it's easy even when you've taken a lot of time off even when you feel like you've had a vacation even when you are at the end of a year ready to start a new one it's easy to feel overwhelmed overwhelmed by what you have to plan the things that you didn't expect to happen that are happening all that you expected to get done but didn't the feeling of overwhelm often leads us to try to get a handle on things and this is one of the impulses we have as the year turns over from one to the next in today's episode i want to give you an empowering reality to remind you of something that is easily forgotten about your time my name is jonathan cutrell you're listening to developer t my goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity perspective and purpose in their careers here is the simple reality we'll start with it at the beginning and then at the end we'll talk about ways that you can change how you're thinking about this overwhelming feeling that you probably have if you're listening to this episode if you're like me and that simple reality is that you decide your priorities you get to decide your priorities and this isn't true if only if you uh own your own business this isn't true if you are in senior leadership this isn't just true if you are a manager this isn't just true if you're a senior engineer this is true for anyone who has agency over their own time which is virtually anybody who's listening to this episode if you feel obligated if you feel like your time is spinning out of control if you feel like all of the things that you wish you could do you can't it is likely because you have forgotten the agency that you have over your priorities now i want to be clear about something here just because you have the agency over your priorities does not mean that you have control over the consequences of your prioritization additionally your priorities whether you consider them a priority or not may misalign with your actions in other words you may mentally or emotionally have a priority that your actions are not necessarily aligned with your priorities and so if you have control over your priorities you may be misaligned with whether by accident or by lack of effort or some other reason again your priorities are yours and yours alone to determine you might be listening to this and saying well that's not true i i get my priorities handed to me by my boss or i don't have the autonomy to prioritize i have so many people who depend on me i have children or i have a significant other or i have a lot of people who depend on me and i have a lot of people who depend on me and i have a lot of people who depend on me and i have a lot of people who depend on me and i have family members that depend on me to prioritize their needs the truth is in most cases with some very important exclusions you have chosen those priorities you have chosen and continue to actively choose those priorities now there may be very good reasons for the ones that you're choosing and the feeling of obligation may actually be driven by an underlying value that you have for example you have children you may have the underlying value of being a good parent of being present and loving your children and so therefore you have a responsibility an obligation and a priority that you place on your children that you feel is non-negotiable in other words there is no way you're going to change your life and your children's lives and so therefore you have a responsibility and obligation to change that and so for that reason you may feel like you have a lack of agency over that priority but the truth is you have agency over the priority but your choices are aligning with your values this distinction may not really change much in practice in these kinds of scenarios where your you know your values essentially dictate a large amount of your priorities but what it can do is it can change the way you think about your agency in those scenarios and in other situations in other words the priorities that you have set for yourself whether they're driven by values and they feel like obligations or if they're absolutely something that you've chosen with clear agency those are all your priorities those are all owned by you this is important because when we feel overwhelmed when we feel like our calendar is being taken by other people it's absolutely essential that we remind ourselves the very simple fact that what we do with our time is our choice what we do with our life then is our choice if you feel like your calendar is being taken by other people you know kind of ripped apart by other people ask yourself why you're allowing that to happen is this something that you feel like you have to do for example and if you stopped doing it what are the consequences what if you instead said no you can't book time on my calendar i control my calendar you can come and talk to me this is a very simple example of something you could do to kind of take back that that agency and that priority so what if you said no you can't book time on your calendar you can't book time on your calendar you can't book time on your calendar now the exercise is not intended to make you create enemies amongst all of your co-workers but instead to ask yourself those deep and digging questions about why you feel the way you do about your priorities why do you feel the way you do about the way you spend your time if you do not have control over your time then who does and why very often the true way to control your time is to answer to this question is seated deeply in some kind of fear if i don't do those things then either a bad consequence will happen or b the actions that i take will not be aligned with the values that i hold which was what we were talking about with making your children a priority for most loving parents so once you accept that your priorities are in your control they are what you get to decide then you can take a step back and think a little bit differently about how you plan your daily time that's what we're going to talk about right after we talk about today's sponsor this episode is brought to you by launch darkly launch darkly is helping you create feature management for the modern enterprise fundamentally changing how you deliver software here's how it works launch darkly enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users wrapping code with feature flags gives you the safety to test new features and infrastructure in your production environments without impacting the wrong end users when you're ready to release more widely you can update the software and the changes are made instantaneously thanks to their real-time streaming architecture here's the reality about feature flags there's been so many projects that i've worked on where it was either cost prohibitive or nearly impossible to actually replicate what was happening on production whether it's because you know you can't really replicate the stresses that are put on the production environment or you can't replicate the data because it's sensitive data you know there's a lot of tricks that you might be able to pull to make your staging look like production but at the end of the day there's going to be something different happening in production