you've probably heard of the five whys exercise this is a root cause analysis exercise if you've ever been a part of an incident some kind of outage in your job then you may have encountered the five whys in the post incident review or some kind of retro a post-mortem but in today's episode i want to give you an additional tool to pair with the five whys and i want you to be able to use this not only in a post-mortem in a in a kind of retrospective fashion but also in a planning position or or in an analysis position we've recently talked about setting up your new year's resolutions for success upgrading your resolutions if you missed that episode go back to the last episode of developer t that's where we talk about it and in this episode we talk about a handful of things one of the things we talk about is ensuring that you have some kind of clear metrics etc one of the things we don't talk about though is matching your action to your intention in other words how are you going to actually operationalize connect your energy your spend your day-to-day your schedule how are you going to connect that to those goals whether it's a smart goal or however you've set those resolutions how are you going to actually meet them a lot of the resolutions as we talked about on the last episode of the podcast we talked about how to make sure that you're doing the right thing especially personal resolutions they tend to be avoiding something all right so operationalizing your avoiding probably depends on replacement okay that's a that's a uh i guess a side tip for today's episode uh you're unlikely to succeed in your avoidance if you don't have a replacement this is uh reasonably backed up by by research that our avoidance techniques tend to fail unless we do something that we're not supposed to do and that's why we're not supposed to do it some alternative action some alternative uh you know um activity for example all right so uh if you're operationalizing the things your goals that you have then you should be looking at your time you should be looking at how you spend your time the vast majority of people who are listening to this episode right now if i were to ask you how did you spend your week last week the first tool you're likely to find is the tool that you're using to spend your time the first tool you're likely to pull up there's nothing wrong with this is your calendar this this is for a couple of reasons one it's hard to remember it's hard to remember what all did i do last week i'm going to go back and look at some kind of tracking some scheduling tool is a good way to figure out where your time went but it's also the case that very often we are not living out our goals we couldn't say that we have a strategy okay then this is what is what to do next so i'm going to go back and look at some kind of what today's episode is about that we have a strategy for where our time goes companies do this pretty regularly they determine what is the portfolio of our energy spend in other words you know what percent of our resources do we want to put towards new projects versus you know maintenance work what kind of investment do we want to make on innovation and what kind of investment do we want to make on the future of our energy spend what kind of investment do we want to make on uh you know fixing bugs for example you may have a percentage allocation this is a strategy this is a forethought strategy for how you'd like to spend your time and most individuals don't necessarily have one of these don't necessarily have a strategy for how to spend their time so in today's episode i want to give you some basic tools for starting down the road of creating your own energy spend time so i'm going to go back and look at some of the things that we've talked about in this episode and i'm going to go back and look at some of the time strategy creating your personal resource spending strategy all right this is very similar to budgeting uh it's very similar to you know any kind of allocation exercise that you might have but uh in today's episode i want to talk about taking your existing spins and rationalizing exactly what those spins are are buying you what is your time strategy for how you'd like to spend your uh investment and what is your return we're going to talk about that right after we talk about today's sponsor speaking of investments if you are building websites by hand if you are uh spending time on ui coding and hosting and security and you don't have all of the experience to do infrastructure maintenance if you just want to build a website then you probably have dreams of making those things easier maybe some kind of automated process or a builder that would be great right a website builder that actually works it doesn't have limited control well that's exactly what you're going to get with wix studio it's a node-based builder that lets you add full stack javascript code to any site you're going to spend less time on ui coding hosting security etc and instead you're going to be developing in your preferred coding environment online at a vs code based ide locally through a github integration however you prefer and either way with wix studio you're deploying in a click you don't have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure because it's automatically maintained for your peace of mind you can extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions and custom built features with wix's apis and integrations and when you need to speed things up wix studios ai assistant is on hand to generate tailored code snippets troubleshoot bugs and retrieve product answers in seconds work in a developer first ecosystem head over to wix studio.com that's w i x studio.com thanks again to wix for sponsoring today's episode of developer team so we're talking about this uh idea of the five ways to build a and usually what we do with the five wise is we go from some instance and we're trying to abstract outward so think about this something happened well why did it happen we're trying to find the root cause right and eventually we will get to something that is probably systematic but at each layer there might be some action to take which is why we want to do the five wise rather than trying to jump to uh you know some intuitive systematic