Hey everyone, before we get started today, I want to talk about something that I'm really excited about. It's a partnership with Breaker. If you haven't heard of Breaker, it is my favorite podcasting app. It's the one that I actually use personally to listen to episodes. You can go and actually connect with other people who are listening to episodes. You can comment on episodes, you can share them. They have an excellent recommendation engine, just a wonderful application. But they're launching this new thing called Breaker Upstream. And Developer Tea is going to be a part of this. This is a way for you as a listener to directly support the show. This is something that we've thought about for a very long time on Developer Tea. And we want to make sure this is available to you in the right way. And that's why we decided to partner with Breaker to do this. Upstream is launching today, the day that you're hearing this episode, assuming that you downloaded it on the day it was released. And what Upstream allows us to do is release special content, special content that you can listen to. And we're going to be talking about a lot of developer tea content that we aren't necessarily going to release on the normal show schedule. We can release it through Breaker Upstream and you can give directly to the show to support us. Now, this support model is specifically for podcasts. That means that your experience as a listener is seamless. You're right there in your player already, and the content is going to be delivered right there in the player already. So this is a much better model than you having to go to a totally different website or something like that. And you can get a lot of support from something like that to support the show. You can download Breaker in the app store, and it will be coming to Android soon in the Google Play Store. One of the most popular episodes ever of this show was about a subject that is really kind of hard to talk about because so much of it is theoretical. The subject was time and more specifically, time. And I think that's a really important part of the show. And I think time management. How do we create what in that episode I called a time budget? This was step one in the developer career roadmap. Now, I'm not sure if the reason that this particular episode was so popular, if the reason was that it was step one in the developer career roadmap, or because people are particularly interested in managing their time, or maybe a little bit of both. But I want to discuss time a little bit more in depth in today's episode. Jonathan Cottrell My hope for this episode is that you'll walk away with a new intuition about the plasticity and really the difficulty that time presents. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and you're listening to Developer Tea. And my goal on this show is to help driven developers like you connect to your career purpose, so you can do better work and have a positive influence on the people around you. And so in today's episode, we're talking about time, not just because of the time, but because of the time. And so I'm going to talk about time, not just because of the time, but because of the time. And so in today's episode, we're talking about time, not just because of the time, but because of the time. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about time, not just because of the time, but because of the time. because, you know, we want to be productive, not just because we want to spend our time well, although this is a very important point in maybe what we should open up with. And that is that time is one thing that kind of binds us all. To some degree, we all have the same amount of time. Now, this isn't necessarily true, in terms of free time. And this is a common mistake that people make when they talk about time. specifically with this equalizing statement that we all have the same amount of time. This is mostly true, except that some people have totally different obligations. They have totally different logistics that take up their time in different ways. And people even require different amounts of sleep. So it doesn't really serve the point to say that we all have the same amount of time. But what is true is that none of us can create, or for that matter, destroy time. Each of us has some allotment of time. And for the given allotment, let's say one hour or one minute, one microsecond, or one year, that amount of time is kind of separate from our control. It's not necessarily a resource in the way that something like money is. And so when we talk aboutensionally, and when we talk aboutensionally, and when we talk aboutensionally, and when we spending time, that is something that is always happening. You are always spending time at the same rate as everyone else. Now again, bear with me here because there are certainly people in the audience of this show who recognize the philosophical issue at hand here, and that is that time is really only a concept. It's something that we perceive. It's difficult to measure it perfectly because our perception is so different. And so what one person experiences and what another person experiences as the same amount of time may feel entirely different to those two people. Now you can see why this is such an important concept, right? If you work, for example, in a freelance position, then you probably bill for your hours. You also probably have some expectation in your... job to work for a certain number of hours in a given week, even if you aren't necessarily tracking or billing based on those hours. Why is that? At its most basic level, what this allows us to do is equalize somebody's effort, right? We're going to pay for a certain amount of effort. Generally speaking, this is a culturally determined normal amount. So for most people, in the United States, that's going to be 40 hours in a given week. And employers are going to exchange a certain amount of value for a certain amount of effort. Now, of course, you as the employee, you could spend no effort in that amount of time, right? You could put forth zero effort, and you could theoretically still be paid for your time. Of course, if you do this for too long, you're going to lose your job. But there is a continuum. In other words, the amount of effort that you put forth at one hour, let's say from 9am to 10am on a Tuesday, might be quite different from the amount of effort that you put forth from four o'clock to five o'clock on a Friday. And here we're stumbling on one of the reasons why time is such an important and difficult thing to talk about. And that is that what we're trying to do is create some kind of proxy. We're creating a proxy from somebody's energy to their time. That proxy acts as a way of saying, okay, we're going to average out your time over the course of a week or over the course of a pay period, or even longer over the course of a year. And in some weeks, you're going to be incredibly productive, and in others, not so much. So that's not too hard to understand. If we were to average out your time over the course of a week, we're going to be incredibly productive, and in others, not so much. So that's not too hard to understand. If we were to average out our productivity or our value over time, maybe we provide an insane amount of value, and then we go on vacation the next month. And this is normal, and it's fairly natural, and usually people don't get fired for having highly productive times and then less productive times. People, generally speaking, your performance reviews are not going to be, you know, entirely focused on all of the times that you were slightly less productive. And so, you're going to have to be more productive. And if they are focused on that, then perhaps either you are less productive in your high productive times than you think you are, or maybe it's time to sit down and talk to your employer about their expectations and your expectations. The truth of the matter is, time is very strange. Every minute is not equal. We're going to talk about how we perceive time, even as an individual. Of course, I may perceive time differently from others, but I'm going to talk about you, but even for myself, I might perceive one hour quite differently from the next hour. We're going to talk about some of the things that might adjust our perspective of time right after we talk about today's sponsor, DigitalOcean. Speaking of time and value, DigitalOcean is going to give you $100 worth of free credit just for being a developer tea listener. You can get started with DigitalOcean today. It's the first time I've ever done a video on DigitalOcean. I'm going to talk about how to get started. Let's get started. DigitalOcean is a company that has been in the business for over a decade. They have a number of great companies, and they have industry-leading price-to-performance ratios. Go and check out what DigitalOcean has to offer. Specifically, that $100 worth of credit, you can find out more by going to do.co.tea. That's do.co.tea. