,

00:01:49 ◼   ► as something I would have wanted to have known as sort of as quickly as possible.

00:01:52 ◼   ► But it's easy to get carried away with that and say, "Okay, well, I'm just going to constantly

00:01:56 ◼   ► be checking and kind of be twitching back and forth."

00:01:59 ◼   ► This is something that I've blogged about before, I've talked about before, and I think

00:02:03 ◼   ► I'm ending up in a much more pragmatic place than I was for a while.

00:02:08 ◼   ► So I don't know if you've been following this for a long time.

00:02:10 ◼   ► For a while, I wrote a post.

00:02:11 ◼   ► A while ago, I wrote a post called "Forcing Quiet Into My Day," which was for...

00:02:15 ◼   ► It's almost like I went cold turkey and kind of worked on totally shutting down and shutting

00:02:21 ◼   ► out the busy part of my day where I'm just doing these, like constantly checking Twitter.

00:02:29 ◼   ► I'm kind of having these reflexive twitches of like, "Oh, what's going on on Twitter?

00:02:32 ◼   ► Oh, what's going on in RSS?

00:02:33 ◼   ► What's going on in my email?"

00:02:35 ◼   ► And I'm kind of jumping around.

00:02:36 ◼   ► And I tried to sort of cut that off and I did all these things.

00:02:39 ◼   ► I even changed my host file so that I couldn't access a variety of services.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And the thing is, at the end of the day, that reflex and that twitch is more a symptom than

00:02:51 ◼   ► a cause of distraction.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Distraction is, I think, what I'm ending up more now is, distraction is a result of me

00:03:00 ◼   ► not being engaged in what I'm doing, not being interested in the work I'm doing.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And so I'm finding things to do instead.

00:03:07 ◼   ► I'm finding, I was like, "Oh, let me check on Twitter.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Oh, let me check on this."

00:03:12 ◼   ► And the problem that's far better to solve is to ask yourself, why is that the case?

00:03:19 ◼   ► Why am I not caring about the work I'm doing?

00:03:21 ◼   ► Why am I not engaged in it?

00:03:23 ◼   ► Why am I not interested in it?

00:03:25 ◼   ► And to address that first, rather than necessarily worrying about how do you balance work in

00:03:30 ◼   ► a constant street of tweets, it's more, why do I care necessarily what's going on on Twitter

00:03:36 ◼   ► at the expense or cost of the work I'm doing?

00:03:40 ◼   ► And for me, I've ended up, I think, in a happier place where I check Twitter, I check RSS,

00:03:47 ◼   ► I check my email on a fairly regular basis.

00:03:50 ◼   ► But what I find is I'm less guilty about it and less worried about it because when I'm

00:03:59 ◼   ► working I find that I'm able to work more if checking those things doesn't feel like,

00:04:06 ◼   ► I don't know, like a guilty pleasure or something that I'm not supposed to do.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Because by sort of by saying, "Okay, I'm going to do some work.

00:04:15 ◼   ► When I'm working, I've got my headphones on, I'm rocking out, and then I'll take a break

00:04:19 ◼   ► and I'll check all those things."

00:04:21 ◼   ► By giving myself the permission, though, to do that, to be like, "Okay, well, I'm going

00:04:26 ◼   ► to work, work, work.

00:04:27 ◼   ► And when I'm not, I'm going to go and check those things and read the news and see what's

00:04:32 ◼   ► going on."

00:04:33 ◼   ► it's, I don't know, for some reason for me, I find that kind of liberating.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And it removes almost this, it's almost like an enticement that I used to have,

00:04:42 ◼   ► where it's like, "Hehe, I'm going to be tricky, I'm going to go, you know, I should be typing

00:04:47 ◼   ► some Objective C, but instead I'm going to be seeing what's going on on Twitter."

00:04:51 ◼   ► And by making it less, it's almost like just accepting the fact that that is going to be

00:04:56 ◼   ► something that I'm going to do every day. That is something that is part of my day that I enjoy.

00:05:00 ◼   ► I like the little dopamine fix of just checking what's new and hitting all these little quick

00:05:06 ◼   ► bites of information.

