The Ball and Chain

I had coffee with two CEOs the week before starting Dev Bootcamp. One’s company had been acquired a month earlier, and was busy working through natural issues during integration, and the other was anticipating the launch of his company’s next product. Both put perspective on how crazy life can become. At one point in both conversations I asked how they did it. That is, how did they juggle all that was going on? One said he didn’t. The other said,

“Moving fast naturally separates the chaff.”

And he’s absolutely right. Time constraints, and constraints in general, give our work and lives shape.

At Dev Bootcamp we’ve been moving quickly. There are an endless number of challenges to complete, always other blog posts to be written, books to be absorbed in, etc. But, unlike most of life, we’re fortunate for this 10-week period to be in a learning environment where (something like college) we can be completely engrossed.

Our days are given over to programming in JavaScript and Ruby – we’re dreaming in it and our conversations circle around it. Thus, though there is so much going on, I’ve found it possible to be under-efficient with my time. It’s possible to spend the entire day here and still be less effective than if I’d utilized ¾ of that time at 100%.

Efficiency without statistics is hard to gauge at this point, but starting this week I implemented a schedule. Not a hard schedule so much as containers around my time.*

These containers of time are becoming the constraints that give my work form:

I’m finding that discipline is all about the subtle, incremental changes we make, and that my efficiency and quality of work are improved because of it. For me those changes are working out every morning and taking a nap at a set time in the middle of the day (DBC is nap-positive, and for good reason), and yes, eating at a regular time.

Likewise, I’ve begun leaving my laptop at work. Partly because my cohorts and I are in the Dev Bootcamp offices so frequently that it seems unnecessary to carry it. Partly, and more importantly, because removing distraction from where I rest is a tremendous part of focusing when I’m on the job.

Part of what were doing here at Dev Bootcamp is learning the hard skills of being a developer in Ruby, JavaScript and Rails. The other is learning to be whole people in whatever job we do. When life hits, people rarely anticipate how little time is left over to live, and I think we all hope to learn the kind of discipline now that will benefit us in the future, whatever it might hold.

* DBC has been a phenomenal space to experiment with the ways I best learn and live.