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I started Developer Tea in 2015 to help engineers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in regular short bursts of high-value content.

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Build Environments That Produce Habits

Habits aren't built on their own. They are the result of environments. Reduce friction and create a positive reinforcement loop, and the habits will follow.

Published: 10/24/2022
Length: ~9m
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Design Your Low Stakes Environment As A Mirror of Your High Stakes Environment

What happens in high-stakes environments? Is the learning you do in your low-stakes environment actually helping you when you have skin in the game?

Published: 10/20/2022
Length: ~12m
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Better Goals - Deriving Values from Personal Investment and Risk Tolerance

Having trouble setting goals? Take a look at a different angle with the guided exercise in today's episode.

Published: 10/18/2022
Length: ~11m
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Better Goals - Finding Cohesion Between Your Long and Short Term Goals

Our goals usually take two forms: what we want to accomplish, and who we want to be. When we can align these things, we find cohesion in our goals, giving us more clarity and purpose.

Published: 10/12/2022
Length: ~12m
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Better Goals - Two Guidelines for Better Outcomes

Two guidelines for better goal setting. First, goals don't stand alone. Second, ranges often beat arbitrary points.

Published: 10/10/2022
Length: ~11m
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5 Powerful Questions To Design Your Time More Effectively

Stop and think about how you are spending your time. Time is constantly moving, whether we stop to recognize it or not. How will you spend it? These five powerful questions will help you reconfigure your time today.

Published: 10/5/2022
Length: ~11m
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Short Term Tactics, Long Term Principles

A short term mindset will focus on different things than a long term mindset. Neither is right or wrong, but what are you optimizing for? Once you answer this question, you can start to work towards finding a solution that balances both.

Published: 10/4/2022
Length: ~8m
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Revolutionize Your Most Important Meetings with Powerful Questions

Your best tool is your next question.

Published: 9/28/2022
Length: ~12m
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Diffuse and Focused Thinking

Diffuse thinking produces options and draws connections. Focused thinking narrows things down to a specific path. Use them both, and watch for when they collide.

Published: 9/26/2022
Length: ~7m
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Why It's Hard to Do Nothing

Doing nothing seems like it would be easy... But it seems that action is often easier than doing nothing. Sometimes, perhaps often, action is the right choice. However, if there is no reason to believe one action over another would be better, or action over inaction for that matter - why are we taking action at all? If we think about our efforts as spending time and energy, we can more adequately understand that inaction may be a valuable skill, rather than a risk.

Published: 9/21/2022
Length: ~6m
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Demystifying Decision-Making - Success is Not Just About Making Good Decisions

You are not the sum of your decisions. Making better decisions often relies on having a long list of mistakes to learn from.

Published: 9/19/2022
Length: ~9m
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What You Have In Common With the Smartest Person In the World

How does the smartest person in the world solve the most complex problems that most mathemeticians can't even understand? The same way you write code and build features at your job. The principles always apply.

Published: 9/15/2022
Length: ~9m
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A Way Out of Overwhelm

Choose one thing. Only one important thing. Do that over and over. That's your way out of overwhelm.

Published: 9/12/2022
Length: ~10m
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Understand Position and Interest To Make Better Collaborative Decisions

What people ask for is not the same as why they ask for it. What people want isn't as simple as what they say they want. Understanding the *why* is critical - the interest is just as important as the position.

Published: 9/9/2022
Length: ~8m
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Future Thinking Is Not Planning For A Single Course of Events

People often erroneously plan for specific futures. This leads down a pathway to failure most times. This is because the future is rarely what we expect it to be. We can think in terms of multiple possible futures, and prepare for most of them. This leads us towards flexibility and adaptabiity.

Published: 9/5/2022
Length: ~7m
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Balancing Decision Frames

Making good decisions is about tuning context. If you can't determine the context that matters, the decision itself is impossible to measure against. All decisions can be framed within a context with other decisions; choosing those decisions in concert is often the best strategy.

Published: 8/31/2022
Length: ~10m
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Copy of How Feedback Loops Shape Our World (Fixed Audio)

Feedback loops shape everything around us. We make a change or adjustment, watch for what happens, and repeat. This happens with people in the most unexpected ways. Tuning in to this adjustment loop can help us use it as a tool, rather than reacting to it.

Published: 8/31/2022
Length: ~9m
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Reframing Every Decision As A Tradeoff

Every decision is a tradeoff. If you are looking for the "right" decision, you can reframe this to the "optimal decision based on my desired outcome." This could have the effect of aligning your biases to work in your favor.

Published: 8/29/2022
Length: ~6m
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Judging Quality of Decisions Instead of Outcomes in Performance Reviews

Is your performance review judging the luck or random events of a person's career? What about the times they made the right decision in a bad situation? The outcome may not be desirable every time, even with good decision-making.

Published: 8/27/2022
Length: ~12m
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How Feedback Loops Shape Our World

Feedback loops shape everything around us. We make a change or adjustment, watch for what happens, and repeat. This happens with people in the most unexpected ways. Tuning in to this adjustment loop can help us use it as a tool, rather than reacting to it.

Published: 8/22/2022
Length: ~9m
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Developer Tea was a part of Spec and is hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering manager at Guild Education.