Why we are thinking about time optimisation completely wrong

Technology has caused a radical change in the way we live our lives. Our eyes are opening to the damage apps like facebook and twitter do to us. We know that the infinite scroll was something we shouldn’t be engaging in.

I’ve enjoyed the headspace of turning my phone into a device that doesn’t have social media on it. I then went one step further and removed email for a ‘month’ challenge. Two weeks into the challenge I stopped even thinking about the challenge and my phone is just a device that doesn’t do email anymore. It’s totally great, I don’t have a burning to-do list of people talking to me in my pocket 24/7. I feel odd that I ever wanted that or felt proud about being such a productive person. Regardless this is not what this blog is about.

The brilliant rise of ‘Edutainment’ with fantastic podcasts and the ability to listen to Audiobooks is not something that we have really scrutinised. But it is worth investigating. I will explain why even using your phone for education should be limited. Your creativity and mental health will blossom and you will thank me for it. This blog will cover why limiting education time will make you a smarter and happier person.

An Extreme Example

There is a ratio of how much time you should spend studying and consuming new content in comparison to how effective you will be. In simple terms, this is astoundingly obvious.

If you spent 0% of your time studying or learning anything you would be clueless. You would get nothing done.

Conversely, if you spent 100% of your time studying and learning. There would be no time at all for having idea’s or doing anything with them. You would be a highly intelligent but equally useless entity. A net drain on humanity. No one wants that. Least of all you.

The Modern Problem

However, in the modern-day, we are surrounded by increasingly mountainous volumes of information that we can never keep up with. We are also surrounded by tech that can supply this information to us in a low-cost manner. We can instantly plug ourselves into learning at every spare moment. You feel wise as you ignore Facebook and other social media distractions to put on a podcast when you walk to work, make your food or hit the gym. You can watch educational videos during your lunch break. This all contributes to making a minor dent in the overwhelming amount of information you aren’t keeping up with.

But where is the time to process this information and make connections, have ideas or use it?

The Argument for 'Edutainment' and Plugging In

If you are studying, building a business, or trying to stay at the top of your field you don’t want to miss opportunities. You want to use the massive amounts of dead time that you have to learn more.

There is so much time in a day to consume the huge variety of useful information available on audio and video. It can give you different opinions about your field or help you learn complex ideas about new things.
You can also learn about humans by even listening to fiction. It shows you how to create a good story or a bad story, and you can even learn about love from 50 Shades of Grey when you are looking for it.

By not using all the extra time to learn you will unlikely be a change-maker in your field.

Before you Press Play

There is a happy medium between optimising your life for learning new stuff and spending spare time with an unoccupied brain. It is hard to find exactly but crucially important.

Like the endless scroll of social media, we have an infinite scroll of edutainment available to us. I started a list of books to read this year from recommendations and 6 months in it is already 350 books long and I’m certain they are all pretty awesome. A ten-minute session looking in my podcast feed easily gives me 100 new podcasts to get through. I get bombarded with lists of amazing blogs that grow my mind and science journalists and (some) newspapers produce brilliant content. Then there’s also politics, the economy, and of course the news. Let’s not even talk about the great content available on the BBC, Youtube and Netflix.

We feel we need to keep up with it. As you start your walk to work and you aren’t listening or doing something, your brain is free to roam around. It feels inefficient to just do nothing, you can instantly solve that with your readily available edutainment and can constantly feel productive.

The Unrecognised Value of Doing Nothing

Doing ‘nothing’ doesn’t provide an instant reward of productivity. You never ‘know’ that you are going to have good ideas if you do nothing for the next 20 minutes of walking. Leaving your brain at peace is setting sail into the unknown with perhaps zero rewards, and it all seems very boring and pointless.

We need to train our brains to not require instant gratification, this feeling of needing to do something is what kicks the brain into gear. It can trigger the brain to do awesome things all by itself if you let it. If you hear that trigger of the brain wanting to do something and just stick on someone else’s thoughts to listen to then you are turning off your brain instead of firing it up.

I will go as fire as stating that you are pissing on your own bonfire instead of adding fuel to it.

You need to learn to like that feeling of an unoccupied brain and embrace it instead of quickly finding a way to suppress it. You need to recognise the brains' inbuilt hunger to do cool stuff for what it is. Let your brain wrestle with the world's problems like the innovator your podcasts are telling you it be.

Body Analogies

Exercise for your brain

If every time you started to feel slightly out of breath someone sat you down and did everything for you, you would not be fit. You would get no exercise at all. This would be grossly unhealthy for your body and produce a feedback loop of decreasing fitness, even getting out of your chair would begin to challenge you. You would end up never using your muscles that would waste away. You would stop being able to walk and become a bed-bound bag of uselessness.

My question to ask yourself. As soon as your brain is about to do some work by itself, should you be sitting it down and making it rest?

Over-Feeding

If you spent all day surrounded by sweets and biscuits you would be constantly reminded of the available food. You would become obese if every time you had a passing thought that perhaps you could eat one of those biscuits you then ate one.

The human is designed to be able to overeat whilst food is available. This prevents it from starving in periods of no food. Humans need to stop their innate behaviour to eat when food is available to be able to stay healthy.

We now live with a device in our pocket that is a constant reminder that we can be learning more things. Our brains are designed to feel a need to satisfy that hunger. Our brain is used to an environment of low information. It was engineered in a time when books didn’t exist and the odd occasion you found something new in your environment you investigated the crap out of it. If once a blue moon someone turned up with news about anything, you listened as if your life depended on it because sometimes it did.

Thus your brain wants to learn about every new thing in its environment to stay up to date so it doesn’t get killed.

That is a powerful innate behaviour optimised to keep your genes going to the next generation. The reason you exist today is directly because your ancestors were better at obsessing about new things in their environment than their peers.

However, the modern world is not going to kill you if you don’t know every new thing. Just like with food, if you let your brain operate on default behaviour it will make you incredibly unhealthy. You need to stop trying to learn everything.

What Even is 'Being Productive'

We need to learn that actually doing nothing is doing something. Your brain is making connections and its best ideas come when you do things like meditating, menial work or exercise without anything else going on. You need to learn to hear your inner voice and become good friends with it.

Focussed vs. Diffuse Thinking

In the science of learning, you need to spend focussed time on new material to understand things. But the magic happens when you stop thinking about it and let the brain go into a 'diffuse' mode of thinking where it makes connections happen between different ideas. This is where billion-dollar ideas like AirBnB and Uber came from, uniting two different bodies of knowledge in the brain into a novel concept. This simply doesn't happen whilst you are in focussed mode.

Learning vs. Rating

You learn much more from a book or podcast if you try and recall it than if you were to just listen to it again. Yet madly most of us consume all this stuff just once and then never revisit it. We quickly forget all the specifics, we can vaguely remember how it made us feel if we remember it at all. So you are basically just creating a pile of ratings in your head by optimising all this time for consuming.

