The term ‘soft skills’ has been used quite a lot in recent years. And while it is often considered an old-fashioned term, I can't overstate the importance of social and emotional intelligence for those who work in software development.

As much as code quality, technical skills, and other ‘hard’ aspects of engineering matter, communication and collaboration are what really make a sound engineer great at what they do.

I will not talk about soft skills from a theoretical point of view here. Instead, I aim to give you practical tips on developing your own soft skills to become a better professional.

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are about how we interact with others and our environment – and they're no less critical than other skills. They’re about how you communicate, how you resolve conflicts, and how you manage your emotions.

And they’re not only crucial for your personal life – they can also make or break your career as a software engineer.

You might be thinking: “I’m an introvert — I don’t have good social skills”. But it is not that simple! Everyone has some degree of introversion and extroversion. It’s all about finding balance.

While some people have excellent communication skills, they can still do better in certain areas of their professional life.

And vice versa — even if you consider yourself shy and socially awkward, there’s plenty of room for improvement in your interactions with others. Also, it’s never too late to start working on your soft skills — so don’t give up before you get started!

What You Need to Know About Soft Skills

We need to realize here that soft skills are just like any other skill out there. You have to practice them regularly if you want them to improve, and it might take some time before they become second nature.

Remember that everyone can benefit from working on their soft skills. Even if they seem perfect on the outside, chances are there’s room for improvement.

Don’t be afraid to admit this! Nobody knows everything in life, so why should someone fault us for something we could still improve ourselves?

What Do Soft Skills Mean for Your Career?

Soft skills are not just nice-to-have. They are essential for those who want to work in software development.

The information age we live in has made the world smaller and more interconnected than ever before, which means that it’s easier than ever to connect with clients, customers, team members, and other stakeholders.

At the same time, it’s a very competitive industry with lots of opportunities  —  meaning that you have to make an impact to stand out from the crowd.

In my opinion, the most significant advantage that soft skills provide is that they help you build networks within organizations and communities. Having good soft skills means being approachable, likable, reliable, and trustworthy –  basically someone other people enjoy working with and want to know more about. This opens doors for new opportunities.

I often see engineers who are confident with their technical skills but lack communication abilities and struggle to showcase their value to the company they work for.

If you think about it from a management perspective ,  why would anyone hire someone who lacks confidence when there are many great candidates out there who are confident enough to prove themselves?

Confidence is such an essential factor in making hiring decisions! There’s nothing wrong with being humble, though. Just remember that the self-confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing helps significantly in putting forward a strong case whenever you need something from management or colleagues.

This applies to more than just job security. Remember that other people tend to notice when you bring value into conversations by sharing relevant perspectives or ideas instead of just agreeing with everything everyone says.

This shows them that you’re worth spending time with because of what you’re bringing to the conversation rather than merely because of who you are (or who they think/assume/hope you are).

You’ll find yourself better positioned for promotions, exciting projects at work (with increased responsibility!), and more significant influence over critical team decisions. The list goes on!

Building good relationships within teams and companies (and community-wide) makes going through bad times easier, since there will always be people around who care enough about your situation and want to help.

It might be hard at first (especially if you’ve been labeled as ‘not sociable’), but trust me – once this starts happening more often, things will improve dramatically!

Soft skills that will help you out

Communication Skills 

How well can you communicate your ideas, opinions, and problems? It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting at a conference or talking about your project with a client — communication is key, and it comes down to how well you communicate your point.

Collaboration Skills 

Can you work in a team? How well do you communicate with your peers and colleagues? Are you able to delegate tasks and responsibilities, or are you always trying to do everything yourself?

Conflict Resolution Skills 

Conflict happens in all organizations, whether it's between co-workers or between customers and the organization. It’s all about how we deal with these conflicts. We need to learn how to resolve them to make everyone happy without being too bossy or passive.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

 Do you know when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed by certain situations? Do you ever lose your temper? Do you get frustrated when things don’t go as planned? Being able to recognize and manage your emotions is essential for your success as an engineer.

Managing Your Time and Priorities

How good are your time management skills? Are you overworked continuously yet never get anything done because of it? This is not only bad for productivity but also for your mental health.

How to improve your soft skills

The first thing to remember is that soft skills are not innate qualities. We all can learn how to communicate better, collaborate, and work with others more effectively. It’s just a matter of practice.

The best thing about soft skills is that you can improve them at any time — it’s never too late to start! Here are some practical tips for developing the best possible social skills:

Be an active listener

This one is probably the most essential communication skill. Listening may seem simple, but it’s often not easy to do well, as many people know.

When somebody talks to you, don’t be in a hurry to reply right away — take your time and pay attention to what they say! This includes both verbal and non-verbal communication — so watch facial expressions as well as body language.

