 This is Tim Nash, he's a security expert in forestry, works with daily which we've heard before, talk about how to make your websites faster, and Tim is going to talk about work mode, which is my understanding. Let's just check, who came for a security talk? Okay, other room, dosing Nigel, he's one of the Q&A panel, asking really complicated questions. You don't know ready complicated questions, you can spend five minutes coming up with something to ask him. That's my handle at TNF from Twitter, feel free to tweet sarcastic things to me. Normally when you do a talk, the best way to start is with a cunning story that will hook your audience in and make them get engaged with you. But this entire talk is basically ego driven and all about me. So we'll start with me, that's my finger pointing at some hardware in a data center in Manchester. And my name's Tim, I'm the WordPress platform leader for SP. As it's probably been mentioned in the government, I do stuff with security, I'm a former pentester. I co run WordPress leads and I've been involved with WordPress for a long time. I used to run a small dev agency, and I go around the country speaking about security. Why I'm here talking about productivity. So if I accidentally start saying scary stories, I'm really sorry it's just the normal pattern. So why am I talking about productivity? Well mainly because they didn't accept the security talk obviously. But productivity and being able to find more time, I described it as it's not about efficiency, it's optimization. I'm not looking to make myself better. I mean it's a good thing for humans to strive to make themselves better. But I'm quite okay with being okay. But what I need is more time. This isn't going to be a talk about too much about self-help. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you to go do yoga or meditation. Meditation is useful and I recommend the car map if you are going to. But it's a few years ago, if I started talking about the things I'm going to talk about today, I would have started looking like this. And I've mellowed over the years. And as I've mellowed, I've slowed down. Now I'm just lazy. And about a year and a half to maybe three years ago I realized I was getting very lazy. And I had quite a lot of projects that were just drifting away. I was doing starting, I should say, lots of things. But I wasn't necessarily finishing. And that was both in my professional life and my home life. I'm a tinkerer by trade. I like to fiddle and fix things. I like working with my hands as well as working on computers. My house is a lovely home automation. And I'm currently in the process of working with builders to build a new house. There's lots of stuff going on in my life. And I need more time. Now I spent a little bit of time making a time machine. And it didn't work. Now I need even more time. So I'm going to have to work out where I'm going to get it. Because I want to spend more time with my family. Thank you. But I do. I need to spend more time with my family. Before I am slightly concerned my daughter is going to start asking questions like, who is that man? But that's only because I cut my beard down. So the rest of this talk is basically about how I've gone from not being able to do much to doing more things. And I'm not perfect in any way. Any of the tips and tricks may work for you. They may not. But hoping there will be something in here for all of you. It's not going to go particularly dead focused. I'm going to talk about some tools and stuff that I use in my work life as well as stuff outside of my work life. And the critical thing and the thing that's really changed for me is planning. As in I do something now. Historically my way of doing things is wake up, wait until someone tells me to do something, do it. Especially at work. You know, my working plan. A lot of projects would be going on but I basically prioritise based on who is screaming at me the most. It's a very effective strategy. Because that way you feel like you're always achieving. Because the person stops screaming, that's success. They might not be doing you any good and you end up just running and always firefighting. So I've started to learn to plan. I have a small child and she screams a lot. So at home this meant nothing ever got done because we were pandering. No, pandering. She was small child who was screaming constantly and trying to fix her problems so we were never doing anything else. So planning doesn't just mean planning at work but planning at home as well and making sure we're carving out different activities and times. So I can't add hours and as we've seen I actually need to somehow use less of them because two and a half years ago I was sleeping four hours a night. Now, bad news. I had low, you know, other 20 hours. Bad news, you can't do that. Some people can but most humans we can't. Bad things happen to you slowly over time especially when you're doing 24-hour shifts going along and then doing an eight-hour catch-up two days every night. It just doesn't work. So step-on. Very simple. Measure tasks. By measuring tasks I mean measure everything. Try and work out whenever you do something even if you don't do it over time. If you're doing it for your first time I've got a new task. I need to do a presentation. Start timer. Look at how long does it take me to do a presentation. Put it all together. About 14 hours. Which is quite a lot. Write a blog post. About five