If you spend some time after each podcast or book chapter to think about what you just learnt and test yourself on why it’s useful, you will genuinely gain twice as much from it. That takes 5 minutes but it doubles the effectiveness of the hour you just spent listening to it.

Life Processing

Then there is everything else in your life that you are learning about and dealing with that needs its own processing time. If you don't put time into thinking about what's going on and learning from it and how to improve, then surprisingly you don't learn from it or improve. Tools like journaling can radically increase your rate of improvement and benefit your levels of happiness and well-being.

Playtime

Imagine you are at work and for some odd reason a toddler appears out of nowhere and wants to play with you. It wants to go for a walk and look at flowers and jump in puddles. (or in my own experience, look at puddles and jump in flowers). Then it asks annoying things that are hard to answer:
"why is the sky is blue?
Why are Spaghettis O’s unhealthy and Baked Beans healthy, they grow on the same tree?
And then why does anyone even care about flowers in the first place if they aren’t for jumping in?"

It wants to explore the world and it seems to want to explore your mind and put things together. This is tragically unhelpful for you and so you give it an iPad and hope that it occupies itself and won’t disturb you.

This distraction technique in the hope of getting more work done is what you are doing to your own brain. When your own inner voice pops up and lets you know that you aren’t doing anything you realise you have some spare time. You feel like you could be ‘doing work’ by sticking on a podcast. Your brain will just do pointless stuff otherwise and you’ve got an endless list of things to get through.

When you do this you are turning off your actual consciousness. And yes when you first listen to your consciousness it does pretty dumb stuff as it explores the contents of the environment and your mind. Sometimes it is a whiney bitch and sometimes it is obsessing about the wrong things. But if you let it play around and listen to it and take it seriously, it will reward you back. Let it explore the environment and let it explore the contents of your mind and just like the toddler it will learn profound things.

This isn't a toddler but I saw a puppy and then it magically ended up here for no sensible reason

Change What you Think

When there is a spare moment and you start thinking for yourself for a second, you need to hear your inner voice and say:

"SHOOT. Hello me. Wow, it’s great to find some time together. What’s going on buddy. Let’s have a chat"

Instead of the current:

"SHOOT. I was hoping to get work done. Let’s give you something to do. So I can carry on working"

Your inner voice is not a toddler that you have nothing in common with. This is not a massive drag on your day that you need to escape from but instead a blessing to make the most of.

We need to stop feeling like we are constantly at work and we need to stop feeling like our inner voice is a bad thing to spend time with.

This is important, because your inner voice isn’t just your best friend. It is literally the actual real you. You need to get to know it, listen to it and take it seriously. It’s essential that you stop treating it like a pathetic things that needs distracting. Stop putting stuff in front of it in the hope it never bothers you.

Find out what you actually think and know. Explore ideas and actually take useful thoughts to the next level.

Exercise time

The combination of exercise and not having other stuff going on in your brain is the perfect breeding ground for good ideas.

Exercise very mildly occupies the brain but leaves a lot of space for thinking. It also releases hormones that make you think more positively. This prevents any negative doubts from blocking potential good ideas before you have given time to think about it further. It provides a golden period where your brain can just explore random stuff that it knows and make connections.

Optimising all your exercise time for learning keeps your brain in a focussed mode where it never has ideas. You have to unplug and let your brain think it’s own thoughts instead of permanently listening to those of others.

The Minimum Requirements

Depending on your current situation there are different guidelines. As I mentioned at the start you will fall behind if you never engage in learning useful stuff. The books I have read on my list of 350 this year have done incredible things to how I think. But I’ve also found that unplugging is where I put all that information together and do something useful with it.

I think you should have an obligatory 20 minutes a day where you are completely in touch with yourself. Meditation is brilliant, but if you want to do yoga or walking or cooking it really doesn’t matter. And this is just minimum to be a human.

The Thinking vs. Listen Ratio

After the minimum requirements are filled I think shooting for a balanced ratio is the best strategy. The same as the saying of two ears and one mouth. I think two-thirds of your time listening to info is fine. But you should block out one third for actually thinking your own thoughts.

This depends on the person and the situation. Sometimes I feel like I do just want to do nothing and that my brain has too many ideas anyway. Sometimes having something to listen to is what gets me out the door to go for a run in the first place. But other-times you can feel overwhelmed by problems and you should use all your time available to think.

Conclusion

Based on the best research on how to learn, giving your brain unfocussed time is key. This time is the ultimate source of creativity and brightest ideas.

Stop distracting yourself with other peoples thoughts and give yourself time to listen to your own thoughts.

This is an ironic conclusion as I run the Growth Mindset Podcast which I'd like to think is Edutainment at it's finest. Hopefully this proves I'm not trying to sell you anything except a better life. This wasn't driven by some anti-Apple anti-Amazon complex and just a product of my studies in evolutionary psychology and general anthropology. (human watching). Putting one domain of knowledge together with another and having ideas.

Effects

I was in Tel Aviv last week and wanted to go for a run to the beach and have a swim. Not wanting to leave my phone on the beach I went for an hour run with just myself. An actual human with no device attached to it running around a city it's never been in. How did this become a rare thing so quickly? (ten years ago I drove around America with just a compass...)
It was one of the most lovely mornings ever. I came back with more solutions to my problems and writing ideas than I thought possible. It seems crazy that I usually spend so much of this valuable time with myself having someone else’s thoughts permanently distracting my brain.

I don’t know how far I ran, how many steps I did or where I even went. But that doesn't actually matter. I focussed on new metrics of success for a productive run, number of ideas and sweatiness. I smashed both records.

Question Yourself

I think we should all step back and define what our phone is actually for. As we realise the importance of our mental health and the problems our devices are causing us, this is more important than ever. We need to let go of our FOMO to keep up with the world to spend more time with ourselves.

Simply put. No one else is going to think for you and solve your problems. If you stop being able to think for yourself you are screwed.

Related Reading

Enjoyed this? You might like these similar posts on the topic of being more sensible:

• Top Strategies for Better Decisions (That You aren't Using)

• The Best Life Hack that isn't on any Life Hack List

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This will form part of a five part "pentalogy" (learnt a new word). Be sure to not miss out on the rest of it!

After attending over 10 hackathons and winning 4 of them myself, here are a few common characteristics I observed in winners.

1. They solve a big problem

Now I know what you’re thinking, it sounds like the most repeated hackathon advice ever, but there’s a reason for that. Most hackathons have a real-world impact as a big judging criterion. This can be up to 25% of your total score. Would you pick a cat pictures platform (no matter how polished it might be) or a hack that changes the lives of its users?

To get an idea of what big problems look like, check these projects out:

Dubit — a video dubbing app for making education accessible to children from developing countries.

MLSI — a sign language interpreter for people who have hearing related problems.

TalkToMe — a virtual assistant for visually impaired Chrome users.

