There is a famous 1932 World Series game that legendary baseball player Babe Ruth played in. In the game, he may or may not have pointed to the bleachers before hitting a critical home run, which intrigues fans to this day. There’s something compelling about the idea of calling your shot, or saying what you are going to do and then doing it.

Calling your shots

My productivity advice is to call your shots every day you sit down to work.

At the beginning of each day, publicly state what you’re going to accomplish, and then update the list throughout the day. Make a list of the three or so most important things you are going to accomplish. If they aren’t important, why are you doing them? Ideally, you can tie these back to company or team objectives.

Here’s an example of what I might set out to do during a day. I usually post this to Slack in an appropriate channel, but you can use the best communication method for your team:

2016-02-02

[√] Fix forward-progress onboarding issue when there is a 500
[√] Sign up for Salesforce backups { OKR: Salesforce }
[√] Work with KP to test out a Salesforce email sending to Mandrill test environment

Blockers: need help figuring out why the PDFs are not generating and updated TOS/ROI at on some Salesforce accounts.

Headed to the Indy Vim meetup tonight, where I’ll be presenting on “using text objects and surround.vim effectively”.

I try to update the task list throughout the day for:

• new work that I didn’t expect to take on
• things that I decided were not as important as I thought they were
• tasks other team members took on

When you get to the end of the day, I reflect on why I did or did not hit the goals that I set. If I hit my goals, I usually feel pretty satisfied with the effort that I put in. I’ll evaluate if I set the bar too low, and adjust accordingly the next day.

There could be many reasons that I miss goals. Maybe I was busy with other things. Maybe the tasks were harder than expected. It could be that the tasks were too easy, and were not enough of a challenge. I could have been prone to distractions. The tasks could have been poorly defined. I could have gotten too focused on one of the tasks and neglected the others. Whatever the issue, I try to address the root cause so it doesn’t hinder me again.

Throughout the day and at the end of the day, I update what I have done. I try to mark when tasks are related to a company or team objective (OKR) so that it’s more clear what it relates to or what the value is.

Why is this useful?

For me, the largest benefit is accountability. Did I set out to do meaningful tasks, and did I do them?

I find that the days where I am fuzzy on what I am going to do are the least productive. I can mentally justify any level of achievement when I haven’t written down what I want to do before the day begins. The day fritters away, and while I like to say that it was unavoidable, it was likely under my control. Most people are not going to call you out when you’ve had an off day, so it is your responsibility to try to communicate expectations to hold yourself accountable.

Focusing on just a handful of things greatly improves my concentration. When everything is a priority, nothing is. By creating a short list at the beginning of the day and trying to get those things done first, I reduce the amount of time wasted figuring out what to work on next.

Another benefit of this approach is broadcasting to your team what you are planning on doing. There will be less stepping on toes. You might get input from a team member before you work on it that there is some prior work or thinking on this tasks, or that they have shifted in priority.

If the whole team does this at the beginning of their days, your team can have asynchronous and remote standups instead of needing to be in the same room at the same time. It fosters a greater sense of accountability and understanding what everyone is working on.

Selfishly, calling your shots and hitting them is a great way to build your reputation as someone who gets meaningful things done on a regular cadence. People will trust that you will do what you say you will do. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what the people you work with are doing. By broadcasting what you are getting done, you make it easier for others to understand and give you credit for the things that you do.

Meetings are not accomplishments

Meetings are not accomplishments, but they might affect how many things I accomplish. I don’t list them on my daily update, but I take them into account when forecasting for the day. At this point in my career at least, I’d rather focus on output over sitting in a room. There are often more productive ways to make decisions than having meetings. (Thanks to Jim Brown for hammering on this idea when we worked together at Haven.)

Modifications

It takes time to consider what you will realistically get done each day and communicate it to your team. You may decide do this planning the night before instead of first thing in the morning to save time. I find that this helps me get excited about the tasks that I set out to achieve, to think about them while heading into work, and that I more often hit the ground running when I start.

If you haven’t done this much or are early in your career, you might not be calibrated. Keep practicing and I can assure you that you will get better at it. You might choose to do this in private for a little while, but I recommend posting it after the first few times to try to get more accountability. Your estimates will improve when you write them down to “commit” to them.