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. We're talking about ways that time can be warped, even for an individual. Let me prove this to you very quickly. When you sleep, when you go to sleep at night, and you wake up in the morning, let's say you wake up in the middle of the night. That's an even better kind of adjuster for the way that you think. Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night, you look around, it's pitch black, and you don't know what time it is. In fact, you have no idea. You could look at the clock, and it could say 1 a.m. or 4 a.m., and both would be equally acceptable. Now, you may feel very like, oh, there's no way that it's 4 a.m., but if you were to look at the clock and see 4 a.m., you wouldn't think, oh, that clock must be wrong. You might think, well, I should have gone to bed a little bit earlier, but you probably wouldn't blame the technology in that scenario, right? And similar phenomena happen throughout your day. You might think, oh, wow, I can't believe it's already lunchtime, right, in the morning, whenever you're working. So, let's cover one of the, you know, most obvious phenomena. And that's the technology. And that's the technology. And that's falling asleep. Whenever your states of consciousness change, this is certainly going to change your experience of time. And this happens to us every single night. Our state of consciousness changes. So, our experience of time while we're sleeping can vary pretty dramatically. If you're not having a dream, for example, you may have zero experience of time. You may feel essentially like you snap your fingers, and you went to sleep, and you woke up. Of course, so many of our other senses and our sensibilities tell us otherwise. And so, we may feel kind of mentally tell ourselves to feel that time has passed, but our experience of time wasn't necessarily there. We didn't really have that passage of time, the same experience that we would have. And to give you an idea, if you think about how long the workday is, something around eight hours or maybe a little bit longer, how long you work in a given day, that's about how long you're supposed to be sleeping. And maybe you sleep a little bit less, but that could kind of help you wrap your brain around how differently you experience time during that period at night. And of course, this kind of feels like a given, and it's not really that important for your work as a developer, but there are absolutely other times when you're totally awake when you experience time differently. For example, we've discussed this one on the show, but we've also discussed this one on the show, before, when you have a new experience. When you do something brand new, like for example, something as simple as taking a new route home. Assuming you are paying attention and you're noticing the new details, and you're kind of forcing your brain to have that new experience, this is going to make time seem like it's lasting longer. Generally speaking, research shows that there are different places of attention that are going to be affected by time. And so, you can have a time that is going to be a little bit longer, but you can also have a time that is going to be a little bit longer. So, if you have a time that is going to be a little bit longer, for example, this one may come intuitively, but if you're experiencing pain, then time may feel significantly longer. If you have a pretty sharp pain, a strong pain for, let's say, 10 minutes straight, that's going to feel like, you know, you might even say something along the lines of, that was the longest 10 minutes of my life. But it's not only pain that will stretch and slow down that time. If you simply focus on your own body, for example, we've talked about meditation on this podcast before. If you were to meditate, people who start out meditating, by the way, this is also a time when I hear that same phrase, that's the longest 10 minutes that I've ever had to spend. When you're sitting in silence and you're, especially if you're focusing on your body, you're doing some kind of mindfulness meditation in that sense, then you may feel that same. That same feeling of time stretching. An anecdotal experience for me is when I'm running on the treadmill and I'm looking down at the time, I'm trying to hit a particular, you know, amount of time on the treadmill and I'm watching that time go by and I try to look away from the clock and my mind is entirely on, you know, the time and the pain that I'm feeling and it seems to just crawl on. Of course, if I'm sitting at home watching funny videos on YouTube with my wife, well, 10 minutes seems to fly by in the blink of an eye. If you're in a job where you are bored or otherwise unchallenged, this is going to stretch time out. It's going to make time feel longer. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, if you are experiencing some kind of flow state, which happens when you have, you know, a highly challenging problem, but you also have enough skill to meet that challenge, right? It's something that's kind of at your edge of the world. If you're in a job where you're entirely focused on what you're doing, then time seems to kind of slip by. You're totally unaware of that time. And as it turns out, generally speaking, if you can find that flow state, then you're most likely going to be kind of at your optimum productivity level. Now, why are we talking so much about this kind of fluidity of time and how we experience it, how it's so, you know, kind of wild and uncontrollable? Well, because it's very important to understand that your perspective on time is going to change your perspective on work. It will also change your perspective on other people and how they work and how you can work best with them. So instead of just treating every hour the same and trying to force yourself into that kind of machine model that we've talked about on the show before, where you're trying to, you know, produce the same amount of value like a factory machine would, instead of viewing your time that way, start viewing your time in terms of what it actually is, a much more fluid experience. Time that you value in different ways. Time that you are better at one type of activity than other types of activities. We're going to discuss this subject more in depth on upcoming episodes of Developer Tips. And in fact, we have a very exciting guest that I can't wait to share with you on the show. And I don't want you to miss out on these discussions. So I encourage you to subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to DigitalOcean for sponsoring today's episode. Head over to do.co slash T to get $100 worth of credit on DigitalOcean services today. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.