 All right. Welcome everybody. I'm Paul Frilts and I'm a manager at Red Hat. I managed the Fedora engineering team of whom I see several members here, which I was saying to Aurelion. I can't tell whether to be amused or horrified by that because these folks really know how to get it done remotely, so I've learned something by working with them. I've learned something from working in Fedora before I joined Red Hat and and also I owe a debt of gratitude to John Poulstra, who's a good friend of mine and probably one of the best effectiveness gurus that I've ever met. I've never met anybody who's more devoted to like figuring out not only how to help himself work smarter and better, but also to help other people. And what little that I've picked up over my years at Red Hat, a lot of that came from him. So I'm going to try this labor office remote. We're going to see how it works. It works. Awesome. So I have a question. I guess I'll just look for a show of hands for these things. How many of you have trouble staying focused during your work day? A lot of people. So and I know we're looking for strategies for productivity, right? You want to you want to make more value in a day and that's really what it's all about. It's not necessarily just about being able to produce for our employer, right? But also for ourselves, right? When we're more productive, when you're doing good work and you know you've created good value, how would you say that makes you feel? Much better, right? So when you get done for the day and you know you've had a great day, I don't know. Hopefully most of you are like me. You're just like, oh, I rocked it today. And then, you know, you can go and completely enjoy yourself in your downtime because you know you're not worried about how am I going to make up for what I didn't do today tomorrow, right? And instead you're thinking, man, I really can't play and I hope I can keep that up tomorrow. Right now, I'm going to enjoy this other time in my life. So yeah, so I'm going to talk about some of those things here. The main thing that I want to get across to folks here and and I'm not going to be able to cover obviously every strategy that exists. But I'm going to try and cover a few things that I think are important and the rationale behind them. And I'm going to leave some time at the end so we can maybe talk about your tips, right? Because it's not all about what I do. I realize that my approach works for me. It may not work for everybody. It may not work for some of you at all. Or you do have to kind of find your own way, but you want to understand why and what you're trying to do. For for me, the key really is that you focus on your approach to working remotely, your approach to being productive. It's not necessarily about a tool and that isn't to say that tools aren't important, right? But the thing about a tool is it's not going to solve your productivity issues because of the fact that it exists, right? It's only being able to use it and being able to be mindful about using it. So what you have to do in order to really maximize your productivity is commit to changing your mindset, right? You have to really be mindful about what you're doing during the day and be mindful about what you're doing during an hour. And be mindful what you're doing sometimes, minute to minute, especially when things are very distracting. And this is not dissimilar from fitness. Now, obviously, I'm not a paragon of fitness, no one's ever been able to stake me for Claiborne or Josh Boyer, I guess. But one of the things that I found came from my trying to be more mindful about productivity was also being more mindful about myself and my own body. And so there was a period of time where I lost about 40 pounds. Actually, I lost a little more than that, but a little bit of his cramp back and trying to get a handle on that. So it's always a battle. But I found that the mindset was the most important thing, right? To stop thinking about myself negatively and about what I could accomplish negatively instead starting to embrace just positive things, right? And little things, one at a time. And if you do that for productivity, that will work for you too, right? And it's not to say that it's not a struggle. It's a struggle for me also to be productive day to day sometimes. It can be very difficult when things are distracting. But you take each hour and each day as it comes and realize that if you didn't do the best job an hour ago or yesterday, every single hour, every single day is another chance to turn it around, right? That's a great thing about productivity. You can always do better. And even if you fail before, you can get it right next time. Okay. So why would you want to do this? Now I'm going to steal a little bit here from Franklin Covey because I feel like they explain why you would want to embrace productivity, why you would want to think about the things that you're doing day to day instead of just acting like a conveyor belt for tasks. And so the way they do this is by graphing basically the kind of things that happen over a course of the day, the kind of issues or situations that arise that you have to deal with. And this goes for everybody. It doesn't matter whether you're a fry cook at McDonald's or you're a knowledge worker or you're a senior executive somewhere or whether you're a business owner. All of these things apply equally, right? And so the way this graph works is basically to think about these four quadrants in terms of importance and urgency. And remember that those are two very different things. Something can be very important, but it may not be urgent that you get it done right away. So here are some examples. So I'm going to talk about what these things are. So something that's not important and not urgent, typically this is trivia, right? Busy work, it's stuff that you're basically wasting your time on. Who has some examples of