hours from doing about 4,000 months. Once you know exactly how much time it takes to do a different thing you can actually plan it. Otherwise we're guessing. We're rubbish at guessing. Humans have no real concept of time which is ironic given it's completely artificial and it's something that we made up. We shouldn't at least be good at guessing it ourselves. So when it comes to doing any sort of estimate I follow our technical director's advice and go with the rule of pi. Whatever you've decided is the amount of estimate you're going to use times it by pi. And that will give you roughly where you should be. If you're talking to a client double that because it's way better to finish the project in half the time and look really good than it is to overrun. It's scary how accurate the rule of pi is. It's also worth emphasizing there is no such thing as a five second job. There is no such thing as a five minute job. In fact if you start to use the word five it doesn't go into take that long. But five second jobs are really always the things that are going to destroy you. It sounds weird this idea that you're going to do a lot of planning and thought thinking. I plan everything and I find that my mood and my personality can lead me down dark rabbit holes and sometimes they can lead me down rabbit holes where I cannot get out of bed. Then those days I absolutely schedule everything. Everything goes in a to-do list and I work my way through my to-do list. Every day I have a to-do list and I will work my way through them. I will prioritise things and I go through. There are different mechanisms for doing prioritisation. I like the one that is Eat That Frog which basically says take the hardest task you're going to do do it first. I modify it slightly by taking a very, very easy task that has to be as easy as pressing a button. If it's any more complicated than that it has to go down the priority list but if I've got a task that I can press that button and have a win, take that for otherwise Eat That Frog. As you're going through and doing your tasks and working your way through them when I say I put everything on a to-do list I've got two sets of to-do lists and Tim's okay to do list and Tim's in a bad place to do list and Tim's okay to do list has big broad things on it. Build a house. No, that's literally on my to-do list if each game is locked down page by page but on my other one my very short inversion is clean your teeth. Sounds so simple until you're in a scenario where you can't do that. Go for an exercise. Go for a walk, etc. Once you've started understanding your to-do list of things you have to realise and you're looking at how much you measure your time you need to understand what distracts you. Netflix. For example, if you work at home chocolate eating Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Instagram Pinterest that blog post I just saw over there pretty much anything on the internet which is really awkward if you work on the internet. So the point that one of the exchanges between me and my wife is ah you're coming to bed and now I got distracted walk by the internet again notice distraction work out what you're distracting out and try and block them out and I'll give you some tips for how to do that later on there's distractions are things that you cause they're mental things that you're putting in nobody is saying go to Twitter are there any social media managers in here sorry yours comes next you get a free pass to Twitter but for the rest of us no one is saying go to Twitter, go to Facebook, go to Instagram do this that's your brain doing that and therefore it's a distraction however when we're coming to planning we have another thing and that's risk now risks are things that are outside out of our control coming along and distracting causing our plans to be pushed along risks include your boss when it comes to making sure that your task will not be done on time your boss is so high on the priority list because let's say they're going to add another 10, 15, 20 tasks for you communication mechanisms Slack incoming and talking to you all of these things are risks send you off to make sure that your task never gets completed with distractions it's very easy to say block Twitter it's a lot harder to suggest blocking your boss I mean you could try you don't know how well it will go but even in an office environment there's ways around this head funds which is clearly the universal sign for right yeah I've never actually worked in an office and this has worked have you ever sat there with a head phones on and the person's gone oh no that person's got a head phones on oh I can't talk to them about this thing I'll just send them an email no they'll still come and tap those on but if you can manage the mitigating okay I need to do this dedicated piece of work that means I can turn Slack off that means I can turn this off put everything to one side and get your work done having done all of our project planning ahead of time and we haven't even done anything yet the next thing to do especially with bigger projects is walk away I never start the task but I just wrote in my diary so if I've written something down I'm going to do something I don't start it straight away because if I start it straight away I'm enthusiastic I think go head along into it and I will be all the way in the weeds so very very quickly and then I will realize that the weeds are not weeds they're