Respond to feedback

Feedback is vital for every professional. To improve, you need to know what you’re doing well and where you can improve. If somebody gives you feedback, accept it with an open mind and try not to get defensive.

It happens that people give negative feedback in a non-constructive way, but if you take the time to talk about it, usually they’ll be willing to elaborate on their point of view. Remember that even though someone is trying to help you become better — they don’t have a crystal ball and might be wrong or mistaken at times.

Be confident when talking with people

Communication is useless if it comes from a place of uncertainty or doubt. If you think something could sound awkward or stupid, then it very likely will sound awkward or stupid.

So try out sentences before you say them out loud — in front of a mirror can be useful here because it demonstrates how you look when saying things like “Um… yeah… I mean… no” instead of “Sure thing!”

Remember that confidence does not have anything to do with being arrogant. Instead, it means feeling comfortable enough in your skin to share your ideas confidently and openly with others. That’s much better than being afraid of looking silly (which only makes people feel bad about themselves).

Be curious about other people and their ideas

Never be afraid to ask questions. This creates opportunities for others to learn from you, too! And even if they don’t have any interesting answers for you right away, keep asking questions until you find something helpful or interesting for yourself.

If there’s some kind of disagreement between two parties during a conversation, try approaching the problem from each side separately. It will help you understand what each person means by their statements more precisely, facilitating collaboration later on (you’ll know what kinds of solutions would satisfy each party).

And last but not least: always be open-minded. Being too set on your own opinions can lead you into unnecessary conflicts with other people.

Final Thoughts

Another important thing I’d like to mention here is the fact that social skills take time to develop. Just like anything else in life, it will take months, maybe even years, until they become second nature (if they ever do). So don’t expect yourself and others around you to change immediately after reading this article.

Instead, focus on improving one area at a time while consciously working towards developing better social skills overall. With enough practice over time, it will eventually become second nature, and people will start noticing the changes in how you interact with those around you.

One of my favorite quotes is from Stephen Hawking: “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet”. The same philosophy applies here — look up instead of down! Building relationships takes time but pays off handsomely in the long run. You’ll feel happier and more fulfilled at work.

While there's no exact science that dictates the best possible times to share content on Instagram throughout time zones and disciplines, there are strategies you can use. And there are certain times and windows that seem to be consistently better than others.

In this article, we'll use the freeCodeCamp Instagram account as an example – since I run it, I'm the most familiar with its behavior and trends.

I'll share my reasoning behind our timing strategies along with what works best for us. I'll also discuss some general advice about posting times and how you can decide when to share your content.

Let's get started.

What's the best time to post to Instagram, in general?

As I mentioned above, there's not really a universally right or wrong time to post to Instagram. It depends on your audience, your goals, where you're located, and many other factors. But let's try to get some insights.

First, some data:

A graph showing how many posts people share in various time slots throughout the day (Source)

This is a very general graph, but you can see that there tend to be the most posts between around 9am and 6pm. This makes sense, as people are generally awake and active during those hours.

To get a little more insight into when people post and why, let's dive in deeper.

Put yourselves in your audience's shoes

Alright, let's think about this logically. Perhaps, if you're an Instagram user, think of your own behavior on the app.

If you're a somewhat typical user, you likely check IG right when you wake up. Nothing like a little shot of inspiration/FOMO/political commentary to start off the day right.

Then, when you're eating lunch, you probably open up the app again to check out all the juicy goodness that's been shared while you were working or doing other things all morning.

As your day winds down, and your brain becomes tired or distracted from work or taking care of kids or job hunting – or however you spend your days – you might check in with Instagram again just to escape and browse for a minute.

See what I'm getting at? People tend to check Instagram before work, when they need a break, or when they want inspiration or information.

Of course, Instagram isn't always restful – many people use it for active learning, sharing their art, consuming and sharing information about politics and social justice, and so on.

But it's up to you to know your audience. Whether you're posting travel photos or tech tutorials, think about who might be interested in those images or videos and when they might be browsing the app.

How to choose the best times to post to Instagram

Now that you've thought about who might be viewing your posts (and whom you want to view those posts), let's talk about some general trends in Instagram viewership. I'll focus on the tech and education spheres, since those are where freeCodeCamp lives.

First of all, here's something to keep in mind: if you have a relatively global audience – meaning your viewers are spread all over the world – it matters less when you post. Or rather, you can't cater to all time zones at once. If you can figure out where most of your audience is, or even a small majority, focus on times that are ideal for that area.

This is one strategy I follow. I live on the west coast of the United States, and there are many people in the States that engage with freeCodeCamp in some way (whether through the curriculum, publication, forum, YouTube channel, or our social media channels).

Part of freeCodeCamp's strategy is that we don't schedule posts ahead of time. I like to keep the content fresh and current, and I post to freeCodeCamp's account a few times a week.