2. Have a demo that makes the judges go wow

In addition to having a big impact, you need a demo that shows the core functionality of the product. It’s even better if the audience can interact with it in some way themselves.

With my most successful hack Dubit, we were able to translate a YouTube video from a judge into their native language on the stage. It even got us a backstage chat with them because of it.

3. Spend 25% of the time on ideation — or better yet, try to have a few ideas before you come

It’s no secret that no matter how impressive the demo, your efforts don’t amount for much until they’re a well-formed and coherent idea. A lot of hackathons have API prizes that encourage you to use sponsor APIs and form ideas around them.

Most people don’t pay attention to smaller API prizes. That decreased competitiveness make these prizes easier to win. You have to plan correctly.

For example, BPatient is an NLP solution to search for symptoms in a disease database. It is a fairly common product. Yet, they were able to bag a prize because they utilized an obscure API to make it.

4. Sleep for 3–4 hours

While some people can get by without sleeping, I found that sleeping about 3–4 hours gave me the best balance between feeling fresh without spending too much time. While it might seem coincidental at first, most top teams I observed including my own weren’t coding all the time. As a developer, I found it helpful to sleep on a big bug and then, upon waking up, and I’d instantly solve it.

5. Don’t fret too much over design

Now, this is controversial for many reasons, but the context matters here. Having great design is always helpful. But if you have to choose between getting your core product functionality finished and improving on your design — I would pick core functionality 9/10 times.

6. Learn from others and have fun

Devpost has a great collection of hackathon projects from all big events. It is an amazing resource for inspiration and for looking at what other people are doing at these events.

Even though winning is definitely pleasant, hackathons are more than that. At my first hackathon, I couldn’t get my project done in time and had to go with a half-baked demo to present. I took that as a learning lesson and made it into one of my best projects after the hackathon was over. It’s important to know that at the very least, you’re learning something. You probably going home with some ideas and possibly a working prototype — and that is no less than a victory.

Spend Your Most Valuable Time on Your Most Valuable Activities and You’ll Change the Trajectory of your Life.

“Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well, and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life.”

— Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog

The problem with programming, along with entrepreneurship and most jobs in tech, is that it requires a lot of mental effort. So no matter how pointless or trivial the task, we still feel productive.

While your brain may be sweating from the sheer challenge of it all, it doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is automatically the best use of your time.

Your best use of time is always going to be adding value. Sometimes that’s code, sometimes not.

If you’re an entrepreneur or single founder, your job is to add value to your customers lives. If you’re employed or want to be, your job is to add value to your company, and the company’s customers.

Nothing in life will move you forward, faster, than consistent prioritization of things that add the most value for others (and for yourself.)

This is what separates the top performers from everyone else, the highest paid from the resentful, the productive and impactful from the overworked.

Don’t be fooled by what you see on social media. The answer is not 18 hour days and 100 hour weeks. The hustle never stops!

You’ll sleep when you’re dead, right?

Well, I like sleeping. And I like clocking into work, getting a lot done, getting paid well for it, and leaving work at work. I like having the free time to write and work on my own stuff.

I’m afforded these “luxuries” (you know, like a work-life balance) because my company trusts me. I’m far from a world-class developer. In fact, I’m a self-taught programmer and I didn’t start coding seriously until my late 20's.

But I’ve built up a track record of getting the stuff done that adds value for other people and the organization. I’ve achieved this through systems and techniques anyone can learn.

We all have a never-ending list of things we have to do.

But they’re only a few key things that provide the most value and contribution, more than the rest of your list combined.

And we all have a few hours each day when our energy levels and circadian rhythm line up and we’re truly engaged (or least, can be truly engaged). The time of day and length will vary, but we all have it in us.

Spend your most valuable time on your most valuable activities and you’ll change the trajectory of your life.

You don’t have to be the best in the world.

But if you’re in the top 10% of developers in your organization or city, or in the top 10% of job candidates, or in the top 10% of freelancers on Upwork, then you’re going to do pretty well.

You’ll know when you’re in the top 10% because the rewards will come to you. The rewards are both internal (fulfillment in your career, free time for family) and external (recognition, promotions, and financial rewards).

Getting More Done in Less Time By Loving to Eat Frogs for Breakfast

“Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”

— Eat That Frog p.2

Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time is a book by Brian Tracy that is loaded with simple and practical productivity advice.

It’s only about 120 pages but its dense with actionable insights and wisdom. Brian Tracy has been a pillar in the self-improvement field for decades, still going strong at 74 years old.

It’s a little outdated (well, at least my copy published in 2007.)

Blackberries get mentioned a lot, and it can get cheesy and repetitive. Some of it can sound a little old-school and hardline, like an old grandpa yelling clichés at you.

But the main ideas are sound. Most have worked really well for me.

All self-help and productivity advice ultimately boils down to the same thing: A little planning. Prioritization. Taking action on the hard stuff. Procrastinating on the stuff that doesn’t matter. Finishing.

That’s it. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

What Are Frogs and Why Should I Eat Them?

“Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.”

— Eat That Frog p.2

When you get into the habit of doing your most difficult task before you do anything else, you become a person of action and discipline.

Your identity changes from cog in the wheel to engine that moves the ship forward.

Not just any difficult task. There are a lot of difficult things we can fill our day with. Difficult does not always equate to important or greatest positive impact.

If you’re unsure what that means, the keyword is procrastination.

You’re likely to procrastinate because of fear. Fear is a great sign that this thing you have to do is an important frog.

It can be the fear of failing or looking stupid.

You don’t start the online Computer Science 101 course because you’re scared it’s going to be too complicated to understand.

As a junior developer, you don’t take on projects that are just slightly out of your comfort zone. It’s safer to work on what you already know.

It’s also the fear of success.

What if your career actually takes off and they start giving you more responsibility and money? Who wants that?!

The fear of success is often worse than the fear of failure. It’s insidious because it’s not obvious that people would be scared of achieving more. But the Jonah complex is real and many talented men and women are stopped short of their true excellence because of it.

So we procrastinate on real contribution. We procrastinate on finishing and showing our work.

Instead, we keep busy doing stuff that “should” get done, and the stuff we’re told to do, in order to avoid looking a big, ugly frog in the face.

Separating Big Ugly Frogs from Tadpoles

_“Cute, but this former tadpole doesn’t scare anyone” by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@yoelkamara?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral" rel="noopener" target="_blank" title="">Yoel Kamara on <a href="https://unsplash.com?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

Tadpoles are helpless babies that aren’t frogs. They’re easy to kill. Killing tadpoles is a mindless activity that doesn’t impress anyone.

Eat the biggest, nastiest frog you’ve ever seen and now you have something to be proud of.

If you’re learning to code, your frog is starting and finishing an online course. Your frog is repeating the modules you don’t understand until you do. Your frog is doing your code camp assignments with focus and intention.

If you want to get hired, then your frog is building things. There is no better way to learn to code and get hired than building stuff, plain and simple.

