 So hi everybody, thanks for taking the first half of your lunch to hang out here with me. I appreciate that. My name is Chris Albrecht. I'm a senior developer at Lullabot. I also host the Behind the Screens podcast, which was largely derived from the things I'm going to tell you about today. So a little bit about my company because I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them. They're the ones who gave me the opportunity to be up here. Lullabot is a strategy design and Drupal development shop, mainly with large-scale digital publishers. We work with a lot of clients like MSNBC, Martha Stewart, Sci-Fi, Bravo, lots of great stuff like that. But at Lullabot we have some really fantastic core values. I feel very privileged to work for this company. And if you ask anybody at the company which one of these six is at the top of their list, it's always this one. Be human. And I think it's very rare in a tech company to have being human as the top of your list. In the industry it can be really easy to lose that notion that we are human, that we're actual people with lives, kids, jobs, behind everything. We tend to build personas around people based on what we see in the issue queue or on Twitter or any social media blog posts. And we form these images of people that don't accurately represent them or their project or who they are. So I think it's very important to remember that the community is made up of people. And we all came from the same place at the beginning. So I've been in the community for over a decade now. And I've had my struggles. I've had successes. I've had failures. I've had excitement. I've had burnout. I've even second-guessed career choices, even somewhat recently. Sometimes it's not easy in the community. So recently I took a really good look at my personal life and my professional life and I decided I needed to make a few changes. Some improvements, if you will. So what I'm going to talk to you about today is first my user story. The time I spent navigating the Drupal community over the last decade. How I debugged some of these issues that I was dealing with. Balancing that load of all the responsibilities and excitement and fun things we tend to find at these conferences and throughout the community, throughout our jobs. Re-platforming how I sort of shifted some behaviors in my life and some of the tools I used to make these improvements to really figure things out for myself. Before I get too far into all that, how many people here you're at your first Drupal con? Wow, that's like half. Excellent. All right. Who here has attended at least a local Drupal camp or some sort of meetup or something like that? So you've had some experience in the community, almost everybody. That's awesome. How many people have just only used Drupal for less than a year so far? Wow, nobody. Oh, one? Maybe? Half? So you're very new into it. So we got like a good range going. That's amazing. Well, before that, how many more than ten years? A few? Okay, good. We've got a pretty big range then. How many people here are developers? Back end, front end in the code? Okay. How about non-developers? Designers, project managers, something? Okay. Good split there too. Awesome. And how many people here have contributed to the community in some way? That could be writing code, documentation, mentoring somebody, providing translations. Looks like everybody's got a little bit there. That's fantastic. So, whoops, that's one too far. So my story in the community, I'm going to take you through that and some of the lessons I learned as I went through. So my first job in tech was with a very small company or a very small team, I should say, within that company. And we were working on a homegrown CMS. This was before Drupal 5 came out. We weren't on Drupal yet. It was all just a mangled mess of code. So my experience in the tech industry was still very limited. All I knew was what I got from that team. So I had no idea of the ecosystem that was around the community, the resources that were out there. Stack overflow was still a few years away even. So, like, googling an answer was, you still weren't quite sure what you were going to get. So it was about Drupal 5.2 when it came out in July of 2007 that my company decided that was where we were going to go. We were going to shift and re-platform onto Drupal. So that's how I got started there. And I was very lucky that I had a fantastic mentor on that team who Drupal was new to him as well, but he understood the way those things worked and was able to slap my wrist when I decided I was going to try and change something in core. We all know you don't touch core. I learned that lesson real quick. So we realized if you wanted to change the functionality and change something in Drupal, what do you do? You write a module for it. You plug it in. So I decided I needed to learn how to write modules. So I started looking at what modules were out there. If I wanted to make something happen on my website, what could I install to make it work? And so I started looking through the project pages on Drupal.org and you start to find the common names that pop up all over the place, the Dave Reeds, Dries, WebChick, Eaton, QuickSketch. I wrote a few of them down here, Merlin of Chaos, Circuitry, Mosh, like those are just a few, but those are the ones that stick out and I think if you've