problem also it should be noted that the five wise may have multiple branches this is one of the criticisms of the framework that one why doesn't necessarily lead to only one other why you may have a tree structure they there could be multiple wise multiple factors leading into you know whatever that lower level thing is so you can imagine you know the the server uh what let's say we we got a denial of service error um our server was overloaded that's the first why that we had a lot of traffic why did we have a lot of traffic we released in uh you know we we had a sale and we sent a bunch of marketing emails out all at the same time and so everybody uh who received the email is all clicking the link at the same time and we didn't coordinate um you know any of our scaling infrastructure to to handle the the the the load right and and i'm going to walk through this whole thing just to kind of get to what we think is like a systematic problem right okay so so so why did that happen uh well we could say well we we released the sale because it's a part of our normal ops okay that that's kind of the end of that chain uh but why did we not coordinate our uh you know our sale release with some kind of devops response uh or pre-scaling or something like that right that might be a good idea uh might be one chain to follow. And you could say, well, those two teams don't necessarily operate with some kind of overlap. They didn't know. The DevOps team didn't have any visibility into these releases. Okay, there's some kind of operational problem to solve there, right? Maybe in the future you could improve by having these two functions communicate better, right? They're going to work a little bit closer together. So in the future, maybe the emails are released as a trickle release, right? So that the overload is naturally managed by balancing the release of the links. Or if there's a timed sale, if we do need to release all these links at the same time, we can pre-scale our servers or whatever the plan is to manage that, right? You could ask one more why, how to... We end up here is what that next level would be. Why don't these two departments communicate? And there may be some insights there. All right. So we're not going to continue. We could go into multiple branches of this. There's a lot of different things we could talk about that. But instead, what I want to talk about is how do we apply this back to our calendar example? Because interestingly, calendar events or your meetings, these process meetings, tend to be the abstracted thing. They're on the other side of the why, right? You would abstract up to one of these meanings. So instead, what I want you to do is move it back down the other direction. And we're going to do that with the five what's. It's not a very catchy name, so I doubt it's going to go viral from this episode. But the idea is to break down what exactly is happening in the meeting. What exactly are you doing? All right. What exactly is it that you're doing with that focus block of time? And the goal is to move you away from abstraction, which is things like labels, right? You have a label of focus time. But inside of that focus time could be a whole vast array of things that you're doing. And so what I want you to do is to consider or you have labeled focus time. It might be administrative work that is more reactive in nature, or it could be proactive work or something in between. It might be something like learning or investigation. This is somewhere in between kind of reactive and proactive. And once you can get down to the more action-oriented or activity-oriented description of what you're doing with your time, then you can perform a why and then go through the five whys again, right? So what is it about this activity that matters? Why are we doing this? And what this can do is it can lead you to recognizing that the way that you're spending your time has some goal that the activity doesn't necessarily line up with. In other words, the things that you're doing with your time, have evolved over time and perhaps have gotten away from your actual goals. I'll give you a couple of simple examples of this. Let's imagine that you have, you know, on your calendar, you have a status meeting. You're a lead engineer. You have a status meeting with your manager and your manager's manager and all the other lead engineers, okay? That are, I guess, like a peer level relationship with you that report to the same manager. Okay. Why do you have a status meeting with your manager and your manager's manager? Why do you have this? Or what is happening? Let's start there, right? So we're going to break this down into the activities that are occurring within this meeting, a status meeting. In this case, let's imagine that your status is each of you going through and giving metrics for the amount of code that you've generated in the last two weeks, okay? So notice that what we've called a status meeting, is actually, you know, from an activity standpoint, all you're doing is reading out data. Now you can ask some questions at this stage. Okay, what about this matters? Or what about this is achieving my goals? Or what are the goals of this particular activity? You could also break that down further and say, okay, what metrics are we sharing? Are we sharing the data? Are we sharing the data? Are we sharing the data? Are we sharing the data? Are we sharing, you know, how many bugs were closed? Are we sharing, you know, and you could get down to the lowest level activity. And then you build back up to a why, right? So why are we sharing these metrics? The concept of a status meeting tends to have a wide variety. And a lot of you probably have status meetings, some kind of status meeting on your calendar right now, right? There are a wide variety. There are a wide variety of reasons for a status meeting to exist. So if you start asking the why question in this example, it sounds like the why here is to produce the metrics. Now, you could ask the question, okay, what about those metrics is useful in this forum, right? Why are we sharing these metrics here? Because the next step is to produce the metrics. And the next step is to produce the metrics. And the next step in these why questions is probably going to lead you to asking