Your frog is not organizing your bookmarks or polishing your Linkedin profile. Your frog is not posting to forums, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Facebook groups. These are tadpoles. These things are mindless and easy.

If you want to launch a side project that’s been kicking around in your head for a while, then writing code is your frog. Launching is your frog. Shutting it down after it’s clear that nobody is interested? A big frog.

Your frog is not never-ending market research or reading about how other people launched their side projects. Your frog is most definitely not tweeting about how hard you’re “hustling.”

How to Find Your Highest Value Activities

You may already know what your frogs are, but take some time to do the exercises below. A few minutes of reflection is worth a hundred times more than hours of mindless busy work.

When you realize importance of deciding, starting, and finishing the things that will have the greatest impact on your life, career and organization, then you’re going to do better than 90% of the people out there.

Step 1 — Write Out Everything You Have To Do To Reach Your Goal

Goals and goal-setting have fallen out of favor these days. Instead, we’re all about systems, habits, and daily practice.

I agree because goals can be dangerous. Goals focus on the outcome, which we don’t control.

If you don’t reach your goal, it can make you feel like a complete failure. Or you may end up so obsessed with the outcome that you neglect to do any real work towards achieving it. The term “wantrepreneur” comes to mind.

Systems are better because we have control over our systems. We can measure “success” with a system because every day we either do it or we don’t. Focus is on the daily process, not the eventual outcome.

Frog eating is a system. When you organize the things you have to do in order of impact, plan ahead, and then focus on the most important tasks until they’re done, every day, that’s a system.

But you need some idea where to aim your energy. Without some clarity, all of the effort we put into our systems can go to waste.

Write Your Goal

So let’s pretend goals are cool for a second. Use the present tense with a positive voice. Be specific. You want clarity because vague, general goals aren’t helpful.

Don’t write “Learn to code.” A specific and achievable goal would be “I am an experienced front-end developer who has finished the freeCodeCamp curriculum and built three small side projects for my portfolio.”

“Get a new job” is not a good goal. Instead, “I’m earning 50% more than my current salary, working my dream job at X company.”

List Everything You Need To Do To Achieve That Goal

Write out every single thing, large and small, that would be required to achieve your goal. Add in all of your obligations, the stuff you have to do anyway.

This exercise of listing everything has a few benefits.

First, this gives you a master list. Every new thing that comes your way, or that you think of, should be added to your master list. That doesn’t mean you have to do it. It just means you get it out of your head so you stop worrying about it.

Next, working from a list is also great way to be more productive. (Chapter 2 — Plan Everyday in Advance)

When you have a big list, you can pick off the big frogs and get started immediately. When you start your day without knowing what to work on, it becomes much easier to procrastinate on doing anything at all.

Plus, breaking down the huge, overwhelming tasks into actionable steps is the only way you’re going to get started on them. (Chapter 18 — Slice and Dice the Task)

Lastly, it gives you clarity.

You can “Learn React,” an admirable accomplishment for any budding front-end developer. But if it has nothing to do with your goals at this point in your life, then your time is better spent elsewhere.

Step 2 — Organize the Biggest Frogs Down to the Tiniest Tadpoles

“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all”

— Eat That Frog p.10

Recognizing the difference between high-value and low-value activities is the core of Eat That Frog. It’s the core of most productivity advice.

If you learn only one thing from this post, I hope it’s the ability to separate true contribution and value from everything else that doesn’t really matter.

Do More of What’s Working

This advice is so important that I had to put it first, even though it’s not from Eat That Frog. It comes from a great post by Justin Jackson.

If something you’re doing is working, do more of it. Recognize when you have a hit on your hands.

“I’d finally created something people wanted. It was like I’d written a hit song. Once you have a hit, all the locked doors open wide. People love it so much it seems to promote itself. Don’t persistently do what’s not working.”

— Derek Sivers about CDBaby

If your side project is growing without much effort, keep working on it. Don’t start on some new brain fart of an idea.

If you’re doing something for your career that is getting recognized, like giving talks at conferences, do more of it.

If people love what you write, write more.

It’s rare to strike gold. So when you do, put more of your time and energy into mining that precious vein, and eliminate everything that doesn’t add to its success.

Organize Your List with the ABCDE Approach

If you haven’t struck gold yet, that’s OK.

There’s work to be done before opportunity can even show up. Your chances increase when you’re working on high impact activities, not low value nonsense.

We can give weight to each activity using the ABCDE method.

Think about how much each item moves you towards your goal. Think about the short-term and long-term consequences of doing or not doing each thing on your list.

• A items — Things you must do, which will have a serious positive or negative consequence if you do or don’t do it. If you have multiple A items, rank them A-1, A-2, etc.
• B items — Things you should do. Tadpoles that have minor consequences. Someone might be inconvenienced if you don’t do these things, but it’s not the end of the world. Never do a B task when an A task is left unfinished.
• C items — Things that are nice to do but don’t have any real consequences when they’re done. These items can be chunked together and done all at once when you finish your A tasks. For example, replying to emails.
• D items — Things to delegate so you can free up more time to do A tasks.
• E items — Things to eliminate. Generally stuff you do out of habit, like checking social media or reading news headlines.

Let’s stick with the “Land your dream job” goal.

Applying to jobs by submitting your resume everywhere might seem like the obvious A activity, but there are bigger impact ways to achieve this goal.

Spend time researching the companies you would love to work for. Get to know everything about them, as if you already work there. Connect with people who do work there. Find the decision makers. Take a recruiter out to lunch. Spend time writing a thoughtful cover letter. Read great books on getting hired like “What Color is Your Parachute?” Spend lots of time thinking about how you can contribute and add value on day one.

Strive to be in the top 10% of candidates and stop doing what 90% of people do. Eliminate the shotgun strategy of blindly uploading your resume to any and every available job opening. Your chances are so much higher with an intentional, laser-focused approach.

Ask Yourself the Great Question

“What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?”

Look into yourself for the answer. Ask your boss this question. Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends and your family. Whatever the answer is, find out and then go to work to bring up your performance in this area.

— Eat That Frog p.45

The best way to figure out how you can add value, especially if you’re employed or doing work for somebody, is to ask. Have a conversation about it.

Step 3 — Choose Your Top 3 Frogs

“You can get your time and your life under control only to the degree to which you discontinue lower-value activities.”

— Eat That Frog p. 34

If you did the exercises above, you should have a pretty big list of things to do.

Now accept that you’re never going to do it all. There’s never enough time and there never will be. But your goal is not to become the best “checker of lists.”

80% of your results will come from 20%, maybe less, of the items on your list. Out of all your frogs, which one (three at most) is going to have the biggest impact on your life?

Step 4 — Create Your Daily System

You don’t have control over a company hiring you. You don’t have control over getting a raise. You don’t have control over how the market responds to your startup or side project.

What you do have control over is how many big, ugly frogs you can eat in a day.

You have control of continuous elimination and delegation of things that don’t add value.

You have control of committing to your routine, day after day, to become a person of action.