By way of planning, I simply reach out to the people who's posts I want to re-share, and ask their permission to do so. Once I've gotten it, I add that post's URL to a spreadsheet so I can keep track of which posts I've shared and when.

Now the main question – once I have my planned posts, when do I share them?

Well, I think about the factors I've discussed above, and here's my general strategy.

Focus on weekdays

I want to catch people when they're studying or working or doing something from which they might need a little break. A little zap of inspiration. Most of the content I share on freeCodeCamp's IG account is being re-shared, so it's content someone else has created and posted.

I do this, in part, to show the global nature of the freeCodeCamp community. Many of the images I share feature developers and new coders who have used or are using the freeCodeCamp curriculum to learn to code. And people are doing that everywhere, so I want our Instagram feed to reflect that.

So throughout the week, around lunchtime (Pacific Time), I share photos of people coding, photos of people's setups, and photos of people learning to code. That way, when a person scrolling through their feed sees something that freeCodeCamp has shared, they hopefully receive a jolt of positivity, inclusivity, support, and inspiration.

Focus on daytime

As an additional note, I do try to share content when a large part of the world is awake.

Of course, not everyone will be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (as my mom says) when I post, but the goal is to give as many people as possible an opportunity to see the image before the world of IG moves on and floods people's feeds with too many more posts.

Think about the days of the week

Lastly, I think about what people's schedules might be like. I realize that I don't have a completely typical schedule, but I admittedly use myself as a case study.

I generally work Monday-Friday, and spend my weekends focusing on other things. Sometimes something work-related requires my attention on a Saturday or Sunday, but I try to stick to a regular schedule.

When I start the week on Monday, my inboxes are quite full, various repeating tasks demand my attention, and I have a meeting or two. Tuesday is often much the same.

By Wednesday, I'm pretty much caught up and can work on larger projects or other tasks that aren't so time-sensitive.

Thursdays and Fridays are also more free-form and I often have time to write articles for freeCodeCamp's publication and catch up on backlogs.

All this being said, I'll generally share images on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and then again on Thursdays or Fridays. It fits in nicely with my work schedule, and I imagine that other people find time on those days to check IG once or twice.

Turns out that these times are fairly ideal – people seem to use Instagram a lot on Wednesdays and Fridays (in the tech sphere, especially), and lunchtime is a popular time for perusing.

I check in on each post throughout the day after I post, and then a day or so later, to see how much engagement it's gotten. If it has over 1000 likes and at least 5-10 comments, I know it's done quite well.

Ok, so when should you NOT post to Instagram?

I've been discussing how I strategize and figure out when I should post to Instagram. But how do you determine when you shouldn't?

Well, I did some research, and the general consensus is that Sundays are the worst time. Fewer people use the app and share during that time, which makes sense if you think about it.

In my house, Sundays are often used to get done everything you didn't do during the week. Or, barring that, to decompress and rejuvenate before starting anew. I don't spend a lot of time on social media on the weekends in general, and sometimes I'm just tapped out on screens by the time Saturday and Sunday roll around.

Other than Sundays, there doesn't seem to be one day that, across the board, is bad for Instagram views and engagement. This is where you'll need to do some research specific to your situation.

Figure out your own ideal posting times

You can also go through this mental process – thinking about your audience's potential schedules, cross-referencing with your own, and so on. It might take some trial and error, but keep track of the results and you'll be able to hone your strategy.

But perhaps you know that most of your audience is in a certain geographical area. Then you should do some research on when people use Instagram in your region, or country, and base your posting schedule off that (as it makes sense for you or your brand).

Here are some generalizations to think about as you conduct your research and figure out a posting schedule (again, based on the tech world):

• Weekdays tend to bring about higher engagement
• Sometimes you can catch people when they first wake up, so early morning can work
• Lunch time is pretty reliable, as many people check/browse their phones as they eat
• Later in the workday is also decent, as people get tired of work/whatever they've been doing all day and need a break
• Sundays tend to be relatively quiet in IG land

Do you have data that you've gathered about the best times to post to Instagram? If you share it with us, we might be able to include it in this article :) Just reach out on Twitter.

Good luck reaching as many people as you can with your Instagram content!

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!

One of my goals this year is to read less. Not that I don’t think reading is important, actually quite the opposite.

I want to read less because I consume too much content and don’t ever actually take action on any of it.

Let me give you a few examples, maybe you can relate.

I’m subscribed to multiple newsletters on varying topics like web development, design, entrepreneurship, etc.

I eagerly consume the content from all these newsletters, and then get overwhelmed because I feel like I have to take action and try all these different things, even though I’m already in the middle of 12 different things that need my attention.

I go through a similar process with books. I get excited about a new book on starting a business or web development or personal improvement. I rapidly and enthusiastically consume the book, every once in a while I even finish it, then I attempt to take half-assed action on it for a day or two until I read something else and decide I need to take action on that thing now.