While you might miss your targets a little, by continuing to strive to plan and accomplish a few key items per day, you will have far greater total output. Instead of having monthly or weekly feedback loops, we shorten it to a day.

I play Ultimate¹. While throwing and catching are an integral part of the game, I don’t see most players work on strengthening their grip or forearms to make their catches and throws better. At some point I randomly saw an article for baseball pitchers to strengthen their grip and thought that this could be useful to Ultimate players. So, I bought a five gallon bucket and filled it with rice and tried it.

While doing the workouts, I can definitely feel that my forearms and hands get tired. Within a few days, I feel that I can make more difficult catches, have better hand and forearm agility, and get a tighter grip on the disc for hucks (long throws, in Ultimate parlance.) I try to be more careful to be gentle while typing, since my forearms feel slightly inflamed and I don’t want to have any carpal tunnel issues.

Here is the workout I follow, which usually takes less than ten minutes. I definitely recommend watching the video from the link above, since it explains most of the setup and exercises. I took out some things from the workout that related specifically to pitching, and added a few things that might help with Ultimate-specific movements. I usually only do ten to twenty repetitions of each exercise. You will be sore for a day or so after doing it, at least the first few times. Don’t overdo it!

With Left And Right Hands, Individually

Grab the rice at the top of the bucket: I treat this like a warm-up. Just grab the rice at the top of the bucket and pull it up and release it.

Grab the rice at the bottom of the bucket: Dig a bit deeper when grabbing the rice and pull it up like above.

Grab the rice like your hand is a crab pincher: This is a good workout for the hands, and mimics the hand mechanics of one-handed grabs.

Use only the thumb movement in the crab pincher: This is a good workout for the thumb muscles. Your video game controller skills will be on point after doing this.

With a fist go in circles both ways in the rice: This definitely gives the forearms a workout, since the hands are not active.

With a fist go side to side in the rice: Some more forearm workout.

With a fist go up and down in the rice: This does not refer to pulling the rice up and down, but rotating the fist up and down.

Pretend you are throwing a backhand, in the rice: This is a new one. Works the wrist muscles that you would use for throwing. Be sure to use both hands to strengthen both and to work on your non-dominant hand strength.

Pretend you are throwing a forehand, in the rice: This is a new one. Similarly, this strengthens your forehand throwing muscles (outside of the wrist) and whichever fingers you use for throwing forehands.

Pretend you are throwing a hammer/scoober, in the rice: This is a new one. This works on your outside wrist muscles and finger muscles at a different angle.

Handshake while in the rice bucket: Works the top and bottom of the wrist.

Grab the rice as hard as you can: This really works the hand strength and overall forearm strength.

Pinch the rice as hard as you can: Again, this works those hand muscles for pinch grabs.

Flick your fingers outward while totally submerged in rice: This is surprisingly hard. I’m not sure what Ultimate exercise this mimics, but it’s probably good to have balance.

With Both Hands Simultaneously

Simulate pinch grab with fingers on top, into the rice: This is a new one. This exercise works on syncing up the hands for catching, while also working on strength. Pretend you are grabbing a disc that is in front of you for a few, and then one that is above your head if you can get the angle correct.

Simulate pinch grab with fingers on bottom: Another simulation (grab at knees)

Optional

Forearm curls with rice bucket: Take the bucket at your side and do some forearm curls.

Shoulder shrugs with the bucket: Similarly, grabbing the bucket and doing shoulder shrugs on each side works to strengthen your shoulder muscles (so you don’t get tired lugging your stuff around at tournaments.)

I was going to write a sweet blog post, and thought that I would quickly add footnotes support to my blog. I use the Redcarpet gem for this blog, and it appears to have support for footnotes. I tried adding the footnotes setting to the Redcarpet configuration, but that didn’t work. I figured that I had an old version of Redcarpet, so I wanted to upgrade it. Unfortunately, my Jekyll version was a little out of date (1.5.1, where the most recent is 3.0.2.)

I figured it wouldn’t be too painful to upgrade. For the most part, upgrading was straightforward. However–I ran into an issue where my drafts were not showing when I ran the jekyll build --drafts command (or its serve counterpart.) It ended up taking me several hours to debug, so I figured I’d share in case someone else runs into a similar issue.