We’re not trying to be busy for 18 hours a day here. We just want to commit those few precious hours, when our ability to concentrate and focus is highest, on our most important and difficult things.

For most people, it’s in morning before the distractions of the day claw at your time.

Learning to code is huge mountain to climb for beginners, especially if you have a limited amount of time. But when you break it down into actionable steps, you can form a daily system.

• Two hours on instructor driven learning, like a Frontend Masters course or freeCodeCamp exercises.
• Next hour learning tools and theory, like Github or JavaScript best practices.
• Last hour is spent building stuff and writing code. One of the best ways as a beginner is to extend and build on the code examples you do in the courses from the first few hours.

As you get more experienced, the contents of each hour will change, but the system remains the same.

My Frog Eating System

My frog, as far as personal projects go, is writing on Medium and launching codetip.com.

I want to produce practical and useful content that you can implement to help your career. My fear is that I’ll spend days writing something that no one will read or care about.

So I procrastinate. That is, until I toughen up and eat the frog.

My best writing comes in the morning when I open my laptop and start writing. I block all my distracting websites, put my phone in another room, start a Pomodoro timer, then write.

I start writing even when I have nothing to say, or if my thoughts are all over the place. These don’t make for good articles. But I keep taking bites of this big, nasty frog until the good stuff gets teased out.

The most productive code I write at my job happens the same way.

I get into the office early, turn off the distractions, and start working on the hardest, most difficult thing on my list. This thing is important to the company and other stakeholders, like a new feature, performance optimization, or fixing a major defect. I add value by helping the people above me look good.

Most days, I only have the stomach to eat these frogs for a few hours before I get tired.

But in those few, highly-focused hours, I add more value in a day than I would in a week if I were jumping around between a bunch of unimportant things without any intention.

The rest of the day is spent on tadpoles like responding to Slack and emails, fixing minor bugs, and planning work for tomorrow. These activities have some impact and require some effort.

The things I absolutely avoid at work are mindless activities that have zero impact on my company or career, like browsing Hacker News, Reddit, or social media.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t succumb to these entertaining temptations at times. I just do everything in my power to start my day with my most difficult tasks and get as far along on those as I can.

The Biggest, Ugliest Frog in the World is Finishing

Creative people, especially the ones with an entrepreneurial trait, are notorious for starting projects and not finishing them. The next idea comes. It’s newer and shinier, so we chase that.

“The sad fact is that ‘almost done’ probably meant ‘not yet started.’ Don’t let this happen to you.”

— Eat That Frog p.58

Our hard drives are a wasteland of ideas, articles, and half finished apps that seemed like good opportunities at the time. How’s that novel coming along, Brian?

When you don’t finish stuff, when you don’t release it out into the public, you’ll never reach the top 10% of anything. You might as well have not started in the first place.

I get that some ideas and projects are not worth finishing. I get that there’s an art of knowing when to quit. I get that there’s a obsession with struggling.

But I think most of the time we quit when we’re a few short feet from gold.

You have to finish because that’s the only way you’re going to get the feedback you need to decide if what you’re doing is adding value.

Don’t start learning Android development because learning JavaScript got too hard. Don’t dive into machine learning because Android development got too hard, and heck, that sounds like the hot new thing, so yeah, I’ll just do that!

Don’t give up on your side project because you couldn’t figure out how to join two database tables.

Don’t start writing the next article before you finish the last one. Don’t start the next project unless you finish the the one you’re working on now.

If this is you, then tomorrow’s frog is finishing. Not eight hours starting something new.

Commit to thirty minutes, or an hour, whatever you need to finish your frog.

Finish it, launch it, and walk away.

Before You Go —

Also, give me a follow on Medium (Bar Franek) if you like what you see and want me to write more.

And How It Benefits Everybody

In today’s highly complex and rapidly evolving computer science industry, it is more important than ever to have people writing technical pieces that explain complex technologies and concepts in a simple way.

You’ve already seen it. The tech space is riddled with a plethora of fields and buzz words: Blockchain, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Science, Distributed Systems, Quantum Computing, Big Data, AR, VR, Microservices, NoSQL, Progressive Web Apps, OLAP, A/B Testing, WebAssembly, Kubernetes, Hadoop, Ansible, DynamoDB, Terraform, Vagrant, GRPC, Thrift, JWS, Ethereum, Cassandra, etcd, Kerberos, CentOS, DC/OS, Prometheus, Kafka, OAuth, OpenStack, Avro, containerd, zstd, Oodle and countless more…

Depending on how knowledgeable you are, you might have heard about all of the aforementioned. Even if you have, the question is how well do you know all of them? Would you be comfortable explaining to a complete novice what all of these are at a high level and be sure that you aren’t skewing any information?

Unless you are really, really on top of your game, I bet the answer is no.

The Problem

Today’s technology is growing in complexity and variance day by day at lightspeed. It is becoming increasingly harder to keep up with everything new that is happening.

On a personal level, I am quite frankly struggling to keep up with everything new that’s happening while trying to be exceptional in work and balancing my personal life. And I’m not even that busy. I know for a fact that there are people out there trying to balance 10 times more things than I am. I have no idea how they keep up, if they do at all.

The Solution

The space needs more good writers who are able to digest a certain piece of information and present it in a succinct way for fast and easy comprehension.

For example, I once tried to learn what Kubernetes was. Naturally, I opened up their documentation and starting reading through it (what better source than the official one?). After a couple of pages going through each concept, I found that I hadn’t understood absolutely anything. Maybe it was my fault, but after talking to other fellow engineers, I’ve found they also found it challenging.

Then I found this article. I read it in under 10 minutes and revisited the documentation afterwards. Everything was clear now.

As you hopefully saw, that Kubernetes article was at a very high level, but managed to provide you with a great overview through clear explanations and great analogies. If there were such world-class introductory articles for every technology out there, everybody could get up-to-speed in a matter of one day, instead of re-reading and struggling to digest the same documentation over and over.

This would be very beneficial for the industry, as it would help expose the largest number of people to the newest tech, therefore allowing the field as a whole to advance faster.

To achieve this, though, we need people to put the effort into creating such content. Let’s go over why it’s worth it for everybody involved.

What You, The Writer, Win

At first glance, you might think that you only lose the time that is dedicated to creating proper readable content. This is not true in the very least. Writing articles has multiple amazing benefits to your growth as a person.

Knowledge

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough — Unknown

I know this quote is very cliché, but you realize how true it is after you try to explain a topic you’re not too knowledgeable on. I’ve personally experienced this — an article I imagined would take at most a day to finish, took me close to a month. Once I started to actually write it, I started to uncover how many things I was unsure of. Not long after, I found myself with more than 20 open tabs full of resources I had to read.

Since you want your article to be of the highest quality, it is very important to verify and be certain that everything you’re saying is correct — your name is on the line! This makes you think very hard about every single statement you place in your article, and requires you to know the concept you’re writing about inside-out.

