Rock Hymas

So I realized the other day that I was getting up at the same time each morning, doing more, and getting to work earlier. I thought I’d share how I did it. First, you should know that my morning routine is important. I try to spend some time praying and studying the scriptures, plan my day, then do the standard stuff: eat, shower, spend some time with my family, and leave for work. In the past I always got caught wasting time in the middle of all this following blogs, watching new movie trailers, reading a good book, or getting distracted in any number of other ways. I knew it was a problem and I tried to fix it by “focusing” more, pushing through the things that were important, etc. It never worked for very long and my old habits came back.

But I realized this morning that all that changed a couple months ago and I didn’t even notice. I now get to work earlier, get more done in the morning, rarely give in to the distractions, and, most importantly, feel way better about the way the day is going as I arrive at work. This means that my “private victory” each morning is happening. Instead of arriving at work feeling like a failure because I’m late, or because I didn’t get anything done before coming in, or whatever, I now get to work and I’m able to focus on my work, knowing that all that morning stuff got done.

You’re probably wondering what my secret is.

And you’re getting mad because I’m dragging this out and not telling you.

Ok, I’ll tell you.

I decided to do more.

Yep. I decided I just needed to add a few more things to my morning routine. Ok, actually just one thing, but it usually takes 30-60 minutes. Despite that I’m getting more done, going to work on time each day, and doing so with more energy. You may wonder what this magical new activity is. But there is nothing magical about it. Unless it’s magical because I really like to do it and I’ve made a commitment to do it. But everybody has something like that. I think the only magical thing about it is that I decided it was important enough to do each day, and do early to make sure it happens.

For me, it’s running. Yep, I’ve been going running each morning for the last couple months and I’m still doing all those other things, and I’m getting to work earlier. I’ve run a couple marathons and loved to run in high school, but it’s been years since I ran regularly or towards a goal. But I’ve committed myself to run a marathon by the end of the year, and I’m on track. I’ve run 46 days straight without missing a day (excluding Sundays). I’ve worked up from my first week’s mileage of 5 whopping miles to 12 whopping miles. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s part of my commitment to keep going. I’m NOT going to increase mileage so fast that I get burnt out, injured, or bored. I’ve also found a friend to run with in the last couple weeks and that has helped me to keep going.

Of course, if you want to get more done in the morning running probably isn’t going to cut it, though it might. The key is to find something that is important to you that you’re not prioritizing like you should. For me, it was running. For you, it might be photography, or practicing an instrument, or working on a coding project on the side, or riding your bike, or reading great literature (or not so great literature), or woodworking, or whatever. The main thing to recognize is that when you put your priorities in the right order, life is just smoother. The important things get done, the less important things are more clearly less important, and you’re happier about everything you do. By starting your day with the “first things first” you set the tone for the whole day. And anticipating that each night can make it easier to prepare accordingly. I’ve started getting all my running gear ready each night, and I’m going to bed earlier so that I’m ready to go when the alarm goes off.

So now it’s your turn. Ask yourself: what do I need to make a higher priority in my life? How can I work on that a little each morning? And then go do it. You’ll be happier.

So, my last post was all about how I’m trying to become more productive by learning a set of keyboard shortcuts that I can use for faster text/code editing. In this post, I’m going to argue against the premise that it could actually make you faster. The reasons I’ll outline include opportunity costs, lack of portability, anything else? Well, we’ll see, won’t we.

First, opportunity costs. Yes, the dirty little secret about using keyboard shortcuts is that it takes time to learn them. The same could be said of command line interfaces. The main reason that most users (i.e. non-power users, those poor souls) don’t use keyboard shortcuts, or command line interfaces, is because of the learning curve. And there is an obvious learning curve. I’ve spent too much of the last couple days working to remember the keyboard shortcuts and use them a lot so I can make them habits. “But wait!” you say, “It’s an investment!”. Sure, ok, I can buy that. Now let’s look at the numbers to see what the payoff on that investment is. This page seems to indicate that you could save 16 hours a year by using keyboard shortcuts. Two whole workdays. Um, that’s not much when you consider that it probably takes more than two full workdays to develop the muscle memory needed to really gain that much time savings. So you won’t really start to see a return until you’ve been doing it for a couple years. Of course, others state that the mouse really is faster, so I’m not sure why I even argued that point. Okey, I know, the point is that the mouse is faster for people who haven’t yet built up that muscle memory. But then again, maybe not.