things that might be wasting your time or Facebook and Twitter? Those are the excellent examples. Unless, of course, your primary job is as a social media maven, it might be important then, but for most of us, it's not. Expense reports. Actually, I would tend to disagree with expense reports. I would tend to call that important because you don't want to pay for those expenses, but I would also say it's not urgent that you do it right now, right? Okay. But I think that was a great point. Slams? We were just making silly jokes. I saw some meetings coming in there too, yeah, absolutely. All right. So an example of something that's not important but is urgent, right? What kind of thing could be not important but it's urgent? What about when somebody comes by your desk and does it drive by meeting that you weren't intending to have? Because you're in the middle of something else. An interruption. When I call the SEP, right, someone else's problem, right? It's someone else's problem. They brought it to you because they really just don't want to handle it, but they want to give it to you. And I know we have at least one other manager in here and I'm sure, you know, the Harvard monkeys, right? Somebody's always trying to give you their monkeys. But it's not just as a manager. If you lead anything at all, this can happen as well. And some meetings, right? Someone urgently needs to meet with you. But they may think they need to urgently meet with you. But it may not be that urgent for you, right? What it may mean is I haven't really figured out what to do here and rather than writing emails, it's a lot easier for me to come grab 30 minutes of your time now. That may be disastrous for you because you're in a zone and, you know, you just got popped out of there. Pastries in the kitchen. Yes. Urgent that you get the pastries before they disappear. Maybe not important though, right? Especially if you're me. Definitely not important. Okay. What about things that are very important and very urgent? These are emergencies, right? True emergencies. These are things that really are your job to handle. Something critical came up. What's a good example of this? Anybody on my team? Fire. Something's on fire in the infrastructure. Security problem, right? You didn't plan it. It came up urgently, right? But it's very important that you handle it. It's something with a real short deadline. Okay. Any other examples? And finally, there are these things that are important and not urgent, right? Things that it really is important to do. They have very high value, but they don't need to be done right now. What do a lot of us do with those things? What do we do? Procrastinate, right? We put them off, right? What happens when you put things like that off too long? They become urgent. Yeah. They can become urgent. Exactly. They can easily move into this next quarter. Other things that happen, they can wither on the vine, right? So some of the things that are examples, right? Strategy and planning, but this isn't just about strategy of what you're doing at work. Think about planning your family vacation, right? I would say that that's important, but not urgent. It's important to your family that you spend some time with them and do something fun over the summer early. But it's easy to put that off because you have so many other things going on, right? We all say that to ourselves sometimes. There's so much going on right now I really can't think about this. And you may be right, right? This is not to say that you're not absolutely right. I guess what the pitch that I'm making is that making time for that is important. Relationships, I think, of all kinds, both at work, at home, your spouse or significant other, your kids, your parents, relatives, friends, those are all important too, right? Not urgent because most of those people are not intruding on your work day. But if you don't deal with those relationships and instead always put it off till tomorrow, bad things happen, right? Not to get too goofy or sentimental about it, but no one ever died on their hospital bed and said, I wished I'd spent more time at the office. That never happened. Well, maybe it does, but that person would be very sad. I don't want to be that person. So what do you do with these things? Well, again, for these trivial things, avoid them. These are things that you want to avoid. Things that are not important but are urgent, right? Those are things where somebody else is kind of creating an issue for you that's not important to you but is urgent. Maybe only to them. You want to limit those. You can't always stop those, right? And I'm going to pick on Denise since she's here, right? If Denise comes to me with something that is really important because maybe her manager or some other manager came to her and she has something to give to me. I'm not saying this has happened. I don't want to make a career limiting move here in my presentation. But Denise may give me something and for me, it may not be urgent. So I'm going to try and limit those things. So I will try and do them as I can, right? But not every single thing that comes around is going to take my attention right now. Important, or I'm sorry, important and urgent things. These are things that you need to manage, right? I mean that you don't do them, right? You may be personally involved in actually handling those. But you have to manage them. In other words, you have to see what needs to be done right now and separate that from the things that need to be done maybe a little further out to handle that crisis, right? And some of it is going to mean working with your team, working with other people that you know, working with other contributors to make sure that they get handled. But it doesn't necessarily mean you do every single piece of it yourself. And finally, the things that are important and not urgent, these long-term things, the things that are