00:05:07 ◼   ► And I enjoy that, and I'm conditioned to enjoy that, and I don't think that's a habit that

00:05:12 ◼   ► either I want to break or that I will break anytime soon.

00:05:16 ◼   ► And so just kind of accepting that and making that part of my day.

00:05:22 ◼   ► And it doesn't feel like...

00:05:24 ◼   ► I don't feel as much of a twitchiness for that just by saying, "Okay, this is what I

00:05:28 ◼   ► do. And it's, you know, I don't want it to ever get to a point that it, you know, impacts

00:05:33 ◼   ► my work. And so I'm going to do my work. And then I know that when I get to a good stopping

00:05:38 ◼   ► point, it's something that I'll check and I'll look into. And sure, there are days when

00:05:42 ◼   ► maybe it takes up a bit more of my time than I'd like. But I don't think it ever takes

00:05:47 ◼   ► up more time than it should. In the sense that it's important to not get too carried

00:05:53 ◼   ► away in terms of, oh gosh, cranking out code.

00:05:58 ◼   ► It's a funny thing because, say I worked in a factory.

00:06:01 ◼   ► Say I was making widgets on an assembly line.

00:06:05 ◼   ► It's very easy to measure that.

00:06:06 ◼   ► It's very easy to understand and say, OK, I produced 27 widgets today.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Yesterday, I produced 28 widgets.

00:06:13 ◼   ► Today was less productive than the day before.

00:06:15 ◼   ► And that only sort of applies to software engineering.

00:06:19 ◼   ► Software engineering is a funny thing.

00:06:21 ◼   ► You don't have to-- and I would say in many ways you can't--

00:06:25 ◼   ► be always working at 100%.

00:06:28 ◼   ► It's just not that kind of a work.

00:06:29 ◼   ► It's very much based on--

00:06:33 ◼   ► software development is more like applied experience.

00:06:36 ◼   ► And that experience comes from a variety of things.

00:06:38 ◼   ► It's both the things that you've done as well as the things that you know.

00:06:43 ◼   ► So when I'm getting--

00:06:45 ◼   ► so the people I hang out with online in terms of people I follow,

00:06:49 ◼   ► websites I follow, a lot of what they're doing is informing and enhancing my skills, whether

00:06:55 ◼   ► for development, for the techy people, design, understanding marketing, those types of things.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And in aggregate, I think they benefit my work as a result.

00:07:07 ◼   ► And so obviously I don't want to be like, "Okay, well, if I just watched Twitter all

00:07:11 ◼   ► day, I'd be a better coder."

00:07:13 ◼   ► Not really.

00:07:14 ◼   ► But being really engaged in the community and understanding what's going on, I think

00:07:20 ◼   ► it ultimately does make me better.

00:07:22 ◼   ► And this is one of those things that you kind of, I don't know, you kind of have to let

00:07:24 ◼   ► go at some point that your overall skill is not necessarily just the amount of time that

00:07:34 ◼   ► you spend in Xcode, but it's the experience that you have overall and how well-rounded

00:07:39 ◼   ► you are.

00:07:41 ◼   ► And I think the more I understand that, it's kind of, it's almost like you have to spend

00:07:44 ◼   ► money to make money is another way to think about it.

00:07:46 ◼   ► Like I'm spending time to make myself better.

00:07:49 ◼   ► And so my concern online becomes are the things that I'm following and is the information

00:07:54 ◼   ► I'm sending in enhancing and informing my ability to write applications to run a business

00:08:00 ◼   ► to be successful?

00:08:01 ◼   ► And that is a much easier question to answer, I think, than am I spending too much time

00:08:07 ◼   ► doing it?

00:08:08 ◼   ► And because at some point, if you're only taking in things that are enhancing your skill set as an entrepreneur, as a developer, as an employee, whatever, if all the inputs that you have are enhancing you, then it's unlikely that you're really going to get into trouble with this.

00:08:27 ◼   ► It's kind of like you're building efficiency into yourself by learning from other people's

00:08:35 ◼   ► mistakes, for example.