Never half ass two things, whole ass one thing — Ron Swanson

I have a content consumption addiction, and I’m willing to bet you do to.

So my goal this year is to read less, but read the things that matter, read them intentionally, and actually take action on the things they teach me, and I want to make the case for why you might want to do the same.

Why Consume Less Content?

I realize the irony of writing a piece of content telling you to consume less content, but if reading this means that you will read less of my stuff in exchange for furthering your career, I’m okay with that.

I also want to clarify here that I’m not telling everyone reading this that they should stop reading.

I’m speaking to a specific group of people that suffer from shiny object syndrome like I do and have trouble sticking to projects because of it.

If you are that person, I think there’s a strong case to be made to read less, and consume less content in general. This might be reading, but it might also be podcasts, courses, and videos.

Or if you’re a pro at being distracted easily like me, all of the above.

I have ambitious goals to start my own business and live a life of independence using my web development skills.

Unfortunately I have zero self control and am pretty bad at focusing.

Part of being a web developer means we have to be pretty tuned in to the internet and many, if not most of us are addicted to learning and consuming content.

On the surface, this seems like a good thing, but it needs to be tempered.

We want to learn as much as we can and obsessively consume content, at our own peril if we don’t learn how to control it.

One thing I’ve realized over the past few years of working like crazy but actually accomplishing very few of my goals is that without the ability to focus, we won’t get very far, if anywhere.

As I’ve reflected on why I get so distracted so easily and so often, I realized that a major contributor to it was content consumption.

I realized something really sad the other day. I’ve been a web developer for about 5 years now, have consumed countless courses and tutorials, and yet my online presence and portfolio is shamefully bare.

The reason is, again, a lack of focus and overconsumption of content.

I see a cool course come out, or a tutorial that utilizes some fancy new tech, and all of a sudden I’ve spent 5 hours trying to get some new random app working, while never actually completing anything meaningful.

Okay great, we’ve figured out that the problem is overconsumption of content and lack of focus on one project at a time, now what do we do about it?

I think the solution can be broken down into two rules, at least to start with.

Rule 1 — Don’t Consume Any Unrelated Content

This means articles, books, podcasts, videos, courses, etc. Unless it is directly related to your current project, it’s off limits.

A drastic step? Maybe. But a necessary one, at least right now.

I’m subscribed to all kinds of design and development-related newsletters, and inevitably one or seven of them will link to a tutorial or tech that has recently come out that I can’t resist trying.

I’m willing to bet that just this one step will make a big difference.

I also have a bit of an addiction to business and productivity books. I read so many of them that I never actually take the time to act on what I’m reading.

And then there’s podcasts.

At least for now, until I learn how to control myself better, I’ll be avoiding consuming any of this content unless I am doing research for a current article or development project.

Rule 2— One project at a time

I’m committing to not starting a new side project until I’ve finished the one that I’m working on right now.

For example, right now I am very interested in serverless apps built using Vue, so I’m building a calorie and macronutrient tracker using Nuxt, GraphQL, and Netlify.

I’m going to finish this project before starting on any others.

This one project at a time rule could apply to courses and tutorials as well.

The crux of the rule is this:

I can’t start another project/course/tutorial until I have the finished product from this one up on GitHub.

The main goal with implementing these two rules is to stop getting distracted so I can actually product meaningful things.

My hunch is that following the first rule will make following the second much easier, since usually when I jump to a new project it’s because I read something about some other tech I want to be using.

The Practical Side

However, I’ve gone from saying I have horrible discipline and self-control to making a blanket statement that I’m simply just going to start sticking to these rules.

Real life is rarely so simple.

Inevitably, we make commitments like this and find ourselves falling back into old habits almost immediately.

We unsubscribe from newsletters only to find ourselves subscribed again a week later.

We say we will finish the book we are on only to hear about another one that we are just sure will be the most important thing we need to do, so we put it down and start the other one.

We start a project and then get sidetracked because this other tech stack is what we should really be focusing on right now.

Rinse and Repat. Ad Infinitum.

So, how can we make sure we actually stick to these rules and start building a meaningful development portfolio?

I believe the answer lies in changing our habits.

For example, I have an RSS reader installed in Chrome, and multiple newsletters subscribed to in my email.

Usually, the first thing I do in the morning is catch up on my reading.

6 hours later I realize that a good chunk of the day is gone.

Almost every time, the days I have no new content to read are the days I get the most done.

So I’ve removed my RSS reader and unsubscribed from all of those newsletters.

The next step is to replace that bad habit in the morning with a good habit.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the idea of habit stacking.

It’s the idea that you start off with one small habit each morning, and then finishing that habit cues a new one, and so on and so on.

