Hey everyone and welcome to this very special episode of Developer Tea. It is special because we are celebrating 3 million listens. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and today we're going to be talking about the very first topic that we talked about on Developer Tea. Focus. I want to celebrate an amazing milestone for Developer Tea today. As I'm recording this just a few hours ago, we surpassed that 3 million download mark and I'm so grateful to all of you and today I want to talk with you again about that first topic. Focus. Today's episode is sponsored by Rollbar. With Rollbar, you can put errors in their place. Regardless of what platform you are using, Rollbar can help you identify and diagnose the cause for errors. We'll talk more about what Rollbar has to offer to you as a developer later in this episode. But first, I want to continue our long running discussion on focus. Last January, when I recorded the very first episode of Developer Teaon focus, we discussed the massive amount of distracting information and media flow that we deal with every single day. Our phones buzzing constantly. The statistics that we talked about mentioned how many times we unlock our phones. Someone listened to that episode if you haven't yet. It's all the way back in January of last year. We talked about some alarming statistics that apply really to everyone, not just developers. But today, I want to talk to you about a slightly different aspect of focus. As I mentioned many times on the show, the most common questions that I receive are around the pathways that new developers should choose. The questions are coming from people who are trying to decide what language they should learn or what is the best way to learn for a new developer. I've addressed a lot of these questions on the show trying not to be too prescriptive about what language you should or shouldn't use because it really depends on what your current situation is. But far too often as developers who are looking to stay ahead of the game, we find ourselves making decisions on a daily basis that take us in brand new directions. One day we say we're going to learn, react, or angular and become a JavaScript expert. The next day we say, well, first I'm going to go back and learn to write modern C because every programmer needs to know how to write in C. The next day we find ourselves looking over Haskell documentation because really we don't want to learn C. What we want to do is become a functional programmer and take advantage of all of the abstractions that have come about. But then the next day we find ourselves going back to our basics. We're trying to learn our bash skills, how to string different commands together with pipes. But then the next day we're picking up a book about theoretical computer science and all of these things kind of mush together, don't they? The cycle starts all back over and we want to become a JavaScript expert again. And unfortunately, all of those great ideas, all of those individual ideas that we had about what we wanted to do, they all let us know where we didn't learn anything at the end of all of that. At the very most we learned one or two things in each of those areas, but we don't become experts by having this distracted focus. For many like myself, this cycle may be a little bit longer than one day. Perhaps it's a few days before you switch directions. Maybe it's a week or even a month, but there's a common thread through most stories that I've heard from other developers about this. And that is this. When we choose a path, we often go only so far as to see a very small part of the beginning of that path. And then we abandon it all together in favor of another path, or perhaps we try to travel five or six or 20 paths all at once. And this is absolutely detrimental to our ability to focus. Absolutely detrimental. Because as we've said so many times on this show, and as I'm sure you've learned through your own difficult experiences, having your focus split in 20 directions is not only completely unproductive, but it could even be worse than doing nothing at all. I do this with books all the time. This is my downfall. I have a very difficult time finishing books. And we talked about the same concept in our Media Consumption Diet episode. Quite simply, we believe that we can consume and learn more than we have time to actually consume and learn. And so we stockpile our different pathways, and we pursue each of them only to be sidetracked when a new one comes up. I have so many books that I've stacked up beside my bed to read, and I just haven't read them because I'm so sidetracked by new books and new ideas. I never actually go through one. I actually just recently finished one, and ironically it was deep work by Cal Newport. Cal talks about eliminating distraction. So I recommend you check that book out if you're interested in the subject even further. But this leaves us having learned nothing at all if we end up being sidetracked constantly. And this is one of the primary factors of success for Developer Tea. I don't want you to miss out on this. One of the primary factors of success for Developer Tea is that I haven't straight away from the main delivery method of this show. We have done a little over three episodes per week on average every single week since we started this show. Did we know for sure that we would be successful with the show? Absolutely not. And I'm not advocating that you pursue something that is consistently returning little to no positive impact on your life. Pretty quickly we could see that it was catching on. But if you are investing a lot of your time in something that's giving you no return, then obviously there is a time to say no. Instead, I'm encouraging you to make decisions that you can stick with. Let me say that again because really if you leave with anything from this episode is this, make decisions you can stick with. Now I'm going to give you a key modification to your decision making process and the way that you think about your time that will help you focus and walk deeply down individual paths one at a time instead of just seeing the beginning of that path and then choosing another one to view the beginning of. But first we're going to take a quick sponsor break. We're going to talk about roll bar and then I'll come back and give you that key modification to your decision making process. Today's episode is sponsored by Rollbar. With Rollbar you put errors in their place. You can detect, diagnose and defeat those errors. And with Rollbar you get the context, the insights and control you need to find and fix bugs faster. Dealing with errors sucks. Trying to dig through logs for example is an awful process. Trying to ask users to give you input about what it is that they experienced along the way so that you can piece together all of those individual factors that may have led up to the error. Rollbar is really difficult to do because you're ignoring so many factors. Naturally you're not going to be able to piece together all of that in your brain. You're going to end up digging through the source code. Rollbar works with all major languages and frameworks. You can track production errors and deployments in eight minutes or less. You can integrate Rollbar into your existing development workflows and send alerts when those errors occur to things like Slack or HipChat or you can automatically create issues in GitHub or Giro or Asano or Pivotal Tracker. Pretty much everything you use. Some customers of Rollbar for example include Heroku, Twilio, Kayak, InstaCart, Zendesk and Twitch. Now if you go to the link in the show notes you can get the Bootstrap plan for free for 90 days, that's 300,000 errors that you get tracked for free. Go and check it out. Rollbar.com slash Developer