really give value to your life and to your work are the things that you want to focus on and make sure that you have time to do those things. So here's, and I have some examples. The great thing is you guys kind of called out a lot of these, which is great like, you know, Facebook down here in the trivia pile. I had like reorganizing files. How many people have like, have you ever gone to your, like, you know, folders in your system and just like, oh my god, this is a god awful mess and how am I ever going to, like, I don't know how I'm going to find documents and so you start spending time shifting things one way or the other. I have done that once in a while. It's the worst. So not important to write all hands Q&A, right? I could probably go watch the video of that later if I remember. Phone call from mom, right? This is a joke, right? Some phone calls from mom may be very important, right? So we all love our moms. You know, your mom may call you with something that she thinks is really urgent and it may not be like, what am I going to make for your party this Saturday? Well, that's a really good question, but I can call you at six tonight and we can talk about it then, but right now I'm like in the middle of a crisis. So I'll get back with you. And one of those crises might be like, you know, outages. Sick kid at school there, that's important and urgent. You have to manage it. But these important and not urgent things, again, this is where you want to spend more of your time if you want to feel good about what you're doing. Things like making a career plan. Where do I want to be in a year or two years or five years from now? How am I going to architect this project? What are the long-term goals for this project? How am I going to roadmap this out so that we actually have a chance of completing milestones on time? Who am I going to involve? Thinking about big things like that. Hacking. I'd also say hacking. Whatever it is that you're hacking is important and not urgent. That's where you get in your zone. And you're really working on something that you've, that you needed to complete, right? But it's very easy to put off because you have other things going on in other crises. So this, and that's where you really get in that zone. So this, if you, if you want to be productive, then one of the things that you would want to do is try and maximize the time you spend here in this focus area. This area of important things that are not urgent. But the more of them you get done, the more everything else in your life will fall in place. All right. So how can we increase that focus? Well, to me, it's three things. Managing your time, managing your environment, and managing your attention. Those are the things that have worked for me. These areas do bleed into each other a bit, right? Like you might say, well, isn't managing my attention really managing my time? Well, I think of that a little differently. I think about managing time as like actually managing time itself as a resource. Whereas managing environment is sort of managing those things that are external to you, that affect how you deal with that time. And managing your attention is managing what's internal to you. Again, managing your mindset so that you can increase the effectiveness of those time blocks. Does that make sense? Okay. All right. So if everybody buys into that and hopefully the rest of this is going to make sense. So managing your time. Just check my time. So one of the things you can do to manage your time is think about when you get your best daily focus. When's the time that you best focus on? Ten minutes after you wake up. Ten minutes after you wake up? You're on. Is there a time? Is it the same all day or do you have... I've been 40 minutes after that, I'm done. 40 minutes after that? So what I really was saying is I am going to work 40 minutes a day and then I can do nothing but my best work, right? Right now. That doesn't mean that. But there are those periods, right? John, what about you? When's your best time to focus during the day when you find you get your best stuff? And then I get my focus. Yeah, so 11 o'clock. So that interesting for you that's also kind of early in the day, right? Or it would be early in your day if you couldn't make it that way. Right. Not for those pesky meetings. Yeah, and a lot of people actually answer very similarly. You know, morning times are good. Times I think that more often than not people say that some of their low times are after lunch for usually a couple hours and usually a bit of a resurgence towards the evening. Interestingly, these are also the times where we are at least... Those high energy times are the times where we are less likely to come in contact with other people. Right? Because you get in and the first thing is you can kind of figure out what you're doing. When are you going to sign on, you know, to IRC? When are you going to, you know, pull your email or something? You can make those decisions early in the morning. As things happen during the day, you get drawn into stuff that you didn't plan necessarily, but still that you need to spend time on and you need to spend your attention on. But it's harder than to get your internal focus because you're really been thinking about things that you're doing for or on behalf of or with other people. Okay? But thinking about when you have your best focus is important because that's the time, you know, again, we're talking about managing time. That's when you want to set aside some blocks of time to do these, you know, again, this golden quarter, this golden area of focus. You want to do that during the time that's best for you. I actually start work pretty early usually. I think a lot earlier than people on time zone who are, you know, who are in this field by T field. And starting early like that helps me because I can get an hour or two hours out of the day where really no one