than is happening in your staging environments you can't replicate those one-to-one almost never and so especially for features that you are developing that you're trying to release either to a partial audience or maybe you're just trying to qa those in a production environment without actually releasing to the production environment you don't have to do crazy weird hours releases where you know somebody might see the release if they log on at a particular time your qa team is having to stay up all hours of the night to finish this testing that stuff is over with launch darkly you can release to just your qa folks or you can release to you know a beta testing audience or you can release to the wider public with a single flag change go and check it out head over to launchdarkly.com to get started for free today that's launchdarkly.com thanks again to launch darkly for their support i'm developer t your priorities are your own you get to choose them you get to choose what you do with your time you have the agency you have the power over your calendar no one else can tell you unequivocally what to do with your time now if someone asks you to do something different with your time and you refuse there might be consequences if your boss asks you to be in a meeting on tuesday and you instead decide to skip work that day without telling anybody this is something that you have agency over you can do that that's possible nobody's going to stop you necessarily but there will be consequences the point of this episode is not to explain to you that you have no consequences or that you're overthinking things that's not the point the point instead is for you to take a step back and consider how many of your priorities are you allowing other people to determine and how much of that agency are you giving up at your own detriment no you probably shouldn't just skip work as often as you like no you probably shouldn't merge code without anyone's approval or anything like that even though you probably shouldn't merge code without anyone's approval or anything like that you have the opportunity to prioritize your actions in a way that aligns with whatever you want there are consequences but once you've kind of accepted this idea that your priorities are your own that you don't have to have them handed to you from someone else all the time then you can change the way that you plan your time specifically i want you to start thinking about your time and your priorities and your priorities and your priorities and your thinking about your daily list of things to do however it is that you track that most people do this in some form or another whatever that is maybe it's your calendar maybe it's actually in a to-do application maybe it's in a sauna or something like that some kind of project management tool maybe it's on a sticky note i don't know how you do it but whatever it is that you use to manage your to-do instead of thinking of it as a list of things to do you can start thinking about your to-do list of things to do and start thinking about your to-do list of things to do add on to in a reactive way whenever you stumble on something that you need to do you write it down to do later whenever somebody asks you for something you write it down on that list i want you to break the chain between reaction and the list in other words all of the input stimulus that you get in a given day stimuli i guess if it's plural all of these various things that are coming at you from all angles all of them the thoughts that you have in a fleeting moment the shopping list reminders and the requests that come in via email and text message you just got all of these different stimuli are coming in and it's our kind of automatic process to imagine that everything is meaningful and that we should take this stimulus that we just got and immediately convert it into an action a lot of times the true best action is to do nothing at all to allow that stimulus to hit our brains and then do nothing initially with it and instead of using that stimulus as the driving factor for determining your priorities on a day-to-day basis i want you to take a step back and generate your list of things to do now as i said i'm not going to go into too much detail on this but i want you to take a step back and generate your list of things to do now as i said i want you to take a step back it's not to say that you can't capture some of that information some of it is important to capture in the moment you might forget that you need bananas if you don't write it down right there is a difference between you know doing nothing at all with the information you know in kind of a pure way and doing nothing in the sense of not taking an immediate action you write down these notes take down the stimulus you know record the important parts or whatever but don't do anything necessarily authoritatively with your time management as a result of that stimulus okay when it's time to generate your daily thing whatever it is your calendar when it's management time for your priorities now you take into account all of that stimulus that you've delayed on you can review it you can parse through it and decide with that agency mindset rather than a reactive mindset what is the most important stuff to you what on this list that i have in front of me that has all of these various experiences all of these values that i hold all of the stimulus that's uh there's stimuli that's come in over the past day or three days or week what is important for me to do about it now this seems like a subtle shift and it might feel like a subtle shift initially but it's not because i'm not a person who's been doing this for a long time but what it does is it gives you a chance it gives you a chance to look at the whole picture and to take control of building your schedule of building your priority list of actually kind of evaluating the kinds of information or the requests that you're getting from other people and then choosing what to do about it in a more intentional way so the critical idea here again is to replace that to-do list that reactive to-do list with a to-do generator right a task generator that's based on your more carefully thought out prioritized value-driven way of thinking about your time rather than just tacking on something to the list right finding the next open window for that meeting that somebody is requesting from you instead take a moment and allow yourself to think about what you're doing and allow yourself to think about what you're doing and allow yourself to think about what you're doing allow that to come in and evaluate it at a different time disconnect that reactive process from that planning process thanks so much for listening to today's episode reminding you that you have agency over your priorities as we head into the new year thanks again to today's sponsor launch darkly head over to launchdarkly.com to get started with enterprise grade feature flagging thanks again for listening to this episode developer t has a community of engineers just like you it's totally free for you to join it's a discord community head over to developer t.com slash discord to join today thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea