What are the core activities that keep you productive? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. We've been talking a good bit about productivity on Developer Tea. And I want to refocus us as we continue this discussion. A reminder of what productivity really means. It's not getting more done on its own. And it's also not getting more done with less time on its own. Instead, productivity requires that you are crystal clear about the goal that you have. We've had some feedback, particularly in the Developer Tea Discord. You can join that at developertea.com slash discord. Some feedback that not every company's goal is to make money. And I want to clarify something about what I mean when I say that this is the primary goal of our company. In order to stay afloat, every company requires money. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that they have to make money through marketing, in the words selling a product or selling a service. They may be making money through some other means. They may be using money that is made somewhere else. But every company requires money. And this is kind of the lowest common denominator. Assuming that the company is not intending to go out of business either by negligence or on purpose, then the company exists to make money. This is a good criticism, though, because there's a lot of baggage that can go along with thinking about your primary goal or your primary drive being money. The truth is that you can have two different companies, both with the same goal of making money as their primary underlying drive to exist. And one does it with ethical boundaries, and the other one does it by any means necessary. So it's important, and I want to underscore this, but not every company whose goal it is to make money is going to turn corrupt. It is possible to have a goal, and to also have boundaries on the means that you use to achieve that goal. But I want to shift gears here for a moment and talk about your productivity and the activities that you participate in specifically in order to be productive. I want to paint a picture, and I imagine that you will identify with the feeling that I'm going to paint in this picture. You have a lot of work to do, whether because it's in your backlog or because you have it in your to-do list, maybe you know about it because it's been talked about, or maybe it just streams in in Slack or in some kind of customer service ticketing system that you use. Whatever the case, it's likely you have a lot of work, but you feel aimless. You're not really sure what of that work, that big mountain of work, you should be working on now. You might have some kind of clarity coming from one person and some kind of clarity coming from a different person than they don't agree. So what they think is clarity isn't clear at all. You may feel aimless because you don't feel like you have all of the necessary information, or maybe you're not really sure if you're the right person to work on that task. Or maybe you're unsure that the task itself is right. Maybe there's something that you think is wrong about the way the task is defined. To add a bunch of difficulty to an already unclear, difficult scenario, you also have a bunch of meetings on your calendar. If people who are asking for your time, and you have all of these ceremonies that are defining new work and maybe pulling down work that hasn't been defined yet, reprioritizing everything seems to be in flux around you. So what do you do? How do you remain productive in the face of all of this uncertainty? I'm going to recommend one simple shift, one simple shift in the way you work, right after we talk about today's topic. This episode is sponsored by LaunchDarkly. 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And I promised you I would give you one simple shift to your daily work, this simple shift in thinking about your work. It's not going to be a fix for everything though. If your team can't learn to prioritize together, then this goes back to that problem with productivity. You don't have a shared goal, then you can't have shared productivity. Productivity is meaningless without a goal. And so as kind of a bonus before we talk about the shift in a moment, I want you to be extremely clear about who on your team ultimately determines the relative priority of the work that the team does. I'll give you a hint. This person is likely someone who is connected to your stakeholders. They are likely somebody like a product manager, a product owner. And I'll give you one last tip here. It is not your job to resolve priority when other people come to you with requests. When people outside of your team come to you with requests because the requests from outside of your team will impact the things that are going on within your team. You can't separate these things. You can't create two different prioritization lists. You can only do effectively, only do one thing at a time. So when you have those collisions, bring them to that person. Bring them to the person who is responsible for prioritizing work for your team. Okay. Now we've got that out of the way. I want you to make this simple shift to remain productive despite all of the turmoil around you. Instead of thinking of your work as an amorphous blob of time that you spend doing any number of activities, instead focus on a limited number of activities done with a limited number of tools, a limited number of activities done with a limited number of tools. These are your core activities at work. And here's the thing to understand. 90% or more of your time should be spent doing these core activities. Limiting your tools and limiting the types of activities that you're participating in using those tools will greatly improve the way you think about work. And there's a lot of reasons why this is the case. One of the reasons is quite simply your productivity with a given tool is highly correlated with your fluency with that tool. In other words, if you're very used to writing JavaScript, you're likely to be more productive writing JavaScript than picking up a new language. If you're used to providing feedback in the form of a PR, you're more likely to be able to provide good feedback in the form of a PR than you are in a some kind of external document. Now, notice that I didn't say 100% of your time should be spent only in these tools. If you can exceed 90% of the time, then an interesting effect will start to occur. You'll start to think about your problems in terms of the way that you compose your different activities to solve them. Now I can already predict that you're going to think, well, what about fitting the tool to the problem and not the other way around? Yes, this makes a lot of sense. But you don't have to have the perfectly optimal tool in order to be productive. In fact, you're more likely to be productive if you have a flexible, limited tool set that you're very well acquainted with than if you were to have every tool on the market available to you. The number of decisions that you would have to make alone is enough of a productivity trade-off to do this. But it also gives you a grounding. You can think about these activities as kind of a paradigm, a base, a foundational way of framing the problems that you're going to face. Now we leave that 10% reserve because not every problem you're going to face is going to be able to be solved by these fundamental actions, these fundamental tools. Additionally, it makes sense from time to time to consider whether you've chosen the right actions and the right tools, right? Activities and the right tools for those activities. But instead of opening yourself up to using anything and everything that comes your way, you're going to focus on using fewer number of tools and fewer types of activities. That reserve 10% also allows you to work collaboratively with other people who are not necessarily using the same tooling as you. And additionally, it's a good way of experiencing other tools so that if you do choose to update your tool set or add a new core activity to your list, then this is a good place to get exposure to that before you make it a core tool or a core activity. Keep in mind, this is a rough framework. There's no absolute specifics here other than the kind of arbitrary 90%. Really this means the vast majority of your time and choosing a limited number, how many is this? It could be three for one person, it could be six or seven for another person, a limited number of activities, limited number of tools. The key factor here is to be able to look at the way you're spending your time, whether that's cataloged through your calendar or maybe it's cataloged through the tasks that you have on your board and be able to pull from that tool set, right? Whether that is a tool or a process and an activity that you participate in, pull from that tool set and apply it to those different problems. When you have an outlier, you may want to ask yourself, am I the right person for this outlier? Am I the right person to do this particular task? Maybe I am, maybe this fits in that 10% or maybe the tools that I'm using are insufficient. I need to consider uptating my tool set. But instead of seeing every task as a brand new greenfield problem to solve, you're going to come to the job site with your tools in hand. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this discussion on tooling, on core activities, core tooling and how it relates to your productivity. I'd love to hear your feedback on this concept. As we've already mentioned, the Developer Tea Discord community is open for that kind of feedback. Out of the two, developer.com slash discord to join that community, totally free. Always will be. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Launch Darkly. You're getting started with enterprise level feature flagging for free today at launch darkly.com. That's launchdarkly.com. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.