is sending anything out yet. They're kind of still waking up and that's a great time for me to product it. Unfortunately, like John, it's also not my favorite way to live. I would love to actually start later. I'm not a morning person either, but I found that that, that what I can get out of it helps me. Although, like John, the early morning meetings sometimes make that hard. So, but again, the idea here is that you want to set aside some time that makes sense for you for that focus work. And when you set aside time, it's not necessarily about taking an hour every day to think about your career, right? Because inevitably that becomes wasteful or it can become, you know, it can easily turn to well, I'm just not sure what's happening today. It's very easy for that to become a little bit self-defeated. Sorry. It's very easy for that to become self-defeating. So really when it comes to very long-term plans, you're not thinking about an hour per day that you want to spend on those, but it might be an hour a week or a couple hours every month that you want to think about long-term plans, right? If I'm thinking about what I need to get done this quarter at Red Hat, I'm usually going to spend an hour or so a month seeing how I did. And maybe not all at once, but spread out over a few weeks to see how things are coming together, right? And over a year, I may spend a few hours every year thinking about, what's my long-term plan for, you know, our finances at home? You know, what are we going to do about handling college for my daughter, my oldest daughter, things like that? Each day, I'm going to spend a few minutes thinking about what are the things that I absolutely must that I absolutely have to get done today in order to feel like I created great value. And I'll map those things out. And by doing that, it gives me a little bit of a roadmap for the day, right? And then when I have those things crossed off at the end of the day because I was mindful about it, I feel way better about my work. It doesn't always happen though, right? I'm unsuccessful at that more often than I probably want to admit, having a plan means that I can at least judge how I did and not say I'm not sure how well I did today, I'm not sure what I focused on. At least I know and can think about what I did to be successful or what I failed at, right? I'm trying to do better tomorrow. So one way to do this is, you know, manage by a sprint period, you know, in order to focus better, you might chop up your time into several one-hour periods or maybe 30-minute periods if possible. You may need to, you know, either splitting the day up like that may not be possible or you may need to find a time slice that's different depending on what kind of granularity your focus needs to come out. So how do you do this? How do you manage the time? Well, for one thing, you have to have a calendar. If you don't keep a calendar, you're going to be up a tree. So you have to keep a calendar and best case scenario, having one calendar for work, one calendar for home life, one calendar that, you know, your kids are on, does not work, at least it doesn't for me, because you're never going to be able to easily make commitments to people without having to check a lot of things at once and it means that it takes you more time to figure out whether you can commit to something and that uncertainty can make you less sure of your own effectiveness, so being able to manage everything in one place really does help. I also am a firm believer in this. Some people call this cheating and I think that that's asinine. I think it absolutely makes sense to block and pre-schedule time to do focused work. So for example, Friday after, well now I'm going to spill my secret here, but Friday afternoon I block four hours in the afternoon every Friday. It's not because I want to slip off the pub and have an early beer. It's because I fully support you I'm all for the beer. But for me, what I've found is that over those four hour period, that is the time period where more often than not I've found that people were coming to me with those not important but urgent things that they're trying to offload so that they can have a weekend free my job is not for them to have a worry free weekend. My job is to get my job done and do it well and hopefully I have a worry free weekend and if it's again if it's not urgent for me to handle and I know that it's not urgent for me to handle it can wait until Monday. So I like to block that time and I use that for things that I have to focus on and for one thing I can use it to clean up if I didn't have a great week I now have some time I can recover and if I'm doing a good job if I've had a great week often I'll remove the block and say if somebody is going to call me today and really need my attention I can do that in good conscience because I was really productive the last few days. What do you do if you get a call? What do you do if you get a call? Well, so there are ways to do that so you talk about taking a call and as a remote person I do have the option of not picking up the phone and it does depend on who it is I'm not going to lie if Denise calls me directly I'm picking up the phone on the other hand you're always welcome to call Denise I said that to the camera they caught me on the other hand if it's I might not pick up the phone necessarily it depends on what's going on if we're on a short deadline and someone is calling from a product team I certainly am going to take that call on the other hand if it's somebody that I've never spoken to I can't really identify who it is on the caller ID I'm like I don't know who that person is and why they be calling chances are I won't pick it up I'll instead be working on what I'm working on because I know that they'll send me an email or something Yeah, absolutely and you know how well someone values your time and I don't mean to sound like I place