I started making significant headway when I created a new project with the same Jekyll version (3.0.2). I created one simple draft in that project, ran the command, and the draft was correctly generated into my _site folder. I copied over only my _config.yml file (after trying to copy a few other things), and the draft was not correctly generated. So it had to be something with my configuration file.

I ended up commenting out various parts of the file until the file was properly generated, and found the bad line:

# Files to exclude from copying to _site when the site is built
exclude:
  - Gemfile
  - Gemfile.lock
  - Guardfile
  - README.markdown
  - _drafts  # <<< the offending line
  - _reference
  - config.ru
  - ..etc.

Apparently excluding the _drafts folder doesn’t work so well with newer versions of Jekyll. Previously it was excluded (I think) so that I didn’t deploy my _drafts folder. My guess is that since it is excluded from being copied, it is not present for some downstream process. It would have been nice to get a warning about this behavior though.

I tried it out on my blog, and… it still didn’t show my drafts! I quickly compared the two versions and my blog’s drafts had published: false set to true. So I figured that removing this line would make a difference, and it did. I guess that older versions of Jekyll must have ignored this flag when --drafts was passed, but it seems like newer versions of Jekyll take the published flag into consideration. I removed it from all of my drafts and the scripts that generate drafts and pages and posts.

Now it seems to work. It only took me like four hours.

So instead of the sweet blog post, I wrote this up instead. Hope it helps! ^{1, 2, 3}

Since college I have stayed up pretty late and gotten up late. My wife generally goes to bed around 10 or 11, and I am more in the range of 12 or 1 AM. However, the past few months I had some worse sleep hygiene. I was staying up late reading random stuff on the internet, or worse, watching Netflix or even video game streams. I would tell myself that I could go to bed at the next half-hour increment, and then blow through that. It would generally take me some time to fall asleep because I had watched something interesting, thought about engaging things, or just been exposed to a lot of light. My sleep quality would be worse than if I had done non-stimulating activities before bed. The next morning I would wake up and be annoyed that I had wasted that time. The next day I would be pretty wiped and irritable.

The process was a bit cyclical. I would stay late at work because I had gotten in later, and then it would be dark. I would be less likely to exercise and had a lot of energy at night. And on and on.

Taking charge

I realized that something had to change.

My plan was to commit to stop using my computer at around 10 PM. I reasoned that there was nothing that required me to use the computer after that point unless I made poor life decisions. If I truly needed to be on the computer, I either put things off too much or had an emergency that better engineering or planning could fix.

My hypothesis was that if I didn’t have the internet, I would either need to do useful things locally or would turn the computer off completely out of boredom. I don’t have many interesting things to do besides write words, read longer form content, write programs (using the Dash program as an offline lookup), or do spaced repetition when I don’t have a connection. I looked for a program that would try to turn off my internet completely at a certain time. It seemed that the solutions that I found for doing something like this had one or more negative qualities:

• cost money and didn’t quite have the features I wanted
• were irrevocable (could not get the internet back, even after a reboot)
• didn’t have scheduling of blackout periods
• only blocked portions of the internet, not everything

Rolling my own

A Macbook Pro is my primary rig. My first thought was to make a Mac program that would manage all of this. Then I figured that I could run some automated recurring tasks to try to achieve the same result. Typically one would use cron, but since I have a local Jenkins server, I can run Jenkins tasks to get a better interface and more visibility into the job runs.

I have three tasks set up in Jenkins:

1. The first task is called “Warn wifi turning off”. It warns me that the Wi-Fi will be turning off at 10 PM. It does this by invoking the Mac command say to audibly warn me of this fact. Pretty simple:

   /usr/bin/say "The wi-fi is turning off at 10 PM!"
   

   It runs at 9:50, 9:55, and 9:59 (50,55,59 21 * * * in cron syntax.) It could be potentially improved by flashing a system message in the upper corner in case the volume is down, but works fine.

2. The second task is called “Turn wifi off at 10 PM and every five minutes”. This script does not mess around. It turns off my Wi-Fi every five minutes from 10 PM until 5 AM. This is to prevent me from just turning the Wi-Fi back on. It is also quite simple:

   sudo /sbin/ifconfig en0 down
   

   This just says to take down the wi-fi interface through a command-line command. The interval is: 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 0,1,2,3,4,22,23 * * *.¹

3. The last task is called “Turn wifi on at 5 AM”. It does the opposite of the command above:

   sudo /sbin/ifconfig en0 up
   

   It runs at 5 AM (0 5 * * * in cron syntax.)