My current habit stack for my work day looks like this:

• Get to desk
• Unpack bag and take off coat
• Fill up water bottle
• Make cup of coffee
• Open Skype
• Check Help Desk tickets
• Focused work
• Check email at 10:00 AM
• Workout (Mon, Wed, Fri)
• Meditate
• Make protein shake
• Eat lunch
• Focused work
• Check email again at 12:30 PM
• Focused work
• Check email and assign tomorrow’s tasks at 2:30 PM
• Current learning project/article at 3:00 PM
• Pack up bag
• Leave work at 4:00 PM

You should tweak this habit stack to your own personal needs and schedule, but the idea is that as soon a I get to work, I complete a few small tasks, which triggers starting another task.

I’m starting a new routine of writing one new article and releasing it every Friday. My learning projects and articles will be related, so whatever my current project is is what that week’s article will be about.

Right now my learning project is getting my content consumption under control, so that’s what I’m writing about.

Next, I’ll be working on creating and integrating good habits into my workflow, so I’ll be writing about how developers can use habit formation to improve their skills and career next.

Read Less. Do More.

The root cause of my lack of robust portfolio was my content consumption, so I’ve decided to read less, but read more purposefully. And, most importantly, take action on what I am reading.

Right now that’s Atomic Habits.

1. Only articles, tutorials, podcasts, courses, and books directly related to what I’m currently working on.
2. No starting a side project until I’ve finished one.

I’m willing to bet there are a lot of other developers out there that struggle with shiny object syndrome. If you do, take a look at your content consumption habits and see if reading less would help you get more accomplished.

Hey I’m Ken. I design and code web applications. I also write guides, essays, rants, and manifestos for developers and designers on Medium. If you want to keep up with my writing and get notified when I write something new, you can sign up right here or subscribe via RSS. You’ll get one email every once in a while when when I write something new, that’s it. You can also send me email at ken@kenrogers.co if you have a question, comment, piece of hate mail, or just want to say hello. Thanks for reading ?

Oh dear! If I had a dime every time (I just rhymed — twice!) someone, including me, complained about the lack of time, I’d be super rich.

We all have 24 hours per day to achieve our goals, complete our personal and professional tasks, spend quality time with our family and friends, take care of our bodies, and so much more.

The thing is that some people make time everyday, and achieve in a year things that others need 5, 10 or even more years to achieve.

I was always fascinated by this “superhuman skill”, so for the past few years I’ve been following the below process:

• Read about the subject
• Analyze and apply what I’ve learned in real life
• Evaluate my results
• Decide to keep the practice or throw it out

Below are some of my observations and tips I have come up with during this time.

The Pareto principle

Also known as the 80/20 law. This means that 20% of your tasks will yield 80% of your results. And the remaining 80% of the tasks will give you the other 20% of your results.

So starting today, make sure that everything you do during the day gives back the maximum results.

Maximum results according to what, though?

I’m glad you asked.

Well, that depends on you. Each one of us have different goals.

For a web developer, it might be acquiring a skill that will give them the best possible career prospects, or a big raise, or take them one step closer to a big career dream.

For a single parent of five kids, it might be making sure that all their kids are well cared-for and safe.

Read lots of books

If time is money, then reading the right books will impart great knowledge. This will, in turn, help you expand your skillset and abilities.

Additionally, books can help you enter a wind-down-before-sleep phase (so you both learn and relax) as well as help power up the brain engine again in the morning.

This becomes even more helpful if you do it during the so-called “dead hours”, like waiting at the doctor’s office, or while commuting.

Hmm, how about squeezing in a few pages while waiting for your significant other when they are late again? ?

Hey sweetie, I was just reading a book :)

Audiobooks

For more advanced anti-dead time folks. Audiobooks books have all the pros of physical books, and they can also be used when you’re moving around. You can even listen to them while working out doing cardio training in the gym.

This way, you’ll learn even while you accomplish other important tasks.

Exercise during your commute

As you have probably already figured it out, I think daily commutes are a big time liability. But you can compensate for this quite easily. For example, you can cycle to your office.

You will reach the office fast enough (although maybe not as fast as with your car). Additionally, the initial cost of buying a bike is relatively small and quickly pays off. And by the end of the day, you will have done more cardio than most people around you might do in a week. Good deal, huh?

Use great hardware to eliminate unnecessary delays

Do you remember when sending a couple of emails took you 5 minutes each, without taking into account the time spent on typing them? Are you constantly waiting for a production build, and it takes ages because your CI/CD solution runs on your beloved ENIAC and you can’t call it a day until it is successful?

Hello FamilyGuy

Have you ever done the math to see how much time you waste on such things? Quality hardware is a great investment, and having a Scrooge McDuck mentality is not a wise choice, if you care about your time.

I am not saying go out and buy the most expensive gadget or computer you can find. But be willing to spend a few more bucks to achieve higher quality levels.

No hitting snooze

This alone has made a significant positive change in my life, especially to my productivity. Why, you ask? Why is it so bad staying in bed for 20 more minutes?