tentacles and I'm being slowly but surely constantly sucked in because I didn't think through the consequences of any of my actions because I was too happy going yeah I'm going to go do this whether it's co-fixing something whether it's making any sort of decision it does have to walk away for a long but just walk away from the task for a little while so you can think through the consequences of your actions it sounds so counter intuitive I want to get things done quicker so I'm telling you to not start them and this isn't an excuse to not start them just you need to step away even if it's for five minutes give yourself and your brain a chance to go huh oh yeah if I do this if this and this that explodes and that's bad let me not do that if you can walk away you'll find yourself in a position when you do come to it that you have even if it's subconsciously started working out how things should be done so what does my day look like I am a morning person that probably doesn't shock many people I wake up about five o'clock in the morning lots of people just wake up mind you those people probably go to bed at 11 or 12 and I go at the u so it balances out I like myself in the morning I'm very productive in the morning by this time of day I'm starting to wind down I'm starting to slow down effectively we are in my evening nine o'clock I turn into a pumpkin it's really turning into a pumpkin maybe a mouse whatever to I don't know which part of the method I'm meant to be but I'm a horse with a carriage but anyway the general idea is I turn and I go to bed so we are in my afternoon a late afternoon then now we definitely get going to Miami so five I get up my daughter will be up between quarter to six and quarter to seven so I have this 45 minutes it is mine nobody else can take these 45 minutes away from me so what do I do well clearly I sit in bed on Twitter going ahhh and that's always what I use to do but now I get up and it's little simple things I for years and years have been hydrated I didn't know that but I just had weird skin slightly staining skin and I put it down to the next month simple thing like that like go drink water really hard to convince me to drink water I don't know why but when I got out of bed I didn't go I must drink water I went to the tap and got water I'd go I must drink coffee and go straight downstairs to go get some coffee instead now get out of bed go to the door by the door we have a bookshelf there's a thing of water on it I now pick up water drink it on my way out of the door it sounds like crazy optimization but all of a sudden I'm now drinking 500ml of water likewise in your own... whatever you're doing whatever you're doing those sort of micro-optimizations aren't just about speed and efficiency yes I'm no longer going to get the actual tap and turning on but because I do this every day it becomes a routine it feels part of it so the point there was a thing where for one evening I wouldn't do my normal bed time routine in the morning I woke up and slammed my hand into the wall because the water bottle wasn't there anymore and it's 5 in the morning and I'm not awake because it wasn't there to growl I just went straight into the wall on the first side this shows that I had built enough muscle memory and routine in there that this is good but you need to have some sort of feedback in testing the system because otherwise the wall gets hard so pick up on the water, I drink my water I take my pills again, originally I was just taking the water get down the stairs have my coffee we'll take some pills back upstairs do do do do do do so putting the pills there those 45 minutes are my reading time let's learn how I go through my reading routine in a bit but they're my reading time why I struggle to read effectively at any other time of the day so I only take those 45 minutes and that's peace and tranquility to read I do a tiny bit of meditation at the beginning but after that I just read for those 45 minutes with my cup of coffee for many of you that sounds wonderful can you imagine just for 45 minutes of your day you get to have a cup of coffee you get to read if people write facts or if you just get up a fucking night I had already read no truth so we get to 6.5 I then go to normally actually I'm a community manager so a couple of times a week I really want to find work on the trail because when I get to the office I'm not going to be able to do any work when I get to the office what happens is I go in and go morning and then half the office goes well actually there's normally only two of us in the office at 7.30 but we have a normally and then by about 9 we've already had 10 10 10 10 6 minutes did you break this no clean all through the day so during getting carried to some work I managed to convince people not to do any things with me until 2 o'clock I think my boss in the States thinks that's because I'm lazy and I'm not getting into work until 2 so we use the schedule in me until after 2 o'clock the reality is I want that by 2 o'clock I'm tired and I'd rather sleep in a meeting than I would actually do so I'll do my meetings 2 o'clock till 4 o'clock and back home I then get the train journey back my train journey has become semi-precious things but I can't read on a train so I tend to listen to podcasts and other bits my days work from home days those times become my ultimate productive thing because now I've gained back 1.5 hours in the morning and about 2.5 