In the end, I’ve found that writing an article on something helps me firmly solidify the concept in my head and understand it thoroughly. This is my strongest motivation for continuing to write. Nowadays, the only way I’m sure I know something is after I’ve written an article on it.

Fulfillment

Contributing and being appreciated is something we all inherently enjoy.

Knowing you have helped people even in the slightest way brings fulfillment to your life. Having people write positive comments on your articles always bring positive feelings.

Better Communication

Good communication is essential. In your personal life, you will very frequently need to justify your thoughts and opinions. At work, you will very frequently need to explain concepts or approaches to other (probably non-technical) people.

These things are regularly done through writing. One of the top companies in the world — Amazon — makes their employees write narratives instead of presentations.

Therefore, it is very important that you are able to convey your thoughts through writing in a masterful way. Practicing is the only way to improve.

Opportunities

Hopefully the content you’re writing will be actively read by people. This opens you up to a lot of opportunities like meeting new people, having speaking engagements, and even being offered jobs.

I’ve had immense success through writing. My Kafka Article helped me significantly propel my career by landing a job at an amazing company called Confluent. They found my article and thought I might be a good addition to the team, thus they interviewed me. Everything worked out and now I’ve found myself part of a better, more challenging, and interesting organization in a new country.

Apart from career advancements, the articles I’ve written have helped me connect with other very smart people across the globe. For example, I was recently contacted by an engineer who found me through my distributed systems article. After a quick chat, we decided it would be cool to meet up while we were both staying in the San Francisco Bay Area (thanks for showing me around, Quan!).

What Others Win From Your Content

Knowledge

Even though I’ve portrayed it as a somewhat selfish endeavor, writing in its most basic sense is altruistic. It is the process of sharing knowledge. Through writing good, succinct pieces, you are helping further the education of other people.

In this digitalized world, it is now easier than ever to reach a wide audience and provide massive value. You are contributing to and outright helping push the industry forward by getting more people up to speed with the latest advancements.

An alternate view

Different people come from different backgrounds. Because of that, some content might click perfectly with one type of audience but completely go over the head of another.

I’ve personally stumbled upon many resources where, after I’ve comprehended them, I recognize that I could have portrayed the same thing in a much more simple (to me) way. This isn’t because the writer did a bad job — it is purely because of my different perspective on the concept.

As such, it is extremely important to have many different resources on the same concept, all of which present it in their own way. This increases exposure and maximizes the amount of people that can grasp the concept.

Summary

Good quality technical articles are needed for a healthy software industry. As I showed, there is much incentive for you to put in the effort and produce quality technical content. It is inherently very beneficial to the reader and even the industry as a whole. Please do trust me when I say that writing opens up a lot of opportunities to you as an individual, and is worth every minute invested into it.

Final Call to Action

If you want to take a step in the right direction — start writing an article on something you feel knowledgeable about right now! Chances are there is something that’s been on your mind these past days. Of course, the best approach is to not force it, but sometimes you have to force through writer’s block and just produce some sort of a draft which will eventually be perfected (send it to your friends for review).

Even if it is something simple in your eyes, there is certainly somebody out there that was as clueless as you were before you learned it — help them by presenting the concept from an alternate viewpoint.

Update

I currently work at Confluent. Confluent is a big data company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka themselves! I am immensely grateful for the opportunity they have given me — I currently work on Kafka itself, which is beyond awesome! We at Confluent help shape the whole open-source Kafka ecosystem, including a new managed Kafka-as-a-service cloud offering.

We are hiring for a lot of positions (especially SRE/Software Engineers) in Europe and the USA! If you are interested in working on Kafka itself, looking for new opportunities or just plain curious — make sure to message me on Twitter and I will share all the great perks that come from working in a bay area company.

It’s almost been two years since I graduated from the Lighthouse Labs Web Development Bootcamp. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that a coding bootcamp is an intensive program that teaches folks a little bit about software development. I say a little bit, because bootcamps are usually short, but they really do enable you to grow into a new career if you put in the work.

Plenty of people have discussed the pros and cons of attending a bootcamp (For example, on Quora, Reddit, and Medium). Should you go? Is it better than a computer science degree? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not here to talk about that.

I want to talk about what to do after a bootcamp. How will you succeed?

For me, I didn’t want to leave success to chance. I quit my job and with a small amount of savings, and I was finally ready to become a real software developer.

My journey was hard, but I like to think that I’ve been successful coming out the other side. The success came from the work I put in during and after the bootcamp. Success can be yours as well — all you have to do is put in the work.

Here are the things I did to get to where I am today.

Start applying to jobs early

I started applying to jobs somewhere around three weeks before graduation. During my bootcamp, I started to get an intense fear that I wouldn’t find a job after bootcamp. This fear helped me decide not to leave it to chance. I started spreading my résumé like wildfire. ?

Leading up to graduation, I had already applied to 50 different positions. Did they all respond to me? No. Did I get interviews with most of them? No! The majority of them didn’t even respond to me, but guess what? I got a job before I graduated.

Applying for jobs is a full time job. This step is essential. You need to cast your line and get your name in front of as many people as you can. You’ll see this theme carry throughout the rest of this article.

My favourite place to apply for jobs has always been AngelList. I like the user experience of their website. It’s clean, simple, and there are a ton of companies using it. Plus, who doesn’t like Naval Ravikant? Other than that, LinkedIn, Hired, TripleByte, or even Craigslist could help.

Go to meetups

I’m going to preface this part by saying that I’ve got an INTJ personality. Being in large crowds of unknown people makes me feel like I’m being pulled to the bottom of the ocean. Small talk with strangers is one of the most difficult things for me to do. But pushing through this struggle allowed me to realize the true potential for meetups.

If you haven’t been on Meetup.com, you should take a peek. If you have access to a relatively large city, I am willing to bet that there are endless possibilities for meeting folks on that website.

Remember when I told you to get your name in front of as many people as you can? This will help. People remember faces, good conversations, and fun events. Quite often there will even be job boards where you can share your email!

Pick a couple of meetup groups that you find interesting and are related to tech or software development. Put yourself in these social environments once a week. You will find plenty of people to exchange numbers with. Add them to your LinkedIn. Reach out to them later.

Bring your best elevator pitch!

Volunteer

Volunteering is something that I will always find valuable. We don’t have much time on this planet, so why not give back a little of what you’ve been given? So many people helped me during my journey through bootcamp. I decided I wanted to give this back to others.

There are tons of volunteer opportunities that you could find. The most valuable ones are probably related to the tech meetups you find. They will enable you to meet a lot of people while helping out the community.

Eventually, once you feel comfortable, I’d suggest finding some opportunities for mentorship! Help people learn to code. You never know whom you might end up helping through the process.

No matter where you volunteer, it’s a good opportunity for making others aware of who you are. Another bonus: it looks nice on your résumé.

Practice, practice, practice

There is only one way to get better: practice.