The set up is slightly buggy at the moment–the Wi-Fi usually doesn’t turn back on in the morning, for instance, so I have to invoke the script manually. Also, I’ll sometimes be greeted with “The Wi-Fi is turning off at 10 PM!” when I open the computer in the morning if I had it closed before 9:59 PM. But these are acceptable issues.

The result

So far I don’t think that I stayed up late dicking around on the internet once since I’ve set it up. I’ve only disabled it to watch a movie with my wife in the evening on her birthday, and then promptly re-enabled it.

I take the 10 PM deadline much more seriously than if I had to think about it every day. I’m sure that I would see the deadline come and go and not think twice about it after a few weeks. I think this is an example where a little willpower in setting up a system pays dividends down the road. A few times I’ve heard that the Wi-Fi is going to shut off and hurried to finish any tasks that needed the internet. Usually some time shortly after 10 PM I do get bored and do other things or simply go to bed.

Now I am getting more sleep and starting on a more positive spiral.

Another positive belief that I’ve come to realize: if there’s something worth consuming on the internet, it will be there tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be more awake, alert, and able to assess whether this thing is worthy of my time. But today, I can be safe in the knowledge that if there is something great, it’ll be there tomorrow and to not need to “complete” things (are they ever really complete?)

What distracts you?

What are your bad habits, and how could you set up a system to try to corral them?

Today I have a handy break down of how I made one of my Vim editing workflows more efficient.

I recently realized that I split code lines a non-trivial amount and that this process takes time and effort. I think this probably happens because I am working with ES6 imports more. Often, I’ll start with one line and add some imports, and then want to split up the line to make it more readable. For example, if I have:

import { clearUser, fetchUser } from 'actions'

and then I want to add another imports, the line gets a bit long:

import { clearUser, fetchUser, somethingElse } from 'actions'

I would prefer this line to be split like this:

import {
  clearUser,
  fetchUser,
  somethingElse
} from 'actions'

To accomplish this, I would ideally:

• go the beginning of the line
• hit f, to go to the first comma
• press l to move one character to the right (past the comma)
• press s to delete the space character and go into insert mode
• press <enter> to create a new line
• hit <esc> to get out of insert mode
• hit ; to go to the next comma (since I had f searched it before)
• then press . to repeat my insertion command
• repeat the previous two steps for the remaining items in the list
• sort the list items by visually selecting the range and invoking :sort (I like sorted lists)
• clean up the brackets and indentation

Splitting one line into multiple lines

I figured there was a better way than doing this manually each time, so I searched online. Apparently the splitjoin.vim plugin “simplifies the transition between multiline and single-line code”. I had this plugin installed but had not used it much. However, it seems like it does exactly what we want.

Instead of the clunky commands above, with this plugin you can press gS to split it up as before. I do this a few times a day, so this is a clear win.

Joining multiple lines together

gJ joins multiple lines together onto one line. It doesn’t handle spaces in this case quite how I like it to:

import {clearUser, fetchDependents, somethingElse} from 'actions'

There are no surrounding spaces, and I prefer having a space around the braces when the code is all on one line.

There is a fix for this: if you have surround.vim installed (and you really should…) you can type cs{{ to add the space after joining so it looks correct. Basically this command says “change the surrounding curly brace pair to be a curly brace pair with a single inner space”. So you’d press gJcs{{.

While a digression, the other permutations of braces do interesting things:

• cs{} truncates all inner brace space
• cs}{ adds a single space to both sides
• cs}} is basically a no-op

Another, shorter way of joining lines like these together is to press 5J (where 5 is the number of lines in between the braces.) This will run the “join lines” command five times.

splitjoin.vim

There are a number of different languages that splitjoin.vim supports. I recommend skimming through its documentation for languages that you use. Another useful example is being able to convert the following Ruby:

if something
  run_a_command
end

to:

run_a_command if something

with gJ (and the opposite with gS). The join lines command from above wouldn’t work here.

Hope this helps!