a higher value on my time or that my time somehow is more value than anyone else's to me it does but they may really have something important but as I get to know people they know whether or not it's worth calling on a Friday afternoon to hand off a monkey to me so relationships absolutely affected but this is one of those things that I take charge of and I admit it's hard to do it doesn't come easy but you do have the power to do this this is one of those things that you can't affect sorry I keep squeezing the front here also these Pomodoro timers are really useful too is anybody use Pomodoro method for packing we want to explain that for people just since I'm tired of yacking actually you require some for example half an hour and then after that you have like 5 days for a break and then another like a time window starts so you get like 8 time windows absolutely just so the camera will pick it up the explanation was perfect you basically are slicing up your work period into specific times and you sprint during that time towards a specific goal and at the end of that time you take a short break and then you come back again and it's sort of enforced you can actually get an extension for node 3 that it's a Pomodoro timer and it will actually lock your screen and not take any more keyboard input so you can get up and go take a break so it enforces that spirit mentality it's not useful, I don't really do this a lot but I've heard other people tell me that it's useful alright so that was time how do you manage the environment what distractions do you have I find that if I have a clean desk and a clean desktop on my computer I work so much better because I'm not thinking about what that thing is and why it's here and I feel like a physical desk doing this with your physical desk how many people would agree with this statement when my desk is clean I feel like I'm awesome I feel like that and that's not to say that my desk is clean all the time you would cringe my office space is in a horrible shape right now but I also know that once I clean that up when I clean that up after I return it's going to be great I'm going to feel great about that for the day so it's a great way to keep a simple and clean work environment really helps your focus because you're not being distracted by things and this goes for sound too if you're remote you hopefully have the option to control sound in your environment you might do that in a number of ways you might do it by playing music that helps you focus you might do it by not playing music because you like silence you might do it by wearing noise canceling headphones if you're in a shared environment or if you're in a coffee shop you put those on and it allows you to isolate a little bit if that helps you you need to find what works well for you what I found works for me and this is just me I do not work well in silence when something makes a sound around me and it could be my wife coming downstairs it could be one of the kids tromping across the floor it could be a lawnmower starting up next door that sound really breaks me out of my out of my zone so I cover it up with music that has no words and usually music that I'm unfamiliar with and that way I can't start humming along with it or singing because I know it well and what works for me is improvisational jazz where I don't know what's happening it just kind of covers up that silence Spotify has this wonderful playlist called Deep Focus Spotify so Spotify Deep Focus I'm using Google Music now for that too they have radio stations so I started to discover a lot of things but yeah find a playlist that you like so what are some tools to manage your environment well I covered a little bit of this already which is you know have a desktop without icons this is what I love about Gnome 3 is I can't put anything on the desktop anymore I know that was something that they originally took away but it's been great for me because now I don't think about things that are sitting on my desktop anymore it's only there to hold what I'm working on I put away windows I'm not using I keep a wastebasket in my office so I don't have to get up and break out of my zone to throw something away I turn off notifications if I really need to focus I have a notifier so when somebody pings me online on IRC I'll see it if I really need to focus for a little while I'll turn that off and that way I can't be interrupted because you know again there are a number of ways people can find me I may turn my IRC notifier off but my phone is on and I know if somebody reaches out for me by cell phone it's going to be important because let's be honest most of us around Fedora or Red Hat don't pick up a phone to call people we prefer to just engage lightly so if somebody calls me I know it's wrong so again use silence, music, and noise whatever works for you so finally there's managing attention this is that inner piece P-I-E-C-E the inner factor hopefully there's also inner piece inner piece the most difficult part of managing your attention is being mindful and it's about reaching this balance between being mindful of what you're doing and not continually going to a metal level where you're questioning constantly what you're doing because that can interrupt you just as much as not being mindful at all so it's about striking that balance knowing what you're doing and why and then being able to let it go taking inventory I what helped me a lot was for two weeks and this was probably the after I worked at Red Hat for about six months I realized I didn't feel like I was getting as much done as I was capable of and so what I started doing is for two weeks I tracked my time and so if I got done checking email for example I would at this point I finished checking email and then I did this with I did it with an app called Hamster and I was tracking my time with that and then at the end of a few weeks I went back and looked