Ok, now let’s talk about opportunity costs. What else could you do with the time invested in memorizing keyboard shortcuts and making their use habitual? Wisely invested, a few days each year could let you read lots of books, take training courses or attend seminars, develop personal productivity tools (more on this in a future post), start learning a new programming language, or listen to the 1000 songs that can fit on your iPod nano. Doh, I mean your Zune.
Anyway, the next challenge is portability. Sure, you might learn all the cool keyboard shortcuts for vim, or emacs, or Visual Studio, or whatever. But you can’t then use them in the others, or in Notepad, or a web browser, or a mail program, or whatever. Even the really basic navigation ones, much less the more interesting ones and potentially useful ones. This actually makes using other programs more difficult once you’ve mastered a lot of app specific shortcuts. Unless you want to go the route of the “Emacs As Operating System“, which may actually have benefits, but only for a very small subset of people.

Basically, those who would use Emacs As Operating System are people with a great memory. Those who can memorize, either in the head or in their muscles, thousands of useful commands. The rest of us are ok with a JIT use of commands. We find them and use them when we need them. Keyboard shortcuts are useful for commands we use more often then once an hour. That can actually include quite a lot of commands if you’re a developer who lives in a text editor of some type most of the day. But it probably doesn’t extend much beyond that. And trying to develop muscle memory of commands used less frequently will be very difficult.

Wow, I think I talked myself out of my latest project. Guess I’ll have to go find some other way to save 16 hours a year…

It’s time to buy a new phone. One of the cool benefits at Microsoft is discounts on phones and phone plans from most major carriers. So when my contract is up I go back to the discount web site to see what the latest deals are and if I should get a new phone. My current phone is a T-Mobile SDA that is falling apart because I dropped it when running across a parking lot in the rain. It’s a great little phone, but it would be nice to have one without a dorky rubber band around it. However, I have noticed other people with pretty beat up SDAs, so they must be reliably durable. However, having used it for a year and a half now, there are definitely some things I don’t like about it.

• Candybar style. It’s just to bulky to put in my pocket, so I carry it around in belt clip, but I’d much rather have it in my pocket. The candy bar shape also requires that I lock the keys (which I don’t) or I randomly call numbers consisting of an odd mix of 0’s and *’s. So yes, I randomly call numbers consisting of an odd mix of 0’s and *’s cause locking the keypad is too much of a hassle.
• No secondary display. I loved being able to look at my last phone (a flip phone) and see the time, missed call information, and number of messages. Now I have to push a key to get that and the information is mixed in with random stuff that the window mobile software puts on the home screen.
• Four useless buttons. Yes, I know there are hacks to customize the SDA’s media buttons, but again, I’m too lazy to do it. So I use the speed dial, which, instead of being speedy, requires me to hold down a button for a long time. Its better than nothing for launching key apps (Calendar, OneNote Mobile), but it could be so much better.
• Very tiny, but important, buttons. The home button, back button, and the two soft keys should not be the smallest buttons on the phone. And certainly not smaller than the media buttons. I’ll throw in here that the power button is difficult to use.

So yes, it could be better. Most of my qualms are with the hardware. However, I think the truly useful benefits and changes to phones could be done in the software. Before going further let me deal with the iPhone thing. The iPhone seems really cool. However, I doubt I’ll ever get one. Even if they sync with my outlook perfectly, have a flip phone, all that stuff. I just don’t want or need something so complicated. The same critique applies to the Windows Mobile phones out there. I want a phone that does three or four things perfectly.