in the evening welcome to our train system it should combine those together I have a fair amount of time that becomes my hobby where I get to spend those parts of my day then I go off with my parents well yes with my parents, with my family with my kids get that love at last hour and a half she goes to bed at about 7.30 I go to bed at night I wake up the next day my day is pretty easy for me and I do that 5 o'clock wake up every day do you sound like me someday my day is not your day get your own days but seriously I get to come about that time because I get to spare and nothing's easy yours might be completely reversed you may be able to come about your evenings maybe your sister will be watching TV from 8 o'clock till 9 10 11 you're probably not healthy at this point 1, 2 in the morning maybe some of that can be prepped back so tools I use for products I'm in I keep a diary and I keep a journal I use a form of bullet journal and one thing I would recommend is get a decent notebook I this is a proper notebook this isn't my diary, this is just my normal notebook that I carry for writing notes the cool thing about something like this is that you can normally get one that you can buy or replace from paper inside and what I do with these notebooks is once I finish writing in them I put tape around them so they're completely sealed I do, I used to work doing payment gateway systems I'd have client details in here that I couldn't allow out but I probably didn't want to burn so I'd sealed them up and marked them as sealed and if I only needed to take and go into them I could then open them up and I could keep a record and I'd just kept doing that but get something that you want to use it says this is for you to pick get something you want to use cut spend a little bit of money on a decent notebook if you're going to do an analog way of doing things get decent pens if you're artistic go for it I am not and yet I can still build it journal because it's just writing it for simple things but I keep a diary every day I keep a journal my diary is not that of a teenage girl but it has feelings in it sad face happy face because I can track that over time because you know what you're sad and miserable you're not very productive I mean I'm a sad admittable I didn't think about such things I also have a big role in my house for all my my personal project are a post-it cam-ban board so a cam-ban board is a thing that anybody who's an agile stuff knows it's just different information you've got columns like to do backlog in progress and done and it's all done digitally in most places take the post-it and move it over there doing something so physical moving your things across really reinforces it in your mind if you didn't want to go digital these days I do almost entirely analogue my work requires me to do digital stuff but for all my personal projects they're all kept in notebooks and on good walks because of that physical activity reinforcing my mind positivity and things that I do but Trello's really good Basecamp's now got a free personal tier so if you've got a bit of your if you're looking for a really complicated product organisation Basecamp, if you're into like GitHub and things like that Co-BaseHG is like a British company and it's like not even GitHub they've got by far the most nicest integration for issue tracking I've seen and they've had that integration for 10 years it's just the rest of you that have not caught up they can do exception tracking, all sorts of stuff so if you're a dev and you're looking at doing anything with Git, go look at Co-Base for the day, I find that fantastic I think people do deploy HQ ATEC media even though I write out the tasks I must come through today in my diary I still use to do this because that keeps me on track and it keeps reminding me and saying hey, you have to do this, you have to do this and then my digital brain is noteworthy so if I'm copying and pasting things I do that in motion so how my daily workflow at work looks like I use just four applications 5G, 3K note this is where it goes a bit more devy basically I have a browser, I have a terminal I have an IDE and I have everything else browsers we all know what they look like one thing that is interesting about browsers really that I want to say is that whenever I find something I want to read I do not read it then I click Save to Pocket I have it pushed to a service called Pocket or if I know I'm going to read lots of things on this site I will save to Feedly which has an integration with Pocket I will then get my tablet in the morning which is my dedicated reading thing and the only thing that I have Pocket app on actually in turn that I read on that tablet and only that tablet that tablet is set up with colour contrast that allows me to read it much more easily so everything goes through the flow I won't read directly off the web I just go right I'm going to say that's Pocket push it through and read it that way I can then re-share it afterwards in terms of this item for anybody into the geeks I use the really minimal theme which gives a nice headless look for the real font nerds I use Pack Nerd font and for the ligatures the monoids which gives you really nice little effects if you don't know what any of those words are do not worry because if you want to be happy with it I also use a bunch of items scripting in particular I use items to open up every multiple windows to every single server