at it and saw how my time was being spent and I was shocked to find out how much time I was wasting for example checking email it was a go to it was very easy to go poll email instead of working on this important but not urgent thing I would go read email because it was a way of procrastinating that so I had to kind of admit that to myself and then realize I need to fix this I need to do better how am I going to do that how am I going to reapportion my time so that it works better context switching if you have to switch context it takes you out of the zone this is again when you have those derived by meetings or somebody walks by your cube or you get a phone call for example or the guy who comes and trims your bushes or something like that so managing your attention knowing what that context switching has been cost is important and finally avoid non-related tasks during the course of my time so this again part of managing attention is taking responsibility for your attention taking responsibility for your mindset and if you are going to be concentrating on something really do it that means knowing during the next 30 minutes I am not going to go checking I am not going to do these other things that could cost me time that I really want to be spending on this other thing and so sometimes that means putting off maybe a quick hit or the little adrenaline bump or the little heart swelling that you might get by going to Facebook and seeing how many people just liked your post or something like that you have to put that off in favor of something and again this whole idea of just to me it parallels so much the struggle that I go through for physical fitness and it is all about it is such a big analogy between this mental fitness and the physical fitness and again it is not that I do a great job of it but I really do try and I think other people can speak and doing that and think about bringing that same kind of idea to how you are mindful about what you do every day so again it is not about doing a perfect job it is about each day trying to do a good job ok so what are some tools that you can use to help manage your attention this is difficult because this attention, this mindfulness is really from internal but there are tools that you can get that will allow you to express your mindfulness and track it and what is important is not that you are mindful yesterday but that you have the ability to prove to yourself that you are mindful right it is giving yourself the evidence to know that you did a good job and that will help boost your confidence and it will help get you on a treadmill of doing it well task and to-do list if you are existing without a to-do list a real really honest to-do list, a task list if you are existing without that there is no possible way to be fully productive because you have to be able to track what you have done in order to prove to yourself that you are attaining those long-term goals for short-term goals what I like to do is I will take a piece of paper or a little notepad that I leave open on one or the other of my screens that tells me what my goals are for today some people really like to write those things down in a physical notepad that is great use whatever tool works for you but have a short-term goal for a time period by the end of this hour or by lunchtime I am going to have completed the following thing or things and then that helps you focus how am I doing it is 10.30 noon is coming I am going to eat lunch at noon means I have 90 minutes left you will be surprised with that adding time pressure to yourself will make you achieve something I do on the computers in place to place I left that browser open with Facebook open maybe I should go close that maybe I should look at this it is really easy to fall into that trap I am just as bad as anyone I try to maximize the app I am using so I stay where I need to be or tap so task list I am going to draw on some ideas here from David Allen who is a master at this he does simplify this a bit but it is a really good place to start thinking about things that you have to do for any task that you have anything that you are supposed to do there are three decisions that you can make with it you can defer it you can delegate it or you can do it and so this is about getting those short-term things done so that you are achieving a long-term goal so if it is something that you are supposed to do you really need to do it but you are not going to be able to do it in a few minutes it is going to take much more time than that you need to defer that the next thing is if you are not responsible for it or at least you are not responsible for the next thing you delegate it and delegate doesn't mean that you call someone who works for you and have them do it it might be that you are looking for something from a teammate but for Denise but for others it doesn't necessarily work though it may not work like say I am working on that vacation project I need to know what is my wife where does she want to go does she want to go to the beach or does she want to go to the mountains I can't tell so she is responsible for the next step so I am going to tell her you decide which of these do you want to do and then get back to me and then I will take it from there to the next step so that would be an example of delegating I am not truly delegating and it is only going to take me a few minutes to do let's say 5 minutes or 10 minutes whatever makes sense just do it right now so that sounds very easy what do I mean by defer do I mean put it off forever no that is not what defer means what it means is that if this is a big project you need some time to focus on it and complete it so you are going to look at it as one of those focus tasks it might be that you don't understand what to do next there in order to make progress use that focus time to break it down and figure out what you do need to do next maybe