00:08:37 ◼   ► And you can get carried away with that, but you don't want to-- I think it's much more

00:08:42 ◼   ► liberating and constructive to just view it in that way and say, "My goal is to be the

00:08:47 ◼   ► best developer I can."

00:08:49 ◼   ► And as long as I'm very judicious in the inputs that I'm giving into my mind each day, then

00:08:56 ◼   ► Ultimately, I'm ending up doing better work for that.

00:09:00 ◼   ► And so that's kind of where I think you end up.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And I guess so you should be very judicious in what you follow.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Unfollow people or mute them or whatever it is that aren't those value adds.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And that's such a subjective thing for different people.

00:09:16 ◼   ► But I've really been doing a lot of that recently.

00:09:18 ◼   ► And I love Tweetbot for this.

00:09:19 ◼   ► And I can't wait for hopefully Tweetbot for Mac to come out at some point.

00:09:24 ◼   ► What I really want is to be able to pull--

00:09:29 ◼   ► I've been muting and filtering and doing all these things

00:09:32 ◼   ► to really focus down my Twitter streams

00:09:34 ◼   ► so that when there's new information there,

00:09:36 ◼   ► there's a very high probability that it

00:09:38 ◼   ► is enhancing to my business and my ability to do things.

00:09:42 ◼   ► And so I do a lot of--

00:09:44 ◼   ► I filter out large numbers of clients, for example.

00:09:49 ◼   ► Instagram posts, for example, don't show up

00:09:50 ◼   ► in my Twitter feed.

00:09:52 ◼   ► They're hidden.

00:09:54 ◼   ► I go to Instagram and I look at pictures, but I don't do that during my work day.

00:09:58 ◼   ► So I'm not constantly being distracted by people posting interesting pictures.

00:10:03 ◼   ► That's great.

00:10:04 ◼   ► That's awesome.

00:10:05 ◼   ► And I like looking at it, but that's not going to be enhancing to my day.

00:10:09 ◼   ► And that kind of thing.

00:10:10 ◼   ► So you kind of can filter down that information so you have this really high quality feed

00:10:14 ◼   ► that whenever you're looking at it is actually beneficial.

00:10:18 ◼   ► And then I think on the flip side of that, it's just making sure.

00:10:20 ◼   ► I've also been sort of increasingly, I don't know, increasingly careful about the work

00:10:26 ◼   ► I do to try and make sure that it's interesting to me, that I'm not seeking distractions from

00:10:34 ◼   ► it because I don't want to do it.

00:10:36 ◼   ► I'm independent.

00:10:38 ◼   ► I should be able to control, to some degree, the work I do.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And by trying to focus that down, it's like trying to sort of outsource jobs I don't want

00:10:47 ◼   ► to do, or projects I don't want to be on, or those types of things.

00:10:51 ◼   ► Ultimately, it really helps for being less distracted, because when you're excited about

00:10:55 ◼   ► something, when you're interested in it, when you're, I guess you could overuse the phrase,

00:10:58 ◼   ► but it's like when you're passionate about your work, you're less likely to be distracted.

00:11:04 ◼   ► I certainly know these days when I'm like, "Oh, there's just these two tasks that I need

00:11:09 ◼   ► to do, but I really don't want to do them.

00:11:11 ◼   ► The last thing I want to do is to do these things."

00:11:15 ◼   ► That's tricky.

00:11:16 ◼   ► Sometimes you just have to sort of suck it up and do it, but that happens a lot and you're

00:11:21 ◼   ► constantly finding other things to amuse your mind, then you really need to sort of evaluate

00:11:26 ◼   ► why are you doing those things in the first place?

00:11:30 ◼   ► Are you really getting satisfaction from that?

00:11:34 ◼   ► And surely at some point it's like, "Well, that's fine for Dave.

00:11:37 ◼   ► I have a somewhat successful business that I run, and so I have that kind of liberty."

00:11:42 ◼   ► It's like if you just have to do your job because you have to do your job, well, do

00:11:45 ◼   ► your job.

