I get asked about this at least twice a week, so I thought I’d save myself some
time by writing a blog post I can reference instead of answering the same
question repeatedly (spoiler, this is one of my secrets).
To help give you context, here are some of the things I do on a fairly regular
basis these days:
- I teach Sunday school to ~6 nine-year-old kids (we’re going through the
Old Testament this year). In addition to
attending 3 hours of church, I also prepare and deliver a one hour lesson for
them every other week. - On Sundays I generally don’t commit any code or do any “work.” I have church
and family time and responsibilities (though I do enjoy spending the evening
with
new friends playing Dominion) - On Mondays, I publish the blogpost newsletter from two weeks ago to
kentcdodds.com/blog, a new one for subscribers.
(~1.5 hours of work, depending…) - Product tasks (currently helping work on paypal.me) (this
is normally where most of my weekday is spent) - Attend work meetings
- Help people on slack/video chat
- Work on paypal-scripts (among other internal
libraries and tools) - traveling/training (about once a quarter. I’m on an airplane right now for
such an engagement) - Research, prepare, and do a
DevTips with Kent livestream (~20 minutes…
sometimes) (week-daily) - Respond to literally dozens of GitHub issues/PRs (daily)
- Code up or help people code up solutions to the GitHub issues
- Release ~5 of any of my >100 npm modules multiple times a day
- Travel to (sometimes) and speak at a conference (about once or twice a month)
- Travel to (sometimes) and deliver a 1–2 day workshop on one of five topics I
regularly train about. - Record egghead.io lessons and courses (working on some of
this very hard core right now) - Research and prepare educational material (for
talks/workshops/courses/devtips/etc.) - Go out to lunch with a (new) friend in the community about once a week
- Outline and prepare for writing my novel for
NaNoWriMo (which is going to be epic by the way). - AMA: Ask Me Anything (currently has 475 questions I’ve
answered). - TechChats: livestream video chats with people
about tech (about once a month or so). - Publish a 3 minute podcast (on 3 minutes with Kent)
- Be a guest on podcasts (about once a month or so).
- Respond to literally dozens of questions per day coming from Tweets (mostly),
Twitter DMs (several daily), Slack, email, YouTube comments, and pigeon (one
of those is a joke).
On top of all that, I’m married, have 4 kids (6 and younger) and a puppy, and
have a home and yard/garden to care for.
A typical day
Let me share a fairly general weekday with you:
Normally I wake up at ~7:00 AM and I’m ready for work by ~9:00 AM. I sit at my
desk (I work from home) and start with my daily scripture study for a few
minutes. Then I power on the computer, and start with my email and twitter (the
stuff I hadn’t addressed while brushing my teeth etc. 😅). If I’m aware of any
pressing work, I’ll take care of that first. If it’s Monday, I’ll make sure my
blog post is published, then start working on this week’s blogpost newsletter.
Then I do the DevTips with Kent livestream.
By this time it’s normally ~10:00 AM (or later on Mondays/if there’s pressing
work I had to do first). It’s likely that I’ve already released one or two new
versions of my npm modules, answered a half dozen questions, and
responded/reviewed several GitHub issues/PRs. Now I start on whatever PayPal
product work I’m working on (as I mentioned, I’m helping with
paypal.me right now). I meet with my co-workers and decide
the highest priority tasks and get to work on them.
At ~12:00 PM (often later if I’m really involved in something), I go up and have
lunch with my family. If he’s not already in bed, I read a book to one of my
boys and put him down for a nap (working from home is the best). My lunch break
is normally ~30 minutes.
I spend the afternoon working on more PayPal stuff, meetings, helping answer
questions from all the various channels (and sadly ignoring many of them as I
have work to do), and releasing more versions of various OSS libraries/tools.
I wrap up the day between 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM and head upstairs. It’s family
time. Often I’ll hang out with my wife after the kids are in bed. Sometimes
though, if I’m working on a big course for egghead.io or
something, I’ll go back to my office and start working on that. Normally I’ll go
to bed before 11:00 PM.
Saturdays are mostly yard work and family time. I don’t normally do much
coding on Saturdays. Sundays are family and church time. I very rarely do any
work on Sundays (occasionally I’ll merge simple PRs from my phone or get a head
start on this newsletter).
If this schedule sounds set in stone or a solid routine, let me assure you it’s
not. What I’ve written is a pretty general schedule that wasn’t really planned
and is just what kinda happened. In any case, I hope it helps to frame the rest
of my advice in a way that’s relatable and helpful to you.
It’s an illusion
If you read carefully, you’ll notice that I do a bunch of my stuff when I’m on
the clock at PayPal. That’s because the stuff I do is good for PayPal and my
bosses have appreciated that I do it. Just last week I had multiple different
engineers within PayPal thank me for the daily
DevTips with Kent livestreams and
these newsletters. PayPal is happy that I’m sharing my
knowledge and so long as what I share is not proprietary/legally concerning/etc,
they’re happy to let me continue doing that. (You could say this newsletter is
sponsored by PayPal! Thanks PayPal!).