some of it you are not really responsible for but if you don't know that it is going to sit in your box or your task list forever and no progress will be made but if you break it down and figure out who is you can start to make some progress on it and again this deferring things this means that sometimes that thing is going to fall into that golden that golden quadrant being important but not urgent so you are going to spend focus time on it now and this isn't say that if something is a big project if it is a critical or an urgent thing it is actually okay to make an exception to defer to make an exception to defer rule normally the deferring thing is yeah I am supposed to do this but it is going to take me more than a few minutes well obviously if it is critical, if it is like the infrastructure breaks down I expect that Kevin Fence is not going to go well it is probably going to take me 40 or 50 minutes to diagnose this so I am just going to put you off because that is just too big yeah beers beer sounds so much better and it only takes me 5 minutes to drink a beer that is something I should do whereas 50 minutes to troubleshoot this I should defer that now you are thinking like a monkey exactly so it is okay obviously to make exceptions for this critical but fortunately for some reason you can drink beer while you are troubleshooting I am not saying you should I am just saying it is physically possible to do it okay, task list how do we get tools for this well they are all over the place a lot of people are into these card systems like Trello or Tyga or Canboard or whatever they need they are used for methods like hand band and scrum and things like that but you can use them on a personal level as well you can get an app for your phone and see a lot of people on my team and I use this too Task Warrior which is a command line utility it is super duper for keeping project and task lists there is all sorts of cool things that like Ralph Bean has made all these little hooks that allow you to get your bugs and other things that just come into your task list so you can easily get through things quickly there is even a synchronization server out there called indy.am which allows you to get it on any mobile client and synchronize across mobile systems but you may not need something like that maybe you are looking for just a little scratch pad ever know or remember the milk or Google Keeper whatever you decide works for you might be as simple as a paper notebook yes thank you Pierre just held up a paper notebook paper notebook and if you want to get real hipster cool you can get one of these mold skin notebooks and you talk about how it's got like organic whatever skin of the immature naga on the outside they still use that joke I don't know the naga hide joke also anyway yeah so anything from paper up to something automated that works for you ok so we talked a lot about these tools now I'm going to shift gears just a little bit in the few minutes we have left wow we really only have a few minutes left to talk about something that someone asked me about which is I'm remote and this is all great productivity stuff it's great but how do I make sure that I'm not just a remote person that I'm not just inwardly facing like how do I focus outward how do I deal with the team these are some examples of building remote trust building your productivity is not just about what you can do it's also about what you can enable others to do or what you can help others with so the things that you the tools that you use here are not anything that is that's going to be a shock to anybody it's keeping up with them and being interested in what people are doing it might be this doesn't happen necessarily on every team some teams like to do like a weekly video call they have regular communications channels and fedora we use IRC for this your manager if you're a remote guy if you're not having a regular one-on-one with your manager you're doing it wrong because they cannot possibly understand the value of what you're doing when you don't have a chance to talk to them about it so if your manager has put off doing that get them to schedule something let's see and also if you manage somebody you should be doing it for them as well so I guess the one way is from you to your manager if you are a manager you should be doing this communicate effectively and concisely if you're a remote person and you write enormous like eight paragraph emails stop it stop it that is it's the worst thing ever for communication to at least to your manager right if you're or to people on your team if you want to build a remote trust you have to be concisely lay out the problem oh sorry did I that wasn't meant to be personal and actually the funny thing is I used to write these really long emails I'm sure Denise you remember and I got way better in the last few years because I realized I was not getting what I wanted out of the email which was attention and a response that's what I want I want somebody to understand what I'm telling them and I want them to be able to respond so to do that I had to change my communication and finally whether you're a manager or whether you're a person reporting to a manager deliver what you commit to if you say you're going to do something do it that's as simple as that if you're not getting it done then figure out what's keeping you from that and maybe you need to discuss that with your manager that's a great way to talk to a manager and I've again experienced that from both sides now that sounds like a Joni Mitchell song doesn't it yeah absolutely go Denise if you're not getting it don't wait until the last minute perfect so the camera might pick it up Denise made the point that if you're not going to get it done it's okay to admit that just don't wait to the last minute to do that you don't want to wait until the deadline to say I couldn't get it done if it's important