• Making phone calls. I don’t make a ton of phone calls, but when I do I want it to be seamless, fluid. I want a nice big number keypad with good feedback when I hit the buttons. I want an integrated list of recent calls (in and out), my contacts, etc. Modern phones basically have this list working well enough for me. But most phones don’t have a good keypad, least of all the iPhone.
• Provide reminders. I want my phone to synchronize with all my calendars (home outlook, work outlook, etc.) and remind me of appointments and tasks. It should also be very easy to add one-off reminders for a relative or absolute time in the future. Those should be synced back to the appropriate calendar also.
• Provide a recording service. But I’m not just talking about the wimpy voice recorder found in Windows Mobile. I want a button on my phone that kicks off recording so that I can instantly start talking. Once that happens, I want a list on the screen of things to do with the recording. The default, for me, would be to put it in my email inbox so that I can be reminded of it. Other possibilities would include making it a task, an appointment, emailing it, etc. Each of these would be preconfigured and would take just one more button click. If I just hit the “End Call” button it should do the default one. And for each of those it should run voice recognition, extract the best guess as to what I said and include both the text and the voice recording.
• Provide voice access to information. I not only want the increasingly competitive 411 services automatically added to the speed dial (and a good speed dial would be nice), but I want a 411 service that allows me to access some of my own information that is in the cloud. I should be able to ask questions about my schedule, retrieve notes (like my wife’s library card number, which is currently in OneNote Mobile), and check for urgent emails.
• Preferably a slim flip phone. I want to put it in my pocket. I want to have an external display with the time and information about missed calls and appointments.

It’s important to note what I left out. I do not want

• An internet browser. They’re too much of a temptation when I’m sitting at my desk. I don’t need that with me all the time.
• A camera. I’m not a picture taker. If I were, I’d want a decent camera with me also, not a significantly degraded phone experience. That said, I’ll take a camera in my phone if it is very much a secondary feature.
• Driving directions, games, instant messaging, videos, a calculator, etc. Whenever something here is useful, it should be rethought as a phone number service I can call. Just as there are web services for many existing desktop apps, so most mobile apps should be phone services with voice as the main UI. Any time I need to enter text it should be possible to do so with my voice and decent voice recognition software, either on the phone or over the line.

At this point I don’t think there is a phone that meets my needs. I’ll probably settle for something that handles phone calls reasonably well, syncs my calendars, and is a flip phone. And it will have a bunch of stuff I don’t need or care about. But I can dream, right?

Because I’ve been working to develop myself as a professional software engineer, I recently read Designing Learning by by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. It inspired me to go a little further and write down a specific plan for the things I want to learn and how I’ll learn them. Then I noticed that the meme has been making its way around the blogosphere. Ok, now I feel like a copycat. That’s out of the loop. Ah well. I’ll be documenting my plan and how well I follow it here on this blog. I’ll also be using the blog to record things I learn and my thoughts about them.

Just for background, here’s a bit about my current state as a developer. While, I don’t consider myself a great developer, I do want to improve more than most of those I know. At work I code in C++ and do some powershell scripting.

After brainstorming, I’ve decided that the areas where I would like to focus my learning are:

• .NET framework and C#
• TDD and unit testing
• Software classics - CS theory and software engineering especially
• MicroISV and software entrepreneurship
• Automating everything
• Other programming languages, such as Erlang
• Regular reading of journals and magazines, such as Dr. Dobbs

I will be using the following proven techniques to learn:

• Reading (includes watching presentations)
• Writing
• Projects
• Experiments
• Discussion with others

So I’ve chosen 5 specific things to do that include a mix of the things I want to learn and the techniques for learning.

1. Project: Write unit tests for EGX, begin TDD, avoid Mocks
2. Read one article, book chapter, etc per day (at work or on commute)
3. Write about what I’ve read about on blog, even if it’s just a link and a note
4. Experiment: Spend a day thinking about every activity I do, and how it could be automated
5. Discussion: After reading an article or two, talk to David about starting a MicroISV

And to make sure it happens, I’ll do the following in the next few weeks:

1. Do an hour of EGX development on each driving day of my vacation
2. List chapter, article, etc. to read on Joe’s Goals each morning
3. Joe’s Goals checkbox for writing about reading
4. Spend tomorrow considering how I could automate everything I do
5. Find some MicroISV articles to read on vacation, forward to David

Moderation is a quality that I would say I lack. The Oxford English Dictionary defines moderation in this way:

avoidance of excess or extremes in behaviour; temperateness, self-control, restraint.

