What are you putting off into the future? I want you to get very specific in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. I'm really excited about upcoming content on this podcast. And a lot of the content that we're going to be producing in the upcoming weeks, months over the next year, even, is going to be focused on growing your career and growing it towards some senior level position. I don't mean position in a company. I mean the senior level position in the career that you want. This means leadership thinking. It means senior developer, senior engineer mindset. That's the kind of content that we're going to be producing. And before the beginner, the younger engineer, the folks who are at the earlier part of their of your career as engineers, before you hear that that content is not going to be relevant to you, it absolutely is because the truth is your journey to becoming a senior engineer, your journey to becoming senior in your career, to advancing in your career. That starts now. That mindset can start today. And today, I'm going to actually set out a habit. They practice that you can adopt. And I want you to adopt it in the course of this episode. Now, it's not going to become a habit unless you continue to practice it. So be certain to revisit this episode if you need to. Write down a reminder to do this again and again, but this is a very simple technique. Then I want you to do it while you're listening to this episode. Very simple thing. I asked you at the beginning, what are you putting off into the future? What? And most of you have a very specific answer. Probably two or three things that you can answer this with. And for the sake of this episode, I want you to focus on one that's relatively small or, more importantly, is immediately actionable. You know exactly what you could do to advance this thing. Now, if you don't know what exactly you could do to advance it, well, that is actually part of this process. Identifying what is the first step necessary to advance this particular thing that you're procrastinating on. And it takes some thought to figure out what that first step is. A lot of our procrastination is actually a result of not knowing what the first step is. So if you don't know what that first step is, figure that out first. That's kind of step zero, if you will. And once you've figured out what the step is, I want you to specifically schedule when you're going to do it. And when I say specifically, I mean, on your calendar, pick a day and a time. And if possible, pick a location. While you're doing this, I want you to imagine who's going to be around you. You can even put a notes in that calendar in the event. And a critical piece to this puzzle is making sure you don't forget it. Right? Use a calendar that you're used to using. If you don't have a normal calendar, set one up that can send you reminders. So you get a reminder maybe the night before, for example, right? So you're scheduling the thing that you're putting off. And maybe the thing you're putting off is something that you want to do continuously. Well, your intuition might tell you that you should schedule all of those. No, I want you to just schedule the first one. All right? If it is something where you need to schedule follow up a second event, a second thing to do, if you want to develop a habit, when you're done with the first one, when you're done with that first event, rather than trying to schedule an entire series of events, when you're done with the first one, schedule the next one. Now, you may be asking why that specific thing, why not go ahead and schedule all of them. It's very easy to see your commitment to a given event, right? Your commitment to a given activity, a given thing that you're going to put on your calendar. If you have a series of them, it's easy to see that as the commitment, the whole series. And that means that the kind of barrier to entry is much higher. What we want to do is lower the barrier to entry to doing this thing. Number one, and number two, giving you a very concrete plan. All right? And understanding exactly when this is going to take place, getting that very concrete plan about how you're going to do it, who's going to be around when you're doing it, where you're going to do it, and when all of this is critical to adherence to that plan. If you only have this kind of ethereal idea of sometime in the future, almost certainly other things are going to suck up that space. Other things are going to eat your time away from you. I've instead, you carve out the time intentionally, you're much more likely to actually do that. And this is shown in research, by the way, a guest on the show, Katie Mowen, she in her book outlined some of the research on this specific topic. I encourage you to go read that book, by the way. It's called How to Change. So take the time before this episode ends. We're going to do our little outro here while we're doing the outro even. Pull out your calendar. And even if you have to change it in the future, that's fine. Go ahead and schedule that event on your calendar. And I want to hear about this. If this works for you, if it actually gets you to take the first step, I want to hear your story about why this actually worked for you. And you can tell me that story. There's two ways. There's the first way, which is just emailing me at developeratiogemail.com. But the second way is a lot more fun. If you want to come and tell your story in the developerate discord community, there's other people who will benefit from you telling that story. developeratiogemail.com.com.com. That's developeratiogemail.com.com. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I hope it's a challenge in the positive way. I hope that you will get the ball rolling on things that you might have procrastinated on for a long time. And if you didn't pick anything to schedule, well, I've got a good thing for you to schedule right now. If you are a long time listener and you haven't left a review in iTunes, that is one way that you can give back to the show. Help us continue to reach more and more engineers like you who are trying to level up in their careers, help them find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. Thank you so much for listening. Of course, if you haven't yet subscribed and you want to, you don't want to miss out on future episodes like this one, go and subscribe and whatever podcasting app you're currently using. Thanks so much for listening. enjoy your tea.