There are a very large number of options when it comes to practicing your hard skills. Practicing solving problems with algorithms is a great way to flex your mental muscles. You might even need to end up solving some of the same problems in the real world.

This type of practice gives you two important ways to learn.

• The first one is clear: you really have to learn by doing. You’re never going to get good at math just by reading about it, and coding is the same.
• The second is more subtle, but is easily just as important. Read other developer’s solutions. They will likely be better than yours in the beginning. That’s a good thing!

Solve, decode, iterate.

Build

One of the challenging things about bootcamp is, all of your classmates will have the same projects as you. You’ll want something to showcase to help distinguish yourself to potential employers.

Do you have a problem that you’d like solved? What about your friends? Your mom? Ask them. Then build it.

It doesn’t matter what you build. Just build something! Your passion projects will be a great conversation starter at all of the meetups you go to.

Contribute to open source

This is probably one of the most intimidating suggestions. Are you good enough to contribute? Will people even want your help? Yes and Yes! No doubt about it.

Open source projects need all of the help they can get. You may not be able to program their next big feature, but there are plenty of ways to get involved. Do you like doing design? Do you have a passion for documentation? What about writing tests?

Most of these projects are passion projects. The developers have full time jobs. Go take a look at some issues on your favourite projects and see if there is anything that excites you.

Once you start submitting pull requests to open source projects, you will begin collecting some invaluable feedback. It’s like having access to an infinite list of senior developers. How great is that?

Much like what I talked about in the section on practice, contributing to open source really gets you surrounded by code written by other folks. This helps open your eyes to a new perspective and new ways to solve problems. Read as much code as you can and try to think about how you would have done it differently.

If this sounds exciting to you, then you have to read GitHub’s guide to contributing to open source. It’s extremely in-depth and covers everything you need to know. Including giving you lots of ways to find projects looking for help.

Expand your knowledge

We live in a beautiful time. The internet is full of resources for learning. If you have an idea of what you want to learn, chances are you can find it online for cheap or even free.

It wouldn’t be hard for me to endlessly list online resources here, but I’ll leave the searching up to you. I was personally very curious about computer science so I started to self-study.

What you decide to learn about doesn’t really matter. Just continue to learn. Showing potential employers that you are a self-starter and capable of picking up things on your own is a huge asset. As a junior you become an investment. You need to sell to them and let them know you’re a valuable investment.

Never be afraid to ask

Hopefully your bootcamp is similar to Lighthouse. We have access to a Slack channel that has a thriving community. Even if your bootcamp doesn’t, you can find online communities to be a part of. These communities provide an excellent alternative for you to fill your knowledge gaps and get feedback.

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Ask people your questions directly. Share some of your code. Read what other people are struggling with. All of these options are opportunities to learn.

Accept recruiter communications

I have one final suggestion for your post-bootcamp journey. Let recruiters on LinkedIn know you are open to communications. It never hurts to be on their radar, and they might just be able to find you a good fit.

Wrapping up

That’s it! Those are a few things to increase your chances of success.

As you can see, there are a few common themes spread throughout these ideas. You need to get your name out there, continue learning, distinguish yourself from others, and give back where you can.

Like most things in life, you’ll get out what you put in. Put in the work, believe in yourself, and have fun doing it.

If you have any questions, need some support, or would just like to chat, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn!

Best of luck!

If you haven’t read my earlier story about how I turned my life around by deciding to become a developer, thanks to freeCodeCamp, I advise you to do that now. I’ll give you some context so you’ll understand that this is not about me bashing CS degrees or admitting defeat.

In 2016, I had been working for a year with an Economics degree in a job that didn’t really challenge or fullfill me. I felt lost and depressed without passion, love, or a life goal. That part of my life is without a doubt the lowest and darkest time I have experienced. Although I came pretty close this year, but I’ll talk about that in a bit.

As I started writing this, I was on a plane going back to my country after dropping out of a US Computer Science degree. I couldn’t overstay my visa. I was literally going into the unknown, but with confidence and a sense of pride.

And what do you know — within a few days of getting back home, I landed a developer job at a hot new startup. Here’s how I got there.

Working and learning in the States

My first part-time job

2017 was for me one of the best years of my life. I decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and got my first web-developer job (part-time) while I was studying. I got great hands-on experience with web development, CMS, both the front-end and back-end, version control, and most importantly, I got to work as part of a team and got some great insights into best practices and automation tools.

It wasn’t easy being a newbie, but what I lacked in experience I made up for in confidence and genuine desire to learn and do better. By the end of the year, I felt like I was thriving with family and friends at work. I even introduced a new senior developer to our tools and helped him with some major tasks.

But I’ve always known that my job wouldn’t be permanent. So I continued learning on my own online, toying with other frameworks like React, looking into DevOps tools like Docker, and working on my own personal projects in my free time.

My college experience

But things weren’t all good. The first semester in my computer science program was a terrible horror show for me. I had been out of school for over a year and my previous degree was not engineering related. There was a lot of math involved, ranging from calculus to linear algebra to statistics.

I found myself wondering quite often: where are the programming classes?!

I was asking myself that question a lot at the beginning. I was just average at math at that point. But those courses sharpened my brain a little to prepare me for advanced algorithms — the most important CS class, in my opinion.

Now, since I’ve tried both, the main difference between studying algorithms in class and learning about them online is that it tends to be more theoretical and detailed in college courses. They make sure you understand how certain algorithms work, help you analyze their complexity, and encourage you to explore their efficiency in different problems.

But most of all, it was summed up by my algorithms professor. He told us that,

In this class you will learn how to develop your own algorithms to solve complex problems.

I remember my mind being blown away when I heard that. I realized then that I’d been thinking about algorithms and problem solving the wrong way. I used to think algorithms are a set of well defined techniques that needed to be followed and implemented correctly to solve traditional types of problems. When in reality what’s really out there are tried techniques used to come up with algorithms to solve or improve solutions to problems.

Simply put, to be a good programmer/problem solver, you need to think about these techniques as tools you use to build your own solutions to problems. This approach to problem solving explains why memorizing and looking at answers to algorithm problems online doesn’t really help you become a better developer.

Other than that one crucial class, I think studying CS in college alone would have never made me a good developer. Granted, there were other important classes I was looking forward to, like Computer Networking and Computer Vision — but I didn’t get to them. But in general, there is a lack of practical experience and more emphasis on the theory.

Believe it or not, I took a class about databases in which we never even used a real database. It was all on paper. We did practice SQL statements, but for two weeks only. For the majority of people, that is not nearly enough to be proficient in SQL. However, I did learn high level database design. I think that is extremely important when trying to design efficient database schemas. And it’s recently saved me a lot of development time and given me a confidence boost.

At any rate, I would assume most of the major courses are like that…but I don’t know for sure, since I ran out of money before completing them.