been around for a little while, you know most of those names. These are the Drupal experts. They build Drupal. So they were the upper echelon to me. And I knew coding was my thing. I loved creating the back-end stuff and learning how all that worked. So I decided that's my career. I wanted to be like these experts. I wanted to be the upper echelon. That's where I wanted to go in my career. So I wanted to be a Drupal rock star, but I was doing it for the wrong reasons though. I wanted to have that notoriety, that sort of fame and glory to be recognized when you go to an event like, hey, it's WebChick or it's Dries. It's the guy that everybody knows, the girl that everybody knows. They did this, they did that. And the problem with this is that notoriety, that fame and that glory, that expertise that we're seeking, that's actually a result, not a reason. And we're going to dig a little bit more into that a little bit later. So here's my user story. As a member of the Drupal community, I want to be an expert. Why? Because experts are rock stars. And I thought that was the coolest thing. And that's kind of a flawed way of thinking. So first of all, what do you take to become a rock star? What is an expert? Expert is the elite, right? They're the best of the best. So pretty sure this is a direct quote from the movie. Gentlemen, you're the top 1% of all Drupal developers, the elite, the best of the best. Yeah, that's actually, that was in the movie. But just keep an eye on this for a second here. He might have been an expert pilot, but he did not architect that plane. He did not design the instrument panel. He did not construct it. He did not put fuel in it, and he does not fix it when it breaks. He has also given very explicit instructions when and where to fly it. So he may be an expert at piloting that plane, but there is a crew of people who also have expertise that give him that, that upper echelon status that we tend to think of. So here's the actual definition of what an expert is. Having involving or displaying a special skill or knowledge derived from training or expertise. So that's actually starting to sound a little bit more like this. Everyone's seen the movie, right? Everyone knows Liam Neeson's famous speech. This is the way it was actually written. What I do have a very particular set of skills. Skills I've acquired over a very long career. Sounds familiar, right? Skills that make me a dream for clients like you. Actually, I wrote the rest of this because I thought it was funny, so I'm going to read it. I've also been going on very little sleep right now, so you'll have to indulge me. If you let my agency go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you. I will find you, and I will bill you. So that's that. So an expert. Having involving or displaying a special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience. How many people here are currently at DrupalCon? All right, some of you are still not quite awake. How many people have used Drupal? All right, that sounds like training, and that sounds like experience to me. So there's a few very important pieces that are missing from this definition when you think about it. Now, I don't mean missing like they should be there, but we should be aware that they're not there. Those two things. There is no timeframe involved in that definition, nor is there a ranking involved in that definition. Nowhere does it say to be an expert, you must have 10,000 hours of experience, or that you must be the top 1% of your like-minded peers. So the next time you hear that expert word, think about what it actually means. It also doesn't change by the company that you're in. If I'm talking to my mom about building websites, I am definitely the Drupal expert. If I'm talking to Angie Byron about building websites, I'm still a Drupal expert. She may work for Dries in Aquiat at the very top. She may have been around longer than I have. She may know more about how things work in core than I do, but that doesn't make me any less of a developer or any less of an expert. We just have different skill sets. So don't let those loaded terms get in the way. And I'd like to take a moment just to recommend this talk. My co-worker, Juan Olaia, who gave this presentation in Vienna, and he couldn't make it this week. So I shortened the URL there for you, but you can also find it just by Googling DrupalCon Vienna, breaking the myths of the Rockstar developer. It's one of those terms we throw around, wanting to be a Rockstar. Who are the Rockstar developers? There's the names you recognize immediately when you go anywhere. And he breaks all those myths down in a very, very humbling, like I'm trying to think of the right words to explain it. It's an excellent talk, so I highly recommend that if you've ever felt that sense of imposter syndrome or you want to get a good feel for what the community is made of, the people at it. So let's talk a bit about debugging. So these experts at the beginning, they were always encouraging and controlling everyone to give back to the community to the point where it started to feel like an obligation to me. And with a sense, I'm making my living off of free code written by everybody else. So in the back of my mind, I have that pressure, like, well, I'm getting all this stuff out of it. I need to give something back. And I distinctly