more important questions like, why couldn't this be done in an automated fashion? Why couldn't we just generate these metrics for our, you know, reporting chain? All right. So if you start asking these questions, you're likely going to uncover, you know, the underlying motivations for these meetings and or you're going to uncover opportunities. Okay. And this doesn't just apply to meetings that you are pulled into. This applies to how you spend your time. So if you're saying, okay, I'm going to spend 45 minutes every week on Fridays learning. Okay. What does, what does learning entail for you? Maybe it entails reading a book. Maybe it entails actually practicing with code. Okay. Why is it that you're reading a book? Why is it you're practicing code? Not why do you need to do this? Why do you need to do this? Why do you need to do this? Why do you want to learn? The important thing here is that you break it down to the activity. And that's really the insight I want you to walk away with, because why do you want to learn? Most people are going to answer that by saying, I, you know, something, something generic. I want to always learn in my career. It's important to learn. I'm going to grow in my career. The more that I learn. But if you ask yourself about the activity, why are you reading this book versus why are you practicing code? You may have a closer insight into how you're going to learn. And if you're going to learn, you're going to know that's going to help your career, right? This particular book was recommended to me by, by my manager, because they believe that it, you know, provides insight into leadership skills. And I want to, I want to build my leadership skills. That would be one version of answering the why that's very different than just the generic you know, why do you want to learn response? So again, I want you to kind of take a, kind of zoom out for a minute. And I want you to think about those goals that you have that we, we, that we talked about in the last episode, the goals that you're developing over time, your, your, uh, your resolutions, your resolve, the things that you care about investing in and aligning your time to those goals. So as you're looking through your calendar, okay, there's, there's kind of two ways to think about this. One is by looking at your existing calendar and trying to understand what you're doing. And the other is by looking at your existing calendar and trying to understand how do my activities that I currently engage in, how do they map to my goals? How do they forward my goals? How do I want to shape the existing things that I'm doing in a way that, uh, can, can help me achieve my goals? Maybe you have things that are absolutely contributing to those, uh, broader goals that you have. Another way to think about this is to start with a clean slate. We've talked about this probably a hundred times on the show. I don't know exactly how many times, but the idea is to to build your ideal schedule, right? To take the goals that you have and to develop some list of activities, right? Again, we want to start with these activities rather than broad labels because the broad labels are going to abstract away the, the ability to ask why. Okay. So if you said, oh, I'm going to work on career progression, that's a label. That's a broad label. There's no activity described in career progression. That's a broad label. That's a broad label. So when you, when you sit down at your desk, what exactly are you doing? Okay. If you had 10 people who all had the same calendar, uh, event called work on career progression, all 10, all 10 of them might do something wildly different. And in fact, all 10 of them may have activities that have wildly different levels of effectiveness. Okay. Be more specific, be more activity oriented. When you're talking about planning out your career, you're talking about planning out your days, planning out that ideal schedule. What kinds of activities do you want to participate in at what ratios to what degree, uh, do you want to balance, you know, building versus managing? Maybe you want to pursue an IC track. Maybe you want to pursue a management track. Those are some broad level goals that you can then more tactically match up your activities with, right? Try, try, try to get down to the activity level. So then you can match your what with your why. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer T. I hope this conceptually makes sense to you breaking down, uh, these otherwise abstract concepts that, that you label in your calendar, you know, thinking about things like even in your personal life, you could do the same thing with your personal life, breaking down family time. What are you doing in your family time? If you're all sitting around looking at your phones, are you actually achieving the thing that you wanted to achieve when you said Friday night is family night? Or is there a different set of activities that you want to engage in? This is the kind of critical thinking I want to trigger in your brain with this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you again to today's sponsor Wix. Wix has built a website builder, uh, Wix studio, the developer first ecosystem that you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more. On the functionalities that matter the most to you and to your customers, you can develop online or locally, uh, whatever your workflow is, it's going to work with Wix studio. You'd extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with Wix studios, AI code assistant. All of that is wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for that total peace of mind. And so you don't have to go and learn a bunch about infra working to develop a first ecosystem at Wix studio.com. Thank you again to Wix. Thank you so much for listening. To this episode. Uh, we're trying moving right along into our 11th year. Uh, we've gone 10 years as of the fifth of this month, and you all have made that possible. Um, incredibly grateful that we still have, you know, listeners, some people who've been listening for, for a decade to the show, which blows my mind, um, that we still have folks hanging around listening to the show that long. I hope it's been valuable to you. 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