Well apart for not taking advantage of your time (which is what this article is about), here are a couple of articles (and they are only the tip of the iceberg) about the issue:

• Good sleep and snooze button don’t go together
• 5 things that happen when you hit the snooze button

If you need to relax, do it NOW

We are not robots, and we are not living only to cross off tasks from our checklist. Thus, you need to listen to your body and take care of it so that is powerful and productive when needed.

If you cannot keep your eyes open, put everything on hold and go to sleep.

If you have forgotten what was the last time you laughed extremely hard, close the freakin’ IDE and go watch a comedy with your significant other.

If you feel the pace of your life is unsustainable, try a ‘No-electronics-Saturday’. You will be surprised how creative our grandparents had to be, for example, in order to spend their free time. And if you employ the Pareto principle, you might realise that you are overcommitting without any actual returns.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope the tips covered above help you generate more time for yourselves and what you think is important. And if so, please give me some love by spreading the word and clapping ? below to show me your appreciation. ?

As always, feel free to contribute to the comments section with your own special tips.

Originally published at perigk.github.io

“Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “It’s not a priority,” and see how that feels.” — Laura Vanderkam

Changing careers is very difficult. Add in a full-time job and a couple of kids and the task seems nearly impossible. Yet, even if you are busy, you can prioritize and make the time to focus on what matters to you and build the skills to level up your career.

Engineer your future with code

I started my coding journey just six months ago. Now I am one project away from completing my front-end developer certificate on freeCodeCamp. I’ve also completed the web developer boot camp course by Colt Steele on Udemy. And I did this all while raising two kids and working in a full-time job.

When I began using these tips, I saw my progress increase tenfold. I know I would have accomplished much more if I had implemented them earlier in my journey. I have not only benefited from increased productivity, but I feel more balanced and am having more fun than ever before.

My pivot into web development

After being in health care for the last five years, I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong - I loved helping people on their path to health, but I hated seeing the system break down for them. I hated when people could not afford their medication, or when their care plan wasn’t in sync with the treatment they needed.

I wanted to do more to help these people. But I knew that I couldn’t do more unless I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture.

I was not always interested in coding, but the more I looked at the forces making real change in today’s world, the more I saw that tech was behind these advances.

I saw an opportunity to make meaningful change, and that is when I became interested in coding.

Why are you coding?

Whatever the reason is, really think about it and pin it down. Use it as motivation to propel you towards your coding goals. Having this end goal will help you bust through plateaus and push through the hard parts (coding is hard).

Every day that I spend at my current day job motivates me to get home, boot up my laptop, and continue my journey of learning how to code.

The good news is that building coding skills is simple. All you have to do is code a lot. But unfortunately, this is where the hard part comes in. Fitting time into your busy life to routinely code is difficult, to say the least.

How to climb the coding mountain

There is a gap between where you are now and where you want to be. That is why you are reading this article. That is why you work day in and out, and end up sacrificing time with your family and loved ones.

If we are spending all this time working towards our goal, it is paramount to make the most of the time we spend learning how to code.

Here are five steps to turn this dream into a reality:

1. Create your personalized goals

To make the most of your time, nothing is more important than making actionable short-term goals. This will not only help you feel a sense of accomplishment every time you meet a goal, but it will help make the coding journey feel a lot less daunting.

Goals Exercise!

To help you come up with focused goals, I want to encourage you to do a quick exercise that I picked up from Laura Vanderkam.

1. Picture yourself one year from now. You have crushed ALL your coding goals and landed your dream job. You have given five talks at conferences around the world, and you built up your App and it was successful. Whatever success looks like to you, picture your future self. Please be ambitious, maybe even dream a little.

2. What 3 - 5 goals did you accomplish in that year that made it so successful?

3. Write these goals down.

4. Repeat this exercise for your personal life goals. It is impossible to work all the time, and to be successful you need work life balance (or you will burn out).

Now you have 6 - 10 ambitious goals that you want to accomplish during the next year. To break these larger goals down into action items, think about and plan about how you can meet these goals.

For example, if you want to complete the freeCodeCamp front end certificate, you need to schedule time to work on it throughout the week. If you want to run a marathon, you need to buy running shoes, sign up for a marathon, and schedule time to train regularly.

2. Make a Schedule

I’ll be honest - I am definitely not the scheduling type. I thought that I could wing it day by day. But realistically, you need to set time aside to focus, or your goals will pour over into the rest of your life. I found myself feeling anxious about coding during time with my family or when I was putting my kids to bed, because I hadn’t coded yet that day.

The thing I looked forward to all day (coding) started to negatively impact my quality of life.

Splitting your time into focused blocks allows you to be 100% in the present moment. When it is coding time, you can have tunnel vision and hack away. When it is time to unwind, or hang out with people you care about, you can be present because you coded that morning, or have time scheduled later in the day.