The specific example I’m thinking about at the moment is eating. Although I’ve never been fat, I have definitely been prone to eating more than is healthy. Around the holidays I would get sluggish, cranky, and apathetic because I filled up on junk food and didn’t eat anything healthy. During the rest of the year I ate healthier (out of site, out of mind), but still ate too much. As my life has become busier and I haven’t made time to run on a daily basis, that meant I started to gain weight. While it was slow gain, after a few years the pounds add up and I was having to buy clothes that were a different size. I felt fat, though I know I didn’t necessarily look it.

During the time I was gaining weight I became acutely aware of my problems around the holidays - they just weren’t fun when I felt drugged up on chocolate, sugar, and grease. So, immoderately, I forswore candy and chocolate. Initially, I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up, but as the weeks and months passed I gained a sense of self-control that I had never had before. It felt great. Of course, I had to put up with my wife heckling me because now she had to eat all the chocolate and candy and knew it wasn’t healthy for her. I also didn’t eat some of the things she loved to make for me. And when Christmas came around again, she struggled to come up with treats to fill my stocking with. Besides all this, she wasn’t sure whether to be proud in public situations when her husband declined candy or chocolate, or to be embarrassed.

I ultimately kept up the chocolate and candy ban for over a year. Why did I go back? Well, when it came down to it, living without chocolate and candy wasn’t very fun. However, about a year later I knew it was time for a change again. I couldn’t seem to enjoy chocolate and candy in moderation. But I could abstain completely, or risk going overboard. This time I only banned candy, and kept it up until I started trying to lose weight. Then I promised myself I could eat as much candy as I wanted once I hit the bottom of my target weight range, and do so as long as I was within that range. But after just a couple months of that I was reminded (again!) of how crummy it made me feel, no matter how much I weighed. So I’m off candy again. So that gives you an idea of my problems with junk food.

Now back to losing weight. You might imagine that when I noticed that I was eating too much I would start fasting until I hit my target weight. It sure felt like, because I started Weight Watchers, and that reduces your caloric intake (well, mine anyway) by about half. Fortunately, I didn’t take it too far (hunger is very powerful), but was able to get down to my target weight in about three months. As I did that I developed the habit of checking my weight on a daily basis. I know that this is more frequently than necessary, but it gave me motivation each day when I was hungrier than normal.

Now, almost six months later, I’m still well within my target weight range and I’m able to eat pretty much what I want. The key, I’ve found, is the daily measurement. By doing that it’s easy to see over a week or so, if I’m starting to head up and to correct course. For me, the daily measurement is just enough incentive. And because I’m doing it, I feel very free to eat whatever I want (candy excluded for other reasons). So I have no qualms chowing down at a restaurant or filling up when Kami makes my favorite food.

The key to my success in keeping the weight off, so far, has been daily measurement. So I’ve been thinking about what it means to use regular measurement as an aid in developing moderation. Of course, my daily weighing is more than just measurement - it is a negative feedback loop. If my weight starts to creep up, my natural desire to stay on target moves me to restrict my eating a little bit to fix the problem. Because I’m measuring daily “fixing the problem” is fairly easy to do, and doesn’t require a lot of self-control or discipline like the initial weight loss did. Tight negative feedback loops are how nature is able to moderate its processes, and the same is true for us humans.

One trick to setting up effective negative feedback loops to moderate our own behavior is tuning the feedback to our weaknesses. For me, just knowing how my weight is changing, combined with my natural desire, is enough to move me to start tightening my intake. However, I know that I need something more powerful if I want to attempt moderation in my candy eating. I would need the feedback to make me quickly and significantly unhappy in some way, or I’d just keep eating.

Another trick is to make the feedback come automatically. If I have to do too much to get the feedback I need, I’ll just tend to avoid it so I can keep eating candy (or whatever it is). Fortunately, weighing myself was done on a daily basis and became a habit. It didn’t seem directly related to eating food, so I didn’t have any desire to avoid it. It worked out well for me. In general though, I think this can be very challenging when it comes to personal habits that we want to moderate. It tends to be easier to abstain completely or indulge completely.