PayPal employees also use a bunch of the open source software that I maintain.
So when I’m doing work on my open source projects during work hours, 90% of the
time it’s because we have a problem within PayPal that needs solving and I’m
just doing my job to make PayPal engineers more effective. Some of my projects
are libraries that I created at PayPal and then open sourced while others are
projects I created outside of my time at PayPal and now PayPal engineers use. In
either case, working on those projects (and contributing to other projects of
which I’m not a maintainer), is all part of my job.
So when people ask me: “HOW DO YOU DO ALL THIS STUFF AND HAVE A JOB AT
PAYPAL!?” My answer is: “well… a lot of this stuff is my job at PayPal.”
This brings me to my next point:
Increase the impact of your value
We’re all constantly creating value in the world. A conversation with your
co-worker over lunch about why, what, and how to do a git rebase is creating
value. A meetup talk you’re delivering is creating value. etc. etc. etc. The
secret that I’ve found is taking the value that you’re already creating, and
increase its impact by preserving and presenting it to the world.
So turn that conversation into a blog post or have that conversation over Google
Hangouts on Air and have it upload to YouTube automatically (which is what my
tech chats are). Make sure your meetup talk is
recorded (even if that means you’re just recording your screen, which I do all
the time). Instead of answering your co-worker’s slack question about arrow
functions on slack, type it out as a quick blog post on medium, a gist, or a 🔥
FIRE 🔥 TWEET 🔥 and send them the link.
As long as your company is cool with you sharing non-proprietary knowledge with
the world, then take advantage of that (as a side note, I would have a very hard
time being successful at a company which does not value open knowledge sharing
like this. I know it’s a privilege to work at a company like PayPal. Sorry if
you’re not in an environment like PayPal in this way.)
In short learn in public
(I love you Shawn!). It’s likely that if you listed
out all the things you do in a week your list would be just as long if not
longer than mine. The thing that makes it appear that I am so productive is that
I make public as much of what I do as possible.
Automation
If you maintain an npm package, it may surprise you (or you may be skeptical of
the fact) that I manage to release multiple versions of multiple packages in a
typical day. Believe me though, I release almost every PR made on my open source
projects within minutes of my merging them into master, and often I do so from
my phone.
This is possible because my open source projects have a solid suite of tests
that run in CI and give me confidence things are working followed by an
automation script that publishes to npm and generates a GitHub changelog. For
years I’ve been using an awesome tool called
semantic-release
(shoutout to
the team of fantastic humans)
to automatically release my packages.
The concept of automation is something
I’ve written about in the past. It’s how I got into software
development and I feel strongly that automation is the way we can make ourselves
more productive
(even if it takes longer to develop the automation than the time it would save us).
If you find yourself repeatedly doing a task, see if there’s a simple way to
automate it. (Like
what I do for creating my kcd.im/ short urls
+
shorten
😄, which happens to be another form of automation and productivity boost
because short URLs are easier/faster to give to people, and people remember them
better).
Enable others
Many of those releases of my open source projects I do are releasing code that I
did not write. I put forth an investment of time in helping
and teaching other people contribute to my
projects and do things
to help motivate people to do so. This means that I’m able to do more because
other people handle a lot of project maintenance for me so I can do other
things.
Don’t answer the same question twice
I learned early on that people ask me repeat questions early on. I like to give
them answers, but I also found out quickly that
I don’t have time to answer everyone and it’s a bit
frustrating to answer the same question multiple times. This is why having
an active blog and an AMA are super helpful.
If someone asks me a question, 99% of the time I’ll ask them to ask it on my
AMA. If I get the same question many times, then I’ll make it the subject of a
DevTip or blog. Having multiple places/formats I can go to answer people’s
questions in public does four things:
- Allows me to answer their question
- Allows others to see that answer (increases the impact of the value I’m
creating) - Gives me motivation to give them a higher quality answer.
- Gives me a link to share with the next person who asks (which is way faster
than writing it out again)
I guess it also contributes to the illusion that I’m doing more and I’m more
productive. I’m sure you answer a lot of questions as well, but how does anyone
know if you don’t share?
Avoiding Burnout
When I tweeted that this would be the subject of today’s newsletter, my good
friend Mark Dalgleish
responded:
I honestly don’t think that I’ve ever truly burned out. I’ve only been doing
this software thing professionally for ~4 years, so maybe that’s why. I’ve
definitely burned out on specific projects or frameworks, but I’ve generally
been able to keep moving and doing things that keep me excited and provide value
to the world while taking care of myself and my relationships.