Tea. Of course that will be in the show notes at spec.fm. Thanks again to Rollbar for sponsoring Developer Tea. So today's episode has been about a subject that's really truly the core of what this show is about. Ultimately, about focusing and about making decisions and how you can use your time most effectively and make the right decisions. That is really the question that I receive most often on this show is what should I learn, what should I do with my time, how can I be most effective. That's the core of these questions that most people are asking especially as young developers. And I told you that I have one key modification that can help you avoid switching your focus from one thing to another every day or every few days or even every month. And that is this key modification is build a time budget and filter every decision you make through it. Let me say it again, build a time budget and filter every decision you make through it. You know, time cannot be recovered. Once time is spent, it's gone forever. I'm not the first to say this. You've probably heard it before. If you want to get the most out of your time, you should treat your schedule less like a container that needs filling and more like a budget you can spend. Okay, your time is not a container that you just fill up kind of haphazardly. Treat your time like a budget that you can spend that you can invest like a powerful tool in your tool chest, right? Financial budgeting is a powerful tool that helps people recognize the reality of their finances, gives them a sustainable plan for the future. In the same way, a time budget can be a powerful tool that can help you shift your focus away from what do I feel like doing today and instead focus on how should I spend my time today, that keyword spend being the subtle but important shift in mindset that reminds you that your time is valuable. If you can't tell, I'm pretty passionate about this subject. How should I spend my time today when people create a financial budget? It is important to keep a few things in mind. You always start by defining your income, your debt, and your bills, and then you determine at your long-term sustainable plan for managing those debts and bills on a month-to-month basis. You may also define your current assets or whatever, but really we're talking about how you're spending your money every single day. When simply managing your current debts and bills, you also want to plan for the future, right? This includes preparing for emergencies, for example. It includes paying off your debts, saving up money for the future, and perhaps even investing. But you don't accomplish those large financial goals like paying off your major amounts of debt or seeing huge returns from investments in a single day, nor do you accomplish them in a single month or even a single year. Long-term financial goals are a long process of consistently moving towards those goals with small, every single day decisions and eliminating distracting factors when they creep in and creating a budget gives you a guideline of how to meet those long-term goals each in every single day. So when you create a time budget, you should keep this analogy of a financial budget in mind. It's very difficult to pay off a lot of debt if you are an impulse buyer, for example. Your extra margins are eliminated by those impulse buys, and the interest on your debt ends up putting you even further into debt. In the same way, it's very difficult to make significant headway on becoming a great programmer or a great leader if your attention moves in a new direction every single day. Not only are you not picking up actionable skills, but you're also losing time and falling behind as the industry moves faster than you can keep up. So in the same way that an impulse buyer is eliminating their extra margins, you are eliminating your extra headway that you could be making by simply shifting your focus all the time. Any time budget that identifies your long-term goals and provides adequate leniency for short-term indulgences, don't feel like the only way to become proficient at something, is to budget all of your time to that one thing. That's not what we're saying here. You should have some fun, right? No good financial advisor would tell you to spend all of your money on a single debt or on a single bill. The goal instead is to recognize that a lot of a spend or time like an impulse buyer spends their money and sticking with something that leads you towards your goal and budget regular intervals of time to put towards those goals. That's what you should be doing. Stick with something that leads you towards your goal. Make decisions that you can stick with. Make decisions you can stick with. If you pick up a book, for example, this is like I said, this is my personal problem. That holds a lot of incredibly valuable information that will push you further towards your long-term goals. Don't set that book down. The next time an interesting book comes along and catches your attention. Don't just quit reading your book when you come across a boring chapter. Stick with that book. Learn to focus. Focus is key. We've talked about it so many times. Focus is key. The goal isn't to restrict you to only one activity forever, one programming language, one ultimate goal. Instead, it is to encourage you to budget yourself some guidelines for your time so that you can eliminate distractions that really you don't care about, that really don't ultimately lead you towards your end goals and invest in your long-term goals. Focus is any good budget has a category for entertainment. Your time budget should include some time for you to play around with things that are totally impulsive. Don't carry you towards any specific goal. The truth is, these efforts are often quite fruitful and they may help you when you decide to define your next big goal, but don't use this as an excuse to drop everything and run in an entirely new direction. Just because there is an entertainment category in your budget doesn't mean you can put all of your budget towards entertainment. That would be absurd. Focus on your long-term goals. Focus on your long-term goals and craft your time budget around those long-term goals. First, learn to focus, stick with your goals. Once you have budgeted and invested the time towards that goal, the learning you will experience skyrockets. Simply because you have chosen not to waver from your path. And you're going further down that path than most people will. Thank you so, so much for listening to Developer Tea. Today, once again, we are just over 3 million unique listens. And I couldn't be happier to have you all listening to the show. Thank you so much for listening. If this is your first episode, welcome to the family. I'd love for you to subscribe so that you don't miss out on any future episodes of Developer Tea. You can do that in pretty much any podcasting app. Just look for that subscribe button in the app. Of course, if you are a long-time listener of Developer Tea. Or even if you've picked it up recently and really enjoying the show, please leave a review in iTunes. This is the best way to help other developers decide whether or not they actually want to listen to the show. So just leave a review in iTunes, of course, there will be a link in the show notes for you to do just that. Thank you once again to RollBar for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. No matter what platform you are using, every one of us experiences bugs. And RollBar can help you identify and squash those bugs. So go and check it out RollBar.com slash Developer Tea. Of course, that link and every other link from today's episode can be found in the show notes at spec.fm. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. And until next time, enjoy your tea.