Matthew Lang

We’ve got a list of actions from a few days of capturing. Now what do we do? We schedule. And not by just putting whatever we want to do in any free space on our calendar. We schedule by putting the right tasks in at the right time.

Take a moment to look back at the last few days or even weeks of work you have done. When do you peak and when you do you plummet?

I work better in the morning. It’s during this time that I like to work on more creative tasks. Building new features, sketching screens and of course wrditing. For these types of tasks, this is when I am at my sharpest.

In the afternoon I prefer to work on more problem-solving tasks. Debugging, refactoring and general problem solving through code. I find this type of work less intensive than creative work so I prefer to do this in the afternoon.

How you work is down to you. But you need to be able to identify when you’re most productive. It’s important to ensure that you are scheduling the right tasks in at the right times. Dropping tasks in your calendar is going to lead to unproductive days.

Now that you know when it’s the right time to do the right tasks, you can start scheduling those tasks in. I’ve tried many ways of partitioning my day but the one for me that sticks the most is being able to work in 1 hour blocks. 50 minutes of work with a ten minute break. It’s almost same as the Pomodoro Technique, I just opt to work in longer chunks of time.

I also only schedule in tasks that take no more than an hour. When it comes to any kind of work I break down tasks into one hour chunks of work so that I’m focused on one thing at a time. Once a task is complete I can move onto the next task for the next hour.

Scheduling is an important part the productivity process. Done right, it will help you work through the right tasks at the right time and give you the sense of making progress. And that’s what being productive is all about.

(Trying something new. Mini posts on the last weekend of the month.)

Made a home cooked dinner on Friday night. Sat down with Jen to watch a movie.

Saturday morning bike ride with Ethan. Lunch and then a family walk with the boys on their bikes. Coded my own replacement for an online product I pay too much money for. Another home cooked meal on Saturday night.

Sunday morning painting the fence. Dropped Ethan off at the golf. Trip to the garden nursery for the rest of us. Tidy up the garden before dinner. Picked up Ethan from the golf. Sunday dinner. A couple of hours on the PS4.

Yip, the weekend was pretty great.

Everyone has their own preferred system for getting things done. Whether it’s GTD, maintaining chains, the pomodoro technique or some other method there’s something out there for everyone.

Having tried just about every technique possible and a few hybrids of I’ve come to rely on four basic actions that help me get things done. I’ve come to call this Grass Roots Productivity.

The first step in this system is ensuring you know what you want to get done. This starts with the process of capturing.

Most productivity systems have the idea of an inbox. A place to collect the stuff you want to do. Without this inbox you would be as well just plucking stuff to do out of thin air. Capturing is an essential habit to get into because without it, there’s second step to getting stuff done.

The capture process is something I go through numerous times a day. Links, actions, documents, text and other bits of data. Each of these types of data have their own respective inbox. On the digital side there is Pinboard, Instapaper, Todoist and a few other places. On the analog side I’ve got a notebook and a planner. While the digital inboxes have very focused types of data being captured, the notebook and planner act as loose fitting items that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

The way I do this is to have easy access to each of those inboxes. For the digital inboxes I have either email addresses or keyboard shortcuts setup to quickly save to the respective inbox.

For the analog inboxes, I simply leave my notebook and planner left open on my desk, ready to record whatever I need to. I use the notebook for capturing items on the go. The benefit of this is that it’s a simple action of recording the task and moving on. No distraction by other apps or notifications or any other distraction that digital devices are famous for.

Capturing is an essential but often overlooked step in any productivity system. Without capturing we don’t have any sensible place to start and we always need a place to start.

Great advice for programmers and anyone building a product.

In this mindset, each day your task is to fight from failure to success. You no longer are so willing to compromise, or to sweep seemingly small challenges under the rug.

Instead, you aggressively seek out challenges and problems, and attempt to eliminate them in order to salvage the already failing project.