that we have on our WordPress hosting platform and then so I can open up a real one click and have access to all of the WordPress hosting platforms made hosts then I can open my shift I I can start typing and I'm typing into every single one of them so when I type into our own minus RF backslash and hit enter I can destroy everything what do that on my terminals themselves I always use ZSH I don't have my own max anyway combine this with omis and ZSH again for people who are slightly nerdy and associate free in terms of plugins on there I keep it really slow low because I I don't want to every time you add a plugin on ZSH you just slap these down you can see I have virtually nothing on there other than really the disintegration which is important and colorize which gives you useful colored output for your ls command my editor of choice is piano after a room who are dead and geeks like it's not a pie all in I'm an old person so I use nano you can fight me afterwards but please don't in terms of Asim I can use my IDE I kind of show you my whole setup because I can't work on it on a white screen because there's lots of bits the poody bits in the middle file structure over here and I have a browser built into it so I don't want to bother going to a different browser because that takes time and I also have the terminal window down here all of this can be used with your studio code all of that works pretty well it's the same way one thing I really like about Asim is that you can use it as a tougher IDE so some of the plugins that I do use that Asim use to fight instantly fixes all my code just makes it look nice all you have to do in case you've got a solve don't do that IDE bit in there you can get this in both visual code and Asim graphic colorizer all it does is it changes the color of the brackets internally for each one so you can go oh that's in that block of code because that's green and that one's red and that one's yellow as deep as that sounds it'll probably take you hours rest of it all of that highlight the time a bit basically I only customize my IDE and under customize my terminals because they need to fit in the client's bottle Wavebox is a tool that just allows you to integrate slack telegram to do its color notion all into one application the great thing about this is I go click, gone turn it off and I also have a host file that I have a single command that says distract 3 which I use for second and it changes my host file to block out about 32,000 websites which is malware and a bunch of other stuff as well 32,000 websites I can no longer access it has every variation of a social media platform you could ever come up with except for tweet deck that could work but I can set tweet deck up in Wavebox we're not allowed to go in it except you post things it won't show me the columns it blurs them out for me Alpha if you haven't used it if you're a Mac user my colleague Keith was a really good Alpha talk but it really will change the life it allows you to do snippets and fast snippets so I can do things like back it through there we go 140 minutes not 30 perfect you don't want to ask me questions I just thought I'd tell her now before she starts panicking so snippets I can just go type flf and then a special character and it spurs out this whole line of code that allows me to find large files on a server even at the whole pack that I want to go to if I'm doing any real DPCLI it's just WPPL square bracket we'll also expand that out to DPC plugin list of it goes if you're using windows the windows one is asked something I don't even remember as far as I asked but there's a equivalent for windows is asked something and if you're which I think should be just somewhere the same as the windows and there's also text expanded as well the really cool thing about Alfred there is work load allows you to build out complete scripting systems to do stuff and for Alfred itself if you're just using specified hotkey brings up a little search box you can write your own search indexing so in my case I can write it and say I want to remember the thing blah blah blah blah and because I use notion for tracking notes digitally I have source and websites that I always go to set up I can have a customized search engine that is effectively my second brain which is good because my first one is rubbish so this is a much better idea if I make sure I get to keep that in digital as possible the final section is learning to improve myself and get that optimization I need to start learning things to take shortcuts and there are a few ways that when you get to a certain age learning is harder it is actually meant to you use harder you're running out of brain cells they are actually dying so learning and storing things is harder and harder likewise the difference between a senior and a junior there is to see that in Google so realistically I don't need to learn anything I just need to learn how to Google it and to a certain extent I know that's what I've done but there is a little part of me that doesn't need to have any some memory recall so I can tell you a lot about it I can do talks it's not because I'm an expert in every subject and demand just a few but it's not because I'm an expert in subjects but by researching by doing talks and by teaching other people I have to be able to put them into words and put them into context that they can understand which means I have to slightly understand it myself maybe