Personal Productivity - Dealing With Distractions While Getting Sh!t Done

Faced with a punishing week of distractions, the crew discusses their own techniques for remaining personally productive.

Full Transcript:
Starr:              I'm sick of being discriminated against because of my name. It's like they have a better for a name but-

Josh:               At least I have to pay 60 bucks for just a domain.

Ben:                Change your name.

Announcer:          So do those guys really named their App after a meme, huh? Buckle up fellow kids, it's time for founder quest.

Josh:               I think mine was like ... for what it's worth star, my name was like $180.

Starr:              Do y'all think that Dev domains are going to be like pogs?

Josh:               Maybe.

Starr:              Like beanie babies?

Josh:               Like garbage pail kids.

Starr:              Oh No. Garbage pail kids or a classic.

Josh:               Yeah.

Starr:              I just mean like when we started Honeybadger we did an io domain and back then those were pretty hip and so in 10 years our dev domain, it's going to be kind of ... right now people are like, oh an io domain, wow. Our dev domain is going to be like that in 10 years? I don't know.

Ben:                Maybe the app domains, you know the.app.

Starr:              That app, I kind of think dev is ... well, I mean it's going to be used for a lot of things, but I think one thing that it'll be popular for us, like get hub projects and that sort of thing. Like I said, like faker.dev would be cool to like forward to you're a faker project.

Ben:                Would be cool. I'm just not going to pay 115 bucks for it.

Starr:              Right? Yeah. Who bought honeybadger.dev? I'm like dying to know this cause I thought it was one of you guys because I was going to do it and I forgot. I think someone's messing with us.

Ben:                We'll find out some day.

Starr:              So I thought like this week we could talk about just productivity. Some people are really surprised when they hear that we're ... because I was going to say we're a three person company. We just hired another developer and we hired a marketing person a few months back. But we're still a very small company, so people are interested sort of like how do we do it? I mean, we must be super productive. We must all be super productive, including me despite the evidence, despite the soul crushing evidence. So what's our secret?

Ben:                I think the secret to our success is that I wake up naturally at 4:00 AM every morning.

Josh:               That's it. Yeah.

Starr:              I do too. But I fight it. I fight it. Ben so much.

Ben:                I don't think we have a secret of success. We're just standing up just regular folk doing some regular stuff.

Josh:               I do have to say like I've been a lot less productive I felt since having kids, especially the second kid.

Starr:              Yeah, well my secret, a reason for choosing this topic actually was at this week and the previous week I've been incredibly unproductive and so I'm really just trying to get my groove back on.

Ben:                Just looking for tips.

Starr:              I'm looking for tips guys.

Josh:               Yeah. I had the same thought actually when you suggested and I was thinking about it last night and I was like, I'm actually looking forward to like talking about this because maybe I'll refresh. Get a refresher on it.

Ben:                Yeah. So the past couple weeks have been rough for me too but the snow, really threw me off. School was shut down for like two weeks or whatever it was. I couldn't get to my office because driveway was buried in snow and that's on a hill. And so I was at home. At home, which is not usual for me and with kids at home, which is not usual for me. And so I ended up playing a lot of sports here and stuff. So I had to get back on the focus train and actually work on it. And so one thing that I did was the tomato technique, you know the 25 minute thing.

Starr:              Pomodoro.

Ben:                Yeah, Pomodoro. So I'm like, yeah because I always sit down and I would pick but get some work done and I would open up the laptop and be like, ha, I don't feel like doing anything. There's like 5,000 things I could do and I don't feel like doing any of them. And so when it came down to you, I was like, all right, you know what? I can't wait to feel like it. I just got to do it. And so I said, boom, set the timer for 25 minutes, I'm going to work on something and then I can be done and give myself a break, you know? And then of course, the 25 minutes ago that I'm heads down, I'm focused and so there's no way of taking a break right now. It's like keep working on for a couple hours. Right. So that helped me like get over the hurdle of I really don't like doing a thing.

Josh:               I tried doing the Pomodoro technique for awhile, like long time ago and I liked it. Yeah. Maybe I'll give it a try again sometime here.

Starr:              I like it too. It only works from you for certain things. Like, Pomodoro is really nice for me for things where I've got like a list of things and I'm going to sort of cycle through really quickly and sort of churn through. Is not so great for things that are more sort of loosey Goosey, kind of like writing and stuff. I don't really like having a timer going when I'm writing because I just feel so sort of constrained by it and like I've got this deadline looming over me and that's like-

Josh:               "Be creative come up with something interesting in 10 Minutes.

Starr:              And under the gun.

Josh:               How do you guys typically start your days? How do you think about like what you're going to going to do first or what you're going to do during the day?

Starr:              I've recently, after we came back from Christmas break, I changed up my routine and I've really liked it. So let me tell you a little bit about that. Previously, I just kind of started the day without like a plan or anything, like coming to work, check my mail, check Slack, figure out what my main task was, just start going heads down on it and not really think about it much. And that's fine when it works. But a lot of the times it left me feeling like I was ... while I was making progress on my main task, I was kind of losing sight of the big picture or m...