Here is an example of my personal schedule:

As you can see, I schedule a lot of family time. Family is really important to me. Your schedule will look a lot different, but the point is to create a schedule that will allow you to meet your goals without you hating life along the way. Just try to account for everything, so you can stick to your schedule.

3. Audit yourself to find time opportunities

Write down all the activities in a given day or week and see what you really do with your time. You will likely be surprised by exactly how much time you spend mindlessly scrolling through your Instagram feed, or binge watching a new Netflix show (I love Stranger Things).

I’m not telling you to cut all of it out but keep a balance. You can definitely turn some of that idle time into some serious coding gains.

There is more time than you think

If you are still thinking to yourself, “yeah, but I still work a lot and (insert excuse here) so I can’t find time”, then here is a fun fact! There are 168 hours in a week. If you work a full 40 hour week and subtract 8 hours of sleep per night (which I definitely don’t get) you still end up with 72 hours of “free” time.

Look at all the time you have in your life situation and squeeze as much “good” stuff into that time as you can. There IS time.

4. Fill your time with quality

Here are some tools that I use to help me accomplish my coding goals and stay focused on my learning path:

freeCodeCamp

Seriously one of the best tools for meeting goals. The curriculum is right there for you to follow and work on, it even tracks your progress!

JavaScript 30

30 JavaScript projects really help you master array methods while filling up your portfolio with projects (plus it is tons of fun). Wes Bos is a solid instructor who provides a quality free course. You can complete it in 30 consecutive days, or work it into your learning schedule.

100 Days of code on Twitter

This 100 day challenge consists of coding every day and tweeting about what you did. It is a great tool for tracking progress and measuring how far you have come. This community is full of inspiring people from all over the world and is a great way to meet like minded developers.

The Web Developer Boot Camp

I am almost finished with this course, and it has patched a lot of holes in my coding knowledge. Colt doesn’t just show you how to do something, he also explains why you do it a certain way. Plus, there is now an advanced web developer boot camp that I am going to take once I’m done.

Live It!

This isn’t a resource, but you should embrace the tech community by living it. Listen to podcasts while you drive to work or do the dishes. Follow leaders in the industry on Twitter. Read articles. Immerse yourself in tech and you will learn without realizing you are learning.

5. Multiply your time

We have set goals, and now have several larger goals broken down into actionable goals. We have gone through how to fit these goals into your busy life and I have helped give you some ideas on how to fill your time. Now, I want to tell you how you can make the most out of the time you put into coding.

The Answer: Be Happy!

What does being happy have to do with managing time, you ask? Simply put: it is everything. The idea is called multiplying your time.

Being present and deeply focused leads to increased productivity. This in turn multiplies the time you spend by increasing efficiency. Plus, who doesn’t want to be happy?

According to Shawn Achor, who studied the effects of happiness and its link to productivity, your brain performs 31% more productively when you feel happy.

Dopamine, which floods into your system when you feel positive, does two things:

1. It makes you happier (duh!)
2. It turns on the learning centers in your brain. They help you learn things more easily, and allow you to spend less time on learning while retaining more information.

Turn your brain into a dopamine producing machine!

You can release more dopamine by creating lasting, positive change. There are five things you can work into your routine to turn your brain into a dopamine producing machine:

1. Write three new things that you’re grateful for each day. This creates the habit of scanning the world for positive things, instead of negative ones.

2. Journal about a positive experience you had in the last 24 hours. This allows you to relive the positive experience which leads to the same dopamine response.

3. Exercise. Go on a short walk before a coding session, or bust out a quick workout. Exercise releases tons of dopamine.

4. Meditate. Meditation trains your brain to focus more on the task at hand, all while releasing dopamine.

5. Random acts of kindness. Thank someone in your social support network for helping you, or help someone out. This not only releases dopamine for you, it also does the same for the person you helped (and they may pay it forward).

Use blocks of time to build your future

Even if we are busy, we must take out time for the things that matter the most. When you focus on what matters, you can build the life you want with the blocks of time you have.

Thank you for reading this post! You can find me on twitter @michaeltombor

Project managers (PMs) are deadline chasers. They think clients want the earliest possible ship date to reduce costs. But that’s a common misconception. What clients really want is the best possible product with the earliest possible ship date.

Quality products need well-written code. Developers should use the 12 development approaches on the Joel Test to ensure good source control, encourage daily builds, and make use of QA testers.

Realistic deadlines need to be based on estimations from track records. Our project teams wanted to verify the accuracy of our estimations and create a feedback loop for our PMs and developers. We’ve been doing evidence-based scheduling (EBS) with Fog Creek for two months, and I’d like to share what we’ve learned so far.

Evidence-Based Scheduling without being OCD

We used Fog Creek’s EBS to track developers’ estimates compared to their actual time spent on a project. This data helped us make better project schedules, and also provided a feedback loop for PMs and developers to improve their estimates for individual tasks.