I should probably do this subject better justice in another blog post, but I’ll
just say that in general what I do to avoid burnout is to not do stuff I don’t
have to do or want to do. I’ve learned and internalized that I don’t owe anyone
anything unless I’ve made an actual commitment of marriage/employment/etc. So
while I try to be kind and helpful, at the end of the day if I can’t help, then
I don’t and I don’t stress over it.
For example, there are many open issues on my GitHub projects that get no
response from me because I’ve chosen to give my time to other things I’d rather
do. I do feel bad I can’t do more, but I don’t stress over it.
This subject isn’t all that simple, but that’s all I have time for (and I’m not
going to stress over not giving you more because I don’t owe you anything 😜
#seewhatididthere).
Hyper-focused
I’ve listed pretty much everything I do. You may have noticed that I don’t have
many hobbies. This is true. I have a few things that I do for fun, but it pretty
much all boils down to: Family, Religion, and Coding.
Even though this is working out so far, I don’t believe this is sustainable.
This is one reason why I’m so excited about writing this novel for
NaNoWriMo. It’ll be a new creative outlet. And
hopefully by November I’ll be done with most of
the HUGE things I’m working
on so I can dedicate myself to writing 50,000 words in 30 days 🙂
That said, I think short bursts of hyper-focus do help me get a lot done.
Whether I’m hyper-focused on an egghead.io course, or
getting something specific done at work, it helps me get things done. I’m not
sure how to explain it, but for me hyper-focus means that I kinda don’t think
about anything else for a while. When I’m not with my family or fulfilling
another commitment, I’m thinking about and working on this thing until it’s
done.
I didn’t explain that well and should probably remove this section, but I’m not
gonna. Maybe it’ll be helpful for someone.
Continued: Turns out this was helpful to a few people so I thought I’d
expound on this a tiny bit (and my wife suggested that I do as well because she
thinks this makes a significant impact on who I am (not necessarily that it’s a
desirable trait).
So this necessarily isn’t a short-term kind of thing, it doesn’t prevent me from
sleeping well at night (though sometimes I do have trouble shutting my brain
off, most of the time I sleep fine). This also isn’t the same as staying focused
and on-task during a period of several hours when I’m trying to get something
done (something that I’m typically not very good at doing unless I’m very
excited about it).
This hyper-focus is pretty much that I immerse myself in the subject for a
period of time. As an example, since I decided that I want to write this novel a
few weeks ago, I’ve found a TON of content online about tools novel writers use
to make their books “work” and I’ve been consuming it at a rapid rate. It’s
filled my idle mind. I’m still able to turn my attention to my family, my work,
or courses that I’m working on, but when I’m doing mundane tasks and my brain is
able to think freely, it’s consumed by the idea of the novel itself and learning
tools that I can apply when I start writing it in November. Ask my wife. If
we’re not talking about something that’s actually important, then I’ll
inevitably turn the conversation over to the book (and she’s been
extremely helpful).
I don’t have tips of how you can develop this in yourself, and I’m not even sure
that I would recommend it. It’s just something that I do that my wife and I
think may have something to do with my productivity.
Spend more time producing than consuming
I do not spend a lot of time watching other people’s courses or reading other
people’s blogs/newsletters. I definitely will skim blog posts as needed, or I’ll
sit down and watch a few egghead.io lessons or part of a
Frontend Master’s course when there’s something specific I need to learn. I love
Dave Geddes’s mastery games on
CSS grid and
Flexbox, but generally I spend a
bunch more time working on producing my own material/projects. I think that
makes me more productive as well.
The importance of balance
With all this talk of productivity, I should probably mention that I’ve learned
that it’s important to live a balanced life. Like I said, I can get pretty
focused on one thing, but I spend a lot of time with my family and that brings
me joy. Shutting down for a little bit, taking a step back, and working on
your relationships is where you’ll get your juice to keep going.
So the fact that I’m married and have four kids and a dog isn’t a detriment to
my productivity, but really it’s an important part of my secret to
productivity. They motivate me and recharge me in ways that I couldn’t
understand before I had them in my life.
Conclusion
So the reasons it appears I’m so productive is multi-faceted:
- Lots of it is an illusion
- I’m privileged to work at a place that values open knowledge sharing and
doesn’t limit what I do in my free time - I learn in public, thereby increasing the impact of the value that I create.
- I automate mundane/time consuming/context switching tasks
- I answer questions in a public forum
- I spend more time producing than consuming
I should say also that my wife plays a huge role in how I’m so productive.
However, she is a pretty private person and asked that I not talk about her much
publicly (except she did give me permission to say this). I couldn’t do all of
the things I do if it weren’t for her.
I don’t want to give the false impression that I only appear productive
either. I really do feel like I’m quite productive. But hopefully this makes my
productivity more realistic and attainable in your mind. I hope some of these
ideas help inspire you to be more productive and more importantly find more
happiness through your relationships. Good luck!
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