How do you value your time? I don't mean how much do you cost per hour. But instead, I want you to consider how much you value the present moment, each moment that you have. How can you place a value on those things? Whether we know it or not, we implicitly place value on our time by choosing what to do with it. In today's episode, which will be a shorter than usual episode, in the spirit of today's topic, I want to implore you to limit your options. This may sound like strange advice. In fact, much of the advice, even that we've given on this podcast in the past, talks about seeking optionality, increasing your options, having multiple ways to exit a situation. And it makes sense that we would have many options open to us, that that provides us flexibility, for example. But it also creates situations very often that we can't adequately resolve with the fullest amount of cognition that we would need to do so. In other words, the options that we have outstrip the amount of time we have to evaluate those same options. And so we spend our time worrying, being frustrated that we had to pick one option or maybe not even picking one, feeling paralyzed by all the analysis that we need to do. And this goes beyond just analysis paralysis. Sometimes this kind of paralysis, this feeling of having too many options extends into a deeply anxious feeling. So I want to talk about a couple of ways that you can limit your options. But first, we're going to talk about today's sponsor, Bob Zero. Velopathy is thankful for the support for today's episode from Auth0. Identity is the front door of every user interaction. Login experience is critical to a user's experience with your app. And as a software engineer, you've probably spent countless hours on this incredibly important interaction. And it's still not done. If you're like most teams, you don't want to spend all of your time on the login. In fact, you'd rather spend almost all of the time that you were spending on the login on your core products, something that differentiates you from other people. Maybe you don't have the expertise you need to make your login experience seamless or maybe you're concerned about security and the constantly evolving nature of login. And this build versus buy decision on login is really a no-brainer, especially as you start to scale your application. It's even better if you can solve this before you adopt a bunch of technical debt or hidden security issues with the homegrown login solution. This happens all the time, even when you think you've got your bases covered. Auth0 is here to solve your login problems for good. Auth0 provides simple, secure, and adaptable login for applications and businesses, freeing you up to focus on the problems you're best suited to solve in your product. Auth0 supports virtually every style of login you could want. Social login, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, password list, and much more. You can implement Auth0 in your application in as little as five minutes by heading over to Auth0.com slash DevT to get started today. That's Auth0.com slash D-E-V-T-E-A. Thanks again to Auth0 for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. I want to talk about limiting your options in a meaningful way, in a way that will help you focus and stay grounded and now feel scattered and anxious all the time. But at first I want to kind of talk about what this isn't. A few years back, we talked about decision fatigue, a lot of blogs we're talking about it, a lot of podcasts we're talking about it. We probably talked about it on Developer Tea. I don't even remember, but this very popular topic came up and people were subscribing to the idea that you could automate all of your smallest decisions. And part of this automation would be eating the same thing for lunch every day or wearing the same outfit every day, having multiple of the same shirt so that you didn't have to make a decision about what you were going to wear for the day. And while I'm not here to demonize any of these practices, that's not really what we're talking about when we talk about limiting your options. Instead, I want to talk about larger decisions that you're making or larger areas that are made up by singular habits. In other words, something that you do over and over and over that isn't a small thing like picking your clothes out. And just to expand a little bit more on why we aren't going to focus in on those small decisions. Sometimes those small decisions are a meaningfully positive part of your life. You might enjoy the variability in food, for example. And my goal on this show is not to create the most streamlined, algorithmically efficient version of you. And hopefully you can understand that the goal of this kind of elimination is to give you time to spend on the things that you really care about spending that time on. So one source of elimination or limiting your options, and it may not sound like options initially, but is simply to take control of your own calendar. If you can, eliminate the ability to even invite you to things via a calendar invite. One thing that happens very often in the workplace is meaning invites show up on your calendar before you ever even hear about them. And while some of these are meaningful and important, very often a conversation could be had that would eliminate this need for meeting showing up on your calendar. So whatever it means to you, take control of your calendar. And there's a couple of ways that you might do this one is of course already mentioned, not allowing other people to make events on your calendar. You can make those events. You can accept those events maybe another way you can take control of your calendar is to start by creating a brand new blank calendar. All right. And the whole point here is to create your ideal week, ignore all of your existing meetings. What would your ideal week look like? Now ask yourself, what is the difference between this and what I think I have to do, my obligatory calendar, the one that already exists that I didn't even necessarily even, I didn't really create it. And the people influenced it and it kind of evolved accidentally over time. And see what you can do to close the gap between your ideal calendar and your existing calendar. Now here's the important thing. The blocks on your calendar, do your best to make the blocks as large as you can. This is very simple heuristic. Do your best to make the blocks as large as you can on your calendar. In other words, have larger blocks times for focus. If you have seven different things happening in your day or ten different things happening in your day, you're splitting a lot of your otherwise high powered focus time into so many different places. Limit your options. Choose which events are the most important. In fact, try your best to identify your top three events in a given day. If you can eliminate everything else on the calendar, do what you can to make that happen. This will also give you the freedom to, for example, meet a little bit longer in your one-on-one or take an unplanned walk if the weather is nice outside. The whole goal here is to provide yourself more flexibility and less obligation. Limiting your options is not about doing less, but about improving your focus and your capacity. Another practical way to limit your options, and this may not sound, again, these don't sound as much like limiting your options until you actually put it into practice. But the other practical way is to have an expiration date for everything on your to-do list or your backlog wherever you're keeping all of these things that pile up that you need to do. The idea here is that if something is truly important, if it expires, it will resurface. This is true in 99% of the cases. In the 1% of cases where this isn't true, you'll know it. You'll know that you need to keep that particular thing on, let's say, a priority list that never expires. The important thing to recognize though is that if you haven't made a decision about something in, let's say, a year or whatever that expiration time is that you set maybe even a month, if you haven't made a decision, perhaps there's no decision to be made. Or maybe the best thing you can do is let that decision go. Let the decision become unimportant enough that it fades away from your list, from your obligations. Once again, if you can limit your obligations, you are limiting your options. When we say options here, we're talking about things that you might do. And by limiting your options, limiting your prescribed obligations, you are giving yourself the freedom to do the most important things in front of you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Auth0. Head over to auth0, the number zero. That's Auth0.com slash devt, Auth0.com slash dvtea to get started today. I'd love to hear your stories about how you are managing your options, how you can limit your options, increase your focus and reduce your obligations. You can tell me those stories in the Developer Tea Discord. Head over to developertea.com slash discord to join that community today, as always, the Discord community is totally free. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.