not fully I can probably put it my way for most of it but I can try and so learning to learn I teach other people and if I can teach somebody else and they go I understand this I probably know it well enough I also write it down whether it's writing blog posts whether it's writing notes if I want to remember something if I write it out and I write it out in long form if I don't terrible if I remember it I write it in short hands because I can't read any of my writing I can't read it in long form I'm just working on hoping that I can make out enough characters when it comes to short hand stuff that I write I have no recollection half the time of what I actually want you can see a blog post on my site and it says something like today I went and did this that isn't me being kind to you that's me going I need to remember this I need to put it somewhere where if somebody else can remind me where it is and then when I go and Google it if I find myself I know it's the right answer it was the right answer finally I use flashcards how many people went to uni and wrote out cards on notes and you would go and ask you'd have like friends so don't ask this one Anki? Anki? I don't actually have to say this out loud this word it's basically a digital form of flashcards you set it up on your computer and I've had to delay it on this one and every so often it will just ping up and say ask me a question and I have to write the answer I use this for doing terminal bits so if I need to learn a new terminal command I will put it in Anki how do you change directories in a folder whatever folder I'm going to that's easy I can ask these questions make myself type of name until it becomes muscle memory the final bit of all of the puzzle is feeding myself back how do I know where I'm doing better well I'm monitor it's alright I'm monitor so everything I do makes stuff in my mind but ideally I write down how well I've done what I've done these I try to everything not toilet habits but twice too everything I do I use an application called Harvest it's really expensive unless you happen to be doing just one project so I have a project called Like it's gone over budget because Harvest lets you track by time and money it's gone way over budget no one called daughter no I said I don't want to track that and make small changes I tried making big speaking things it went really early for two weeks and then I burnt and crashed big ball you make tiny incremental changes so you're not a morning person but you want to get up at 5 you probably want to be a morning person you can start at 7 you can start at 7 20 half six 5 go backwards slowly but surely over weeks and weeks you want to learn something just repeat it over and over and over again and small changes really do make a difference and do change your life so I hope you've learned something I'm not sure if you have a stuffy else you've learned that I'm a very shame person and I get up very early and also probably learned that I'm about to go to bed anyway oh no there's an exercise that's me saying don't obsess about things but no you should just obsess no seriously don't obsess just make those little changes don't worry about it I mean monitor everything so this is all completely contradictory advice but if you're starting to get to the point when you're worrying about the things you're doing you're doing this well life's about enjoying things and going forward and finding more time if you're starting to worry about things you're then taking up time worrying and just becoming yourself to do some things so don't obsess about any of this if it's not working for you go watch that show on Netflix thank you very much look at what that white bar is up there which is rather alarmingly on the screen oh it's the history of my thoughts ok thank you what? how do you work on the train? like seriously it's like I mean I know northern rail ah no trans-Pennine it's open work ok I know trans-Pennine rail yeah how do you do it so I'm a horrible reasonable looking person the actual face is a raging bad person I can't even look at someone in the morning and they think ah no they go which we're not going to get a table to myself but yeah I optimize most of my train journey I know where the train is going to stop I know which carriage has reserved seats in it I know which carriages don't have reserved seats I know that if I get on the train and I go to the left hand side there's a table on the train in the morning that has a they've set it up so that you can reserve the seats ahead of time by texting I also know that SNFIS doesn't work on that particular train so I always know that those seats are going to be used free because there's a reserved side on them but nobody's ever going to sit in so I can sit in there safely I make sure I have tasks that don't require me to use the internet if I have tasks that do require me to use the internet I try to break down the box to the smallest things possible and stif over the bits that I can't do if I have to arrive at work and there are sections of my code that says to do this loop then I have that I go as my own train journey head trains on but basically you look as grumpy as anything I like hack that one of my friends taught me if you're doing really long train journeys is to get a bottle of white lightly pour it out fill it with water and sit on the train you will have the most peaceful train journey you've ever had as no one will approach you