How do I find time?

I am often asked the question: "How do you find time?". Most often it is about open source, sometimes about books, occasionally - about other things. Usually I evaded the answer with something like: “Damn, I don't know, I just take it and find it .” But this answer is not very useful. Yes, and I was wondering if I could cope with time even better. So I reflected a little bit, and this is how I find time:

Min / max

I have the same personality type that is inherent in any competitive player: Dungeons and Dragons lovers call this “min / maxing”. The basic idea is this: you try to minimize what is bad and maximize what is good. It sounds super obvious, but there are many situations in which “victory” is not your goal. A good example is “try to be a fabulous traveler.” If you are not aiming strictly at winning, then using min / maxing makes no sense. But if you want to compete, it is incredibly important.



Speaking of competitions, I advise you to read this book:





Playing to Win is a great book written by one of the world's best players in Street Fighter. This is a Mastride for anyone who wants a competition at any cost.



In this book, the author develops the theory of "Players" and "Slacks":

A weakling is one who voluntarily limits himself to rules about which the game knows nothing.

It is very easy to understand that someone is a weakling when he starts a conversation about "honesty." A game is an impartial, closed system. There are rules of this system that impose restrictions on players. It's simple, the more rules, the harder it is to achieve the conditions necessary for victory. If you come up with additional rules, you put yourself at a disadvantage. Games are not "fair." Players do not limit themselves in this way:

The player must use any reception allowed in the tournament that maximizes his chances of winning the game.

If admission is allowed, then the game is fair. Good games are written in such a way that there are no bad moves. Use all tools available to you, and use them mercilessly.



I will say one thing about thinking wimps: it is very easy to resort to it by chance. Additional rules may be imposed on themselves, but they may also appear due to poor analysis of what the rules really are. For example, the biggest manifestation of my inner weakling in my whole life was a choice that I made almost ten years ago: entering college. Every adult around me told me that higher education was a good idea. They all said that it was necessary to get a job as a programmer. I did not argue with them and put up with it. Now I have a useless piece of paper and $ 70,000 debt. The college was not bad at all, but it was definitely not worth the debt. I appreciate dating, which I made, but no more. This mistake was made due to my apathy towards the system governing my life, which I try not to repeat.



In any case, these two principles are the background for everything else: properly analyze the situation you are in, maximize the results you want, and minimize those you don't need.

Job

“So what do you want in life, Steve?”

- I want to teach, I want to work on open source and I want to travel.

- It seems we can come up with something.



If you work a full day, you spend 40 hours a week doing it. Let's also add another hour to the road, and in the end we have 50 hours.



And as ruby ​​suggests ...

1.9.3-p194 :001 > 24 * 7 => 168 1.9.3-p194 :002 > 50 / 168.0 => 0.297619047619048 

This is 30% of your life. Let's analyze this as professional gamers. Here is the situation that we want to maximize: "I want to live a full life." To maximize this, you need to explore the limitations. The biggest of them, of course, is the time allotted to you on this Earth. In the end, we all die someday. The main resource we have to work with is time. You have to protect your time much more reliably than anything else you own. You will never bring him back. Your every action consumes this most valuable resource.



When you sign an employment contract, you literally sell the most valuable thing you have to acquire other resources. Do not forget about it.



So, work from nine to five. 30% of your life. Is it worth it? Maybe! I can't tell you that. But to maximize your results, you need proper analysis. In this regard, employment is quite a complicated thing. Capitalism forces us to interact with the market in order to receive our livelihood, so we must somehow take part in this transaction. What to do?



Well, quickly, gentlemen, startups: what is the first rule of pricing? If you say “you need to be based on value, not value,” then you won the patio sticker11 . You will never achieve anything, if you sell yourself by the hour, you have to sell yourself. This topic will be discussed another time. The basic idea is that you should not just take the rules for granted: analyze the situation for real.



And vseravno, neither there nor here. In a daily perspective, the only reason I can do what I do is that Jeff is a friend you can rely on and work at Jumpstart Lab is very cool. We do the best lessons on Ruby on Rails in the world, I emphasize that. I do not want to go into the details of my employment, but in fact, teaching, contributing to open source and speaking at conferences is all part of my work. You can see how directly this corresponds to what I stated above.



So, if you value

• My work on Hackety Hack
• My Contributions to Rails
• My contributions to Resque
• My public speaking
• The rest of the open source I'm busy with
• My work in defense of feminism and social justice

then you should think about hiring us through jumpstart. If I had to do the usual consulting to pay the bills, I would have much less time for all these things.

But I do not work in Jumpstart!

So you are not me. You are at work from nine to five. You got it, right?



No, no! Analyze your situation. Understand how to maximize it. Before I started developing, I did it . About 30 hours a week in high school, and about 40 hours a week in college. And I still manage to invest in open source time. How?



The fact is that the work on open source is the one that I really love. For me, this is not a “job”. This does not mean that it always blooms and smells. Sometimes hard. Sometimes it's terrible. Heavy. However, I really love it, so I broke through difficult times and everything eventually became good again. Once I experienced a very difficult break. My mother told me an aphorism, which her grandmother constantly repeated to her:

No dog will carry you the bone.

Grandma They are so insightful! The bottom line is that contributors to Open Source are part of me, no matter what. So I will always find a way to deal with them. I do not give up without a fight. When I first started working on Shoes, it took me six months to figure out how to compile all this. Six months. No compilation. Sucks. But I figured it out.

Eighty percent of success is to budge.

Woody Allen

Relations

Living life to the fullest means interacting with other people. Do not give any productivity fetish to negatively affect relationships. I mean both meanings, both romantic and friendly;) In your schedule there should be a place not only for "HOLY GOD, LET ME HAVE TO FIND THE WORK IN TERM !!! 11". For example, I try to talk with my soulmate a couple of times a day. If she has a desire. Tonight I'm going to ride a bike on the beach. I still play StarCraft from time to time. Every Saturday my friends and I gathered in a computer class and hacked to pieces.



If you spend all your time at work, and not a minute to live your life, then your life has failed. Open Source is fun, but go outside, damn it. Or read a book. Or do something else. But if you only do what you program computers, then you have ceased to be human.

Music

Listen to cool music while you work. I first discovered this when I cut the lawn of my parents: when I listened to Metallica, the grass was cut more quickly. So, while I work, I listen to lousy pop music. Here is my channel on Pandora . It seems to me that optimistic, happy music makes me optimistic and happy. I stopped being ashamed of my love for Ke $ ha. I just shake my head and write more code.

Let in parallel

In fact, I cannot be productive without doing six things at once. This refers to "Structured Procrastination . " I do a small amount of work on a bunch of different things, and quickly switch between them. One day it's Rails, another is Resque, the third is learning, then the rails again, then Hackety ...

lift.do

Most recently, I tried Lift , and I really liked it. You can cultivate your habits through easy social interaction. You may find it useful.

Cut the distractions

I listed a bunch of things that I do to maximize a good result, but how about minimizing the bad? In the interests of minimization, I will not focus too much on this, but here are some things that I temporarily or permanently cut off from myself, in one way or another:

• Television
• Reddit / HN
• Mobile phones
• Video games

Periodically, I suffer from any of this, but I cut out the listed things from my “daily” cycle. My life is better without it. Find what you don't really need and stop it.







;)