00:11:47 ◼   ► But if you find that tension and you find it really hard to stay on task because you

00:11:51 ◼   ► just don't care about what you're doing, that's a bigger issue.

00:11:55 ◼   ► And that's more of sort of like a back to work topic, as we'd say.

00:11:58 ◼   ► You know, it's like that's something Merlin Mann is great at talking about of kind of

00:12:01 ◼   ► how you evaluate those and work out what that looks like and how you can work out of that.

00:12:07 ◼   ► But anyway, that's kind of how I do it.

00:12:11 ◼   ► That's kind of what I do now.

00:12:13 ◼   ► It makes me feel a lot better to not feel guilty about looking at Twitter and doing

00:12:19 ◼   ► all these things throughout my day because I try very hard to make sure that those inputs

00:12:23 ◼   ► are quality.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And it's like if I'm having quality inputs given to me throughout the day, then it probably

00:12:30 ◼   ► doesn't matter too much that I'm looking at it.

00:12:34 ◼   ► If it's a value add, then that's a value add.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And it enhances my position in the community to be engaged there, to be answering questions

00:12:41 ◼   ► for people.

00:12:42 ◼   ► If someone has a problem that I've seen before, being able to jump in there and help them

00:12:46 ◼   ► out.

00:12:47 ◼   ► There's all those things that are good and positive.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And those relationships have value.

00:12:51 ◼   ► And in general, that seems like a much more reasonable approach than trying to sort of

00:12:55 ◼   ► beat myself over the head with like, "Oh gosh, Davey, you should not be looking at Twitter.

00:13:00 ◼   ► You should be hard at work.

00:13:01 ◼   ► You should be hard at work."

00:13:02 ◼   ► It's like, no, that's totally non-productive to be like, "Oh gosh, just get to work."

00:13:07 ◼   ► "Get to work, Dave. Get to work." No. Enjoy the things that you enjoy. If there are people

00:13:14 ◼   ► whose opinions you really care about and enjoy seeing in real time, great. Enjoy that. If

00:13:19 ◼   ► you're getting a lot of junk in there, that's something to fix.

00:13:23 ◼   ► And the other advantage is the more streamlined you are in making sure that you only have

00:13:27 ◼   ► quality content coming into your streams, then the less data there is there. And you're

00:13:32 ◼   ► not-- sort of like the half-life of a tweet in your stream is a long time.

00:13:37 ◼   ► And so often if you get that itch to like, oh, I wonder what's going on,

00:13:40 ◼   ► you go in and there's nothing new, you're like, all right, great,

00:13:43 ◼   ► nothing new, back to work.

00:13:44 ◼   ► All right.

00:13:45 ◼   ► So that's it for today's show.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Hopefully that helps Eric Wielander, who posed that question.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And I've been getting tons of great questions, so just keep them coming.

00:13:53 ◼   ► It's been-- it's really helpful for me to kind of get a sense of what people

00:13:56 ◼   ► are interested in, what they're asking for.

00:13:58 ◼   ► And as always, if you enjoy the show, please tell a friend,

00:14:02 ◼   ► tell too. That's the best thing. I've heard a bunch of people be like, "Oh, what can I

00:14:05 ◼   ► do to support you?" It's like, really the best thing you can do to support the show,

00:14:08 ◼   ► if you like it, is to tell someone about it. Just be like, "Hey, man, I like that there's

00:14:13 ◼   ► a show I listen to, Development Perspective, 15 Minutes, if you do iOS, Apple, anything

00:14:17 ◼   ► like that, check it out. Listen to it. See what you like." That's the best thing you

00:14:21 ◼   ► can do to support me. I do this because I enjoy it. It's not like it's a business. I

00:14:25 ◼   ► don't have advertisers or all these kinds of things. So the best way you can give back

00:14:28 ◼   ► just to tell friends. As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, hit me up on

00:14:32 ◼   ► Twitter. I'm @_davidsmith there. The Twitter feed for the show, if you want to get tweets

00:14:38 ◼   ► when new episodes are posted, is @devperspective on Twitter. Otherwise, I hope you have a good

00:14:43 ◼   ► week. Happy coding, and I will talk to you later. Bye!