yeah that's a really good point those someone else's problems those can actually mean political capital or personal it could be building your personal brand as somebody who can solve a problem so it's not to say that you should never solve anyone's problem the whole idea I think that was limit the right way to handle those is limit in other words if handling that person's problem is going to be well if it's going to be easy for you if it's not going to be easy but it has value for you and with it absolutely you can do it on the other hand if you don't limit it you can end up solving everyone's problems except yours right so there's a balance to be struck and I'm running a little bit over so I'm going to try and scooch this so the remote water cooler it's all about building relationships and speak up if you're if you're a remotee and you're not getting what you need let people know right don't be afraid to be the squeaky wheel because that's how as remotees we can be evolved and I say this as somebody who has is on the remote side sometimes has to speak up and say how am I going to learn about this is there going to be a dialing are we having a video call for this because I'm not in the same place with some of these folks but when you do that be prepared to really participate if you make a big deal about going to a remote call in and then you show up and you basically start your computer doing other things you're not building up trust that way so you have to be prepared to do your part so some resources getting things done by David Allen well worth reading won't take you but a couple hours it's not about applying his method verbatim but it will teach you about how to make good decisions about things and how you organize them time management for system administrators legendary but really good and it directly influences how people can work really well in IT and I got a thumbs up from Kevin and there are websites out there that are great workawesome.com is a fun one and finally here's some tips but I'm going to steal three minutes just to see I'm going to grab the first three people who put up a hand and give me one tip that's helped you as a remote person anybody yes sir keep your workspace and your rest space completely distinct I absolutely agree with that that door closes when I'm done for the day and I spend all my time in the rest of the house so that is my office and when I leave the office I'm at home yes sorry if you can manage it don't put work email on your phone I would agree with that too because again when I'm at work I can easily reach my email at all times when I'm gone from the house my phone is with me because I'm doing something with my family or friends band or whatever the case may be they will call me if it's urgent they will call so they will be able to elevate that from something that I need to handle at some point to oh my god this is burning you have to handle it now people will make that decision and they'll let me know yes to dress the way you climb at work like an eagle so I feel like I'm at home if you're remote so if you're remote go to the office even if it's in your house as if you're going to work I'm at fuzzy slippers or anything like that yeah I absolutely agree because it puts you in the mindset of being of being at work right and being in that professional context so it's about setting up that space excellent those are awesome tips I know people probably have other tips as well if you guys want to share them I'm not sure exactly what we should do does anybody have an idea for like how we might want to to do that after this yeah I would just set up like a wiki page maybe on the fedora wiki if you guys want I'll just call it like I guess I'm going to call it remote tips I'll set up a page for that at least and I'll put it on the the slack the URL on the slack thing the next one thing that she did not mention it's a little bit of the opposite problem is don't forget to step out don't step don't be afraid to step out in other words and stop being productive right no just don't work at the end of the day because if you're still bad you're basically running into that set up limits set up limits right everybody has days that they have to work longer than others it happens and that's okay but if you're doing it all the time chances are number one you're not it's because you're not making time for something that you should family friends whatever or number two you're not working effectively during the hours you have and you're trying to make up for it by working longer and I did that for like the first two years at Red Hat they are still in those times for example your friends need to stop working even though the rest of the team in the US is free working that's the thing which we are the one one we need to be able to serve at service at the end of my time and at the end of the day that's an excellent point if you work with a team that is across many time zones you may feel pressure to be there more often than you should I want to because you live them we don't just you keep working on a team not necessarily just because you love the work but because you also like the people there most people who leave it's not because of the work it's usually because of the people often a manager but also can be co-workers and by the same turn that around people often stay because they love their co-workers we do love each other because we build a relationship with each other and so you feel obligated because of that everyone needs to realize that we all have limits and we all need our downtime as well so yeah again if you maximize your productivity during the time that you're there you can limit the amount of times or you can limit the number of times or the the number of times that you have to stay longer than you plan hopefully not do it very often again work smarter not harder alright that's all I have so thanks guys for watching