— Failing on Day One by Thoughtbot

Text replacement utilities like TextExpander can make a big difference in the amount of time you spend typing. From email signatures to emails for clients, I used TextExpander for all of sorts of things. TextExpander’s licence meant that I was only paying a minimum amount for the desktop tool, but it’s where I used it the most.

When I first heard about TextExpander’s price change to a subscription model I was hesitant to make any fast reactions. Over the days that followed though I was increasingly convinced that the new pricing model was not for me.

I don’t have any problems paying for the software I use. If it has value and is reasonably priced then I’ll keep paying. Regardless of whether it’s a monthly subscription or intermediate upgrades. It’s the only way that you can support the makers of the software that you find valuable.

A big change to the TextExpander app was that your snippets are sent to TextExpander servers so that they could be pushed to your other devices with TextExpander on it. I didn’t find the need to use that particular feature so I started to think that maybe TextExpander wasn’t a good fit for me anymore.

TextExpander’s change to a subscription model might be okay for others, but for me it was a step in the wrong direction. I understand that they have a business to run and that relies on a steady revenue but what was wrong with more frequent releases of their desktop app? I would gladly have paid for a single license for the cost of a year as long as it came with frequent updates.

At the end of the day I just didn’t find the value in paying for the features of a software product that I would rarely use.

Some months ago I’d decided to use Atom as my go to text editor for day to day programming. I had been hearing good things about Atom for a while and the popularity of its packages means that I could easily switch to Atom with no major interruption in my workflow. There was one thing I wasn’t counting on though.

Atom is slow. Not slow that it makes a huge impact on my day but slow enough that it leaves me hanging for a few seconds after certain operations. Even opening a project can have a lag of a few seconds.

Coming from Sublime Text this was a huge disappointment. Sublime Text has always been a fast text editor. Even the indexing of files within the project you are working on is fast. Opening files, creating panes, finding and replacing, all lightning quick. And much faster than Atom.

Speed isn’t a major factor when you’ve done a single days coding but adding all those little seconds up over a period of a year and you’ll have a significant amount of time.

Fellow Scot Ian Dick highlights some areas of technology where Apple are falling behind.

Apple also seems to be out of the AR/VR loop. It’s computer hardware can’t drive an Oculus although on the mobile side it could easily launch AR support as the hardware in the iPhone is extremely capable.

— Placing Bets by Ian Dick

I can’t help but wonder though if things like VR are at the stage where Apple or any other company should be worrying about it.

Zapier is an automation tool that integrated with hundreds of products and services on the Internet. It makes integrating tools together simple and also has multiple step workflows.

The problem with Zapier is that while all this automation is handy for repetitive workflows, I started to question the need for such automation and whether I truly needed it.

Let’s take FormKeep as an example. I use FormKeep as a way of allowing people to contact me regardless of the blog platform I am using. I have a contact form on this blog and one on my web development blog. If I receive a contact form submission from someone, FormKeep will send me an email to let me know.

Using Zapier I could do the following with the submission:

1. Send the clients details to my CRM
2. Create a task to review the client’s request
3. Create a task to reply back to them within two days

I would do all this anyway, so is there any need for me to automate these steps? Probably not.

Also not all form submissions I get are potential clients looking for me to work with them. Some submissions are general questions about Ruby on Rails, some are offers of full-time work and some are questions about previous topics I have written about. So automating this can result in a false positive and mean that I have to remove tasks from my task manager and contact details from my CRM.

The false positive of automation means that it only works if the intended result of the automation is always going to be the same. If there’s a shadow of a doubt that there could be a wrong end result then automation isn’t a good fit.

Automation isn’t all bad and I still need an automation tool so I have created an account at IFTTT as it offers the simple automation I need but without the cost. I’m not worried if IFTTT disappear over night as it’s a form of automation that I can happily live without but I use it just because it helps.

I’ve been scaling back on a few tools that I use regularly and it’s made working a lot easier and removed the need for automation. Zapier is great for multi-step workflows that will always deliver the intended result, but for me it’s become a tool I can do without.