My personal projects and extracurricular activities

This is what made the entire experience so worthwhile. I went to hackathons, participated in coding-related student groups, met up with local developer communities, and took online courses and challenges. I know it sounds like I didn’t have a life outside of my computer, but that’s not true. I did try to have a balanced life, and I hung out with friends, went hiking, worked out, and so on.

Ultimately I loved doing what I do best — mini projects. I spent countless hours reading documentation — Python, Google APIs, ReactJS, JavaScript, MongoDb, Java, Node.js, AWS, and the list goes on.

I always tried to make little programs that helped me with otherwise manual tasks to reinforce my learning — and it all paid off. I was always the most experienced coder in the three hackathons I attended (and my team got second place at one of them!). I never really stopped learning or doing projects, and to this day I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

I think doing personal or side projects are as important to developers of all skill levels as physical exercise is to all athletes — it helps us stay in shape and take on new challenges.

My New Reality

I finished writing this post a few weeks after I landed back home. It’s so good to be home with family and old friends, and to be free of all the stress of living abroad. I thought I would find it tough to find a job quickly in Egypt.

I’ll be OK, I thought to myself. I’ll just continue taking advanced theoretical courses online for free, and work as a freelance developer until I get a stable job. At least I can take a break to relax. But, work found its way to me before I got my well-deserved break.

Not two days after going home to live with my parents, an old friend of mine who had just started a startup asked me to come to his company. He wanted me to check out his work and team and give him some advice regarding how to manage his team and codebase.

I thought of it as a free consulting gig that I would do as a favor, which I was OK with. I introduced some team management tools I’d used at work before, and shared some agile management strategies that he liked.

All kinds of spaghetti make me hungry

When I looked at the code, (AngularJS + ASP.NET), I was met with horrendous spaghetti code, with almost no documentation at all. I pointed the issue out, started some documentation, and re-factored some of the code — which led to 30% less code and improved readability.

That might sound fancy, but I basically reduced repetitive and redundant code, and placed lines of code that did a specific functionality into their own functions that could be reused.

My friend saw value in keeping me, so he offered me a full-time fullstack developer position. And I agreed — he is my friend after all. It’s been almost two months, and I’ve learned a lot on the job, including AngularJS, C# and ASP.NET (I’d come from a ReactJS background).

Reflections & Milestones

So now that I’m at this new job, you might wonder: was it hard to jump into using new frameworks and a complicated codebase so fast? Well, it was never going to be easy, even if I was a seasoned senior developer. Looking at spaghetti code in any language or framework is always confusing and exhausting. But I’ve loved improving it, and in the process it reinforced my knowledge of Angular and .NET frameworks.

I consider myself lucky, because the startup scene in Egypt is booming just like it is in the States. I get to wear different hats at work, so it’s not always development and coding that I’m doing. I get to help shape the marketing strategy, manage social media accounts, and go to networking events to pitch our product.

I remember setting out two goals for myself when I first started to learn to code.

• I wanted to become a front-end developer. I reached that milestone surprisingly quickly, just 2 months after starting the freeCodeCamp curriculum, by getting a part-time web developer job.
• I wanted to become a fullstack developer after doing the back-end challenges on freeCodeCamp. I gave myself a year to get a back-end job, but I still managed to exceed my own expectations and got it sooner than I thought earlier this year.

I still don’t think this is going to be a permanent job position for me. Although I love the work, I need to reach the next milestone that I set out for myself: become an experienced machine learning engineer by the end of next year.

Wish me luck!

_Follow me on twitter @adham_benhawy_

You must have heard about the now famous 10,000 hours rule. It says:

Key to achieving world class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours.

The rule was propagated by Malcolm Gladwell’s New York Times bestseller, Outliers. In his book, Gladwell talked about the rule frequently, citing the magic number of hours to be practiced before you become a master in that field. In the book, Gladwell took examples of several prominent personalities, and explained how life gave them a chance to finish their 10,000 hours before they achieved greatness.

So, do we really need to slog several hours everyday for years before being able to do what we’d like to do?

What about those of us who didn’t have the chance or resources or even the understanding of what to do with our lives, till recently. As per the rule, even if you’re lucky enough to find your calling, it will still take more than 5 years of daily practice of 5 hours everyday to be able to successfully do, what you’d like to do aka reach 10,000 hours. This is depressing to say the least. People want to go out and make a difference with their work as soon as they can! Such thoughts can already push someone towards not pursuing their dreams, if they aren’t motivated enough.

To answer the question, let’s first take a closer look at the 10,000 hours rule and its origins.

Malcolm Gladwell based his book on Anders Ericsson study on deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, and is recognized as one of the world’s leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise.

After Gladwell’s book, the study (originally published in 1993) became very popular. So much so that, based on book’s view of Ericsson’s study, the study itself was criticized. Finally, Ericsson himself had to clarify that 10,000 hours rule is not what his study showed.

If you’re interested in the final outcome of the back & forth criticisms and clarifications, this article sums it all very well. And you guessed it right, there is no such universal timeline that will make you an expert. It depends on several other factors like quality of practice, level of motivation, person’s abilities and more. Here is a quote from the article referred above

10,000 hours was not actually a number of hours reached, but an average of the time elites spent practicing. Some practiced for much less than 10,000 hours. Others for over 25,000 hours.

What does this mean for people just getting started?

First and foremost — don’t worry, don’t think you don’t have it in you to do it, and don’t let the voices of others drown your own inner voice. Keep on going, not just to accumulate hours, but to make sure each hour counts. Keep fighting the mediocrity, without ruing the hours you’ve spent. Keep getting feedback, keep iterating, keep improving.

Doesn’t matter if you’re trying to learn coding or design or writing or something else. Don’t be daunted with the difficulties you will face or the time it will take.

I don’t have a new agenda to push through. But I’d like to outline few of the tactics that helped me move from the position I was in, to the position I wanted to be in. The journey is ongoing, but I have made considerable progress and will keep doing so.

• Learner’s mindset: Students have this great sense of learning and understanding new stuff. But, as people graduate and move to professional fields, this learning capacity decreases. This may have biological reasons, but I like to believe we can still learn a lot from day to day activities and challenges. Keeping eyes and ears open for new knowledge from even unexpected sources will give you a new perspective.
• Feedback loop: Whatever you do, never make assumptions. You should make data based decisions. Getting feedback is critical to do this. Whether you write code, or design logos, or make websites, try to have a reliable feedback system. You could ask your friends or use various Internet news boards specific to your field to get good, impartial feedback.
• Learn by doing: I am a software developer, with major of my experience in C, C++. Later on when I started to build Devup, I needed to learn a modern language to build various automation related tasks. I read a book for few days, but it was obvious, books alone aren’t enough to learn new stuff. With modern learning platforms it is now easy to learn on the job.
• Review at fixed intervals: Worrying all the time about progress doesn’t help. You can rather have a fixed interval to check in on your progress. This way you can focus better on making actual progress.

We’d love to hear methods, tools, tips & tricks that you use. Post them in the comments section!

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