For certain habits and certain people a tool like Joe’s Goals might be just right, though it does require some work to record how you did on a daily basis. Ultimately, though, I think the real gains are going to be in areas where you can find a way to make the feedback more automatic, and the feedback response the correct strength to make the change happen. That said, I really need to wrap this up so I can go invent a machine that will shock me every time I eat more than one piece of candy in a day…

Thanks to blogosphere commentary on my last post, I found out about Take Back Your Brain, a whole blog devoted to advertising to yourself. This is awesome, and just wanted to let everyone know about it.

I recently read J.D.’s post at Get Rich Slowly warning us to Beware the Insidious Power of Marketing. It reminded me of the power of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel to influence our actions, even in ways we are unaware of. Advertising takes advantage of this by doing it’s best to subtly move us closer to making that next purchase, to buying just one more whatchamacallit, to “investing” in a bigger home, a faster car, or a nicer computer. However, the power of advertising and marketing can be used for good too. The concepts behind effective advertising are fairly simple psychological principles. Because they are being used by people to make a living, the application of the principles of psychology to influence behavior has been studied and perfected over many years. We can take advantage of those principles in our lives to change our own behavior just as effectively as the advertisers do.

Personally, this means that I try to surround myself with “advertising” for my goals. The idea is embodied in lifehacker’s recommendation to make a collage to get motivated. They don’t talk about doing anything more than just making one, partly because that can be so motivating by itself. But of course, you’d need (well, I’d need) something more frequent and regular to fight the advertising designed to get us to eat a lot. Make sure to put the collage up somewhere that you’ll see it every day, preferably many times a day. Trust me, that’s cheaper, timewise and magazine-wise, than making a collage every day.

Of course, making a collage is not the only way you can advertise to yourself. Something I’ve started doing is listening to motivational talks by men and women I admire. Podcasts about hobbies you want to spend more time on can be just what you need to actually do something about it. I can’t tell you how many times in the last few months I’ve been listening to a podcast on the commute home and made a note to myself about something I should change or do. When I follow through on that, I feel great. Even better, when I don’t I’m usually reminded of it the next day or the next week by another podcast.

And that’s exactly what advertisers are trying to do. They fill your head with ideas of things to buy and then incessantly remind you about them. They often do it by claiming, explicitly or implicitly, that if you just have their product, then you’ll be rich, famous, in control, powerful, funny, cool, athletic, healthy, happy, relaxed, or whatever. Of course, owning a given product doesn’t make you that person, or we could all be perfect by taking on enough debt. And a perfect person could pay off the debt easily, right?

But wait, aren’t I recommending that you advertise to yourself in order to become all those things and more? Frankly, yes, if that’s what you want. However, the key to advertising to yourself is finding out what it really takes to change. If your goal is to run a marathon, then advertise that goal to yourself in a way that actually helps. Some of that advertising can be “awareness” based, just to regularly remind you of your goal. At least some of it should link that goal to the actual steps required to acheiving it. And by this I don’t mean buying the latest, most expensive running shoes that you saw in the mailer from your local sports shop. The key is finding ways to link the euphoria that you’re sure will accompany accomplishment of your goal to the sometimes hard-to-do things that are required.

Of course, advertising for real products can be used when you’re doing this. Some of the most inspiring stuff out there is in the form of advertisements, such as Nike’s Move commercial. Just don’t feel like you have to buy Nike’s shoes in order to move. And the tools now exist to make exposing yourself to this great stuff, whether it’s commercial advertising or not, very easy.

Speaking of tools, I have to admit that my MP3 player died a couple weeks ago, and I’ve gotten so used to my personal advertising during the commute that listening to the radio is a trial. In my mind, it’s well worth the investment to buy a new MP3 player, because it’s an investment in myself.
The key for me to remember is

“If I can market to myself the person I want to be, slowly but surely I can become that person.”

I’ll have to post that quote on my mirror or something…