we've talked many times on this show before about chaos and randomness and luck and we've also talked about focus in today's episode we're going to explore the overlap between focus and luck and how we can invite the right kind of chaos into our lives my name is jonathan cattrall you're listening to developer t and my goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity perspective and purpose in their careers and it's important to understand that most of our lives are spent in some kind of routine for the vast majority of people listening to this podcast you spend a lot of your time doing something that you're very familiar with doing sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes you'll have variations on whatever it is that you're doing, but for the most part, you're not going to have drastic differences in your day-to-day life. Now, sometimes this will adjust. You may go on vacation. You may have totally different activities as you would normally have, but even when you're on vacation, most of your day-to-day behaviors are going to look very similar, and there's a reason for this. When we become comfortable with our behaviors, it is hard. It's very mentally taxing, physically taxing, and ultimately kind of against our nature to color outside of those lines because our brains, the way our brains are kind of interpreting the situation, our brains are telling us that things are working. Fine, and it's not a good idea to change that because we don't know if those changes would result in success or not. We know we're doing okay today, though, so let's perpetuate whatever it is that we're doing today into tomorrow. Now, this is one of the reasons why developing good routines is so important. Paying attention to your habits is critical to your long-term success. Because if you're not developing your habits, if you're not focusing on your habits and kind of implementing the things that you want long-term through the things that you're doing day-to-day, then the most powerful lever that you have, the most repeated actions that you take are going to be unintentional, unfocused. But as with pretty much everything, there's a balance. There's a balance to be had between developing a simple and straightforward routine and absolute chaos. Something in between is likely to be optimum. We're going to talk about why that is right after we talk about today's sponsor, RemoteWorks. This episode of Developer Tea is supported by RemoteWorks, a podcast that tells extraordinary stories of teams that made the shift to flexible working. You can go right now while we're talking about this show and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you already use. The way we work has changed forever. And in each episode of this show of RemoteWorks, host Melanie Green tells an insightful story about how people and companies can change their lives. Are adapting. Last season in preventing burnout, we learned about the challenges and the rewards of working remotely during this crazy pandemic. A recent study found that 75% of workers have experienced burnout and 40% said their burnout was a direct result of the pandemic. But what if we can't see all the signs of impending burnout, either in ourselves or in others? We hear firsthand from someone who has been through it. And we also hear expert advice and how to recognize it and what can be done to prevent it from happening. In this season of RemoteWorks, we'll hear about how the MLB has had to learn how to go remote. Everybody's working remotely, including the MLB. So we'll hear how MLB has had to adjust about everything they do from new rules in how we gather to virtual fans and stadiums. We'll look at how they've embraced this world of flexible working. Of course, we're all experiencing that. One of my favorite episodes in season three of RemoteWorks is actually about your desk. If you're listening to this episode right now at your desk, you can look around and see signs of your personality. And you may have this feeling that I've had in the past before I listened to this episode of self judgment that my desk wasn't cleaner. No matter what your desk looks like, you can learn something about yourself and about the other people that have desks around you by listening to this specific episode. Check it out. You can find RemoteWorks anywhere that you listen to podcasts. My huge thanks to RemoteWorks for their support. So you have been working on developing your habits, staying focused in what you do, cutting out all the time, and you've been working on developing your habits, all of the extraneous things that you don't want to do. But there is a problem. There's a problem with being too strict, with having too many guidelines, and avoiding all of the otherwise unfocused, kind of diffused time that you used to have before you got a hold of your schedule. This seems like paradise at first to most software engineers. But it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. We love our focus time. We love being able to stay uninterrupted. And we like developing those habits. At least most of the engineers that I work with, the job kind of demands that kind of environment in order to succeed. But we can miss out on so much by controlling. The more control we put forward, the more we control our schedule, the more we control our environment. The more we impose and remove entropy, the less likely we are to experience something new. When we think about the idea of luck or randomness or chaos, those events that you might describe as lucky are kind of fundamentally categorized as new. If you're... If you're reducing the amount of chaos or reducing the amount of entropy that you have in your life by controlling everything that you do, then you're unlikely to experience those moments of luck. And this goes for most categories of our lives. If you avoid social networking events because you have a specific routine and it doesn't include those events, then you're unlikely to meet the person who's going to give you your dream job. By happenstance, right? It's unlikely that you're going to run into them if you're just maintaining a very specific and regimented routine that doesn't include interfacing with new people. Similarly, if you have a meal plan that you have decided every single meal for this week, then you're almost certainly not going to experience any new foods, but potentially not finding new foods that you would very much enjoy. It's important then to understand that neither extreme is likely to produce the effect that we want. If all we did was experience new foods, then we very likely are going to have a hard time predicting whether we're going to enjoy a meal or not. We might also have a hard time developing a consistent kind of profile of nutrition. Similarly, if all we do is network or spend our time in random ways, maybe end up job hopping as a result of this, then we're unlikely to spend much time doing deep work or even developing existing relationships and friendships further. So we have to understand that this kind of model is a balance and that you can't have both extremes but that you should incorporate both sides of this most likely if you're like most people, if you have goals that are similar to most people. One of the best ways you can imagine doing this is to set yourself up for your most important habits, but then understand that that level of focus that you're creating for yourself, that important and very critical kind of high-level deep work focus that you're creating for yourself, is going to be the most important thing that you're creating or the very kind of consistent habits that you're creating. They give you the freedom, right? This is the critical point. They give you the freedom to say no to things that don't matter, which means that you can say yes to those things that are more random, the things that are a result of entropy. Now choosing which event lands in which bucket is an exercise that we're not going to be able to cover in this episode. So if you're going to do this, then you're going to do it in this episode. We've talked about it in past episodes before though. For example, choosing high leverage activities, that's a very important kind of model to have in mind when you're picking what to say yes or no to. The critical point here is that there is not a binary good and bad. We're not trying to eliminate all distraction. We're also not trying to take advantage of every new opportunity. We eliminate the least important things so that we can take advantage of the most important opportunities. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. A huge thank you to Remote Works. You can find Remote Works wherever you listen to podcasts. I encourage you to go and subscribe now for season three. Your ratings and your reviews are the lifeblood of this podcast. If you haven't yet left a rating or review, this is your chance to win a prize. So if you haven't yet left a rating or review, this is the one ask that I make of the people who listen to this show. If you want this show to continue, this is the best way to help us out. Go and leave a rating and a review in whatever platform that you use that has those features. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.