But the emphasis is not on OCD time tracking tools — we trust our developers and PMs to input their times in the project spreadsheet.

Besides what Fog Creek mentions in their EBS blog post, here’s what we learned in our implementation.

Break down projects into less than 2-day tasks

A template for our Google spreadsheet for EBS

As I mentioned above, our EBS tracks estimates vs time spent for user stories and features. The individual features are broken down into tasks (GitHub Issues) that should be completed within two days.

Developers still need to map out exactly how a feature will be put together by creating small enough tasks. For example, rather than just saying “Create shopping cart,” we can break these tasks down into various items, such as “Layout cart product list.”

This tracking also benefits our clients, because they can see exactly what we are working on for each bi-weekly sprint. They will be notified if features are completed ahead of or behind schedule, and there will be no surprises.

We also track our PMs’ time estimates, because they are not just account managers. They must have some technical understanding. It is important for PMs to learn from their miscalculations and improve their future estimates.

By comparing their estimates with the developer’s for the same feature, they can ask questions when there is a large deviation. They learn what takes more time, how technical debt affects a project, and how things work better technically.

Our PMs help find the sweet spot: they give their developers enough time to architect and code well while providing a reasonable time frame (and cost) to clients.

Tracking elapsed time

_Credit: [Toggl](https://toggl.com/team-time-tracking/" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

Since our company has casual working hours, many colleagues may take coffee breaks or go for a chat. For EBS, these breaks are counted in the time spent for that feature. Some developers may take frequent breaks and work in quick sprints, while others may work continuously for four hours.

In the end, if the estimated time and the actual time spent are the same, then both developers are still accurate. You can check your own working estimates with the app Toggl, leaving the timer on through breaks (however frequent or long) until a feature is completed. But this isn’t really necessary.

Because many tasks do take at least a few hours, developers can quickly log the issues they complete daily. Estimates such as 0.25 days are good enough. This is why we do not require time trackers.

We measure estimated versus actual time spent as “velocity.” If an estimate and tracked time are the same, we give it a 1. If a developer finished a task in 2 days, but estimated it would take 2.5 days, their velocity was 0.8, meaning they underestimated their speed.

The goal with tracking is not to become faster for the sake of it. The goal of EBS is consistency and accuracy. Consistency means that team members can predict each other’s delivery dates based on past performance. Accuracy means consistently achieving a velocity as close to 1 as possible (low range).

Factoring developer estimates into project estimates

When a client comes to us with a project, our PMs break down the features and then estimate how much time is needed for each feature. By adding up all the features, including code reviews and QA, we can give a standard project estimate.

EBS helps us see how individual developers can affect projects. Since we started tracking, we have learned interesting patterns. For example, some developers may consistently overestimate their velocity, and are therefore behind their estimates. However, they may still end up finishing features faster than “average” and be on schedule.

Since this behavior is still predictable, our PMs now know how to adjust the estimates given to clients. In contrast, if we had a developer who constantly delivered ahead of time, our PMs would know that they might be able to give clients a tighter estimate.

It just goes to show that evidence is even better than experience.

Other EBS observations and learnings

_Photo by [NeONBRAND](https://unsplash.com/@neonbrand" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=") via Unsplash

We did learn something else interesting: more experienced developers don’t necessarily estimate better. One possible reason is because we delegate complex features to them. Even with detailed planning, there is a high level of uncertainty. Issues need to be addressed as development progresses.

The goal is to allow developers and PMs to give buffer time for tasks they cannot fully imagine yet, and use existing estimates for common tasks (such as login pages).

Another observation is that even though every product is different, some common tasks will always remain just as time-consuming. We should not try to rush for “optimization” just to cut costs.

EBS and task tracking on a spreadsheet has also helped us quickly identify recurring delay patterns with certain types of features.

Having evidence helps us track patterns so we can better understand our working styles. However, every project is a new project.

Joel showed how projects should use a Monte Carlo simulation, with 100 possible scenarios, each with 1% probability. This shows the full range of possible futures for a project based on a developer’s randomly selected historical velocity data. The goal is to narrow that range of ship dates for a client, not to fix a date and assume 100% accuracy every time.

EBS has confirmed that software development is a probability.

Final thoughts

_Photo by [Felix Plakolb](https://unsplash.com/@felix_plakolb" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=") via Unsplash

For practical reasons, we still give clients an estimated delivery date for a project. We also invite our clients into a Basecamp projects so they know what we are working on each week.

When a company or developer (colleagues included!) gives you a project estimation, don’t just look at total days. Regardless of project length, ask for estimates broken down into features, and past records for project ship dates. Understand how a team does their project estimations first, and then factor that in to the long-term budgeting for your product.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, please hit the clap button so more people see it. Thank you!

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