remember instances where they were telling us, just give what you've got. Put it up there. It doesn't matter how good it is or what it is. Put your code up. You get the community that way. Somebody else can work on it and add patches. Somebody else can review it for security updates or for bugs and can fix it for you. So you leverage the power of the community by putting your stuff out there. And so I decided that I need to start writing modules. That's how I'm giving back. I need to do this. Turns out everything I actually wanted to do, there was already a module for it. Even 10 years ago, all the modules had already been taken. So I started searching out an idea for something I could write a module about. It could be some problem I could solve. Most of them were for somebody else. They had not necessarily something I needed at the time, but I had to write a module and I had to contribute it and put it up on d.o. So I started writing code for some of these ideas that I got and I had these big grand plans for them, these elegant UIs and this super functionality and everyone would be like, oh, I want the module that that guy wrote. And then I had three big blockers in the way when we got through that. The first one of those is talent. I would often run into something I had no idea how to do in Drupal. So what is the right way? There are so many ways to do things in Drupal where I didn't even know how to approach some of these challenges. So ultimately I would get stuck in these things. I didn't want to bother people in the issue queue. No one responded on the forums. That really started to play with my confidence, which is the second issue. Everything would have to be perfect for me before I felt good about putting it out there. I had to be bug-free. The code had to be perfectly clean. I didn't want it to get out there and have a developer review it and throw it back at me. You have to do this and this and reject it. You have to clean up your code. Why didn't you do this? We don't have time to do this. We're working on core. All these voices in my head are telling me, you're not good enough to do this. And then I started to think, what if it actually does get in and then someone posts an issue or bug into the issue queue and I have no idea how to fix it? What if somebody installs it and it breaks their site and it's my fault? Luckily I'm the only one who's ever had these fears, so you guys don't have to worry about that. And finally, there was this issue of time and you'll notice that doesn't exactly match up with the picture because there are pretty much synonymous time and money in this case. As I started working through my career, I started freelancing and I felt really guilty about creating a module that I could put up into the contrib space if it didn't need to be, to take that extra time and charge my clients for that time when I could just come up with a quick custom solution for them. I didn't feel like that was fair to them. But at the same time, I didn't have time to do it on my own. You know, lost time has lost money and I was barely paying the bills, so that time that I had left over was working a second job or just trying to relax and get out of my head for a minute. So I started having these thoughts. Why would I do this if I'm not getting paid for? Or if I wait long enough, somebody else will develop the module and they'll do a better job at it. Which is not altogether untrue, but who knows if they would do a better job? And then there was always that dreaded issue queue. I've seen threads in comments miles long and I didn't have time to get into all of that. And these reasons caused me to abandon a lot of potential contributed modules that I could have put up there that somebody else could have gotten some use out of. So it took some time, but finally I was able to break through that and I was able to have this mental shift. I was fortunate enough to find a more permanent job where somebody actually showed me that I had far more talent than I thought I did and was able to break down this first barrier for me. These are the blockers that were stuck in my mind. I don't have the talent to build a module. They showed me that I did and that I could actually lead a team. And it blew me away when I was given that opportunity to find that in myself. So in 2011, four years after I started in Drupal, I was actually able to get my first module up into the contrib space. It wasn't great, but it solved the problem that I needed to do with this job. So that broke down my second barrier. I'm actually doing something and people are using it and thanking me for it. It was amazing. And that job also gave me a little bit of freedom because it was a salary job to work on these contrib modules and put them up there for other people because my boss actually saw the value in sharing this with other members of the... We had multiple departments in this company, but other people in that company could use those modules, and she knew what it meant to put open source code back up into the community. So she let me work on those and contribute those. So she broke down my third barrier for me as well. Now I'm actually making money and being able to contribute these modules to the community. So a word on confidence here is really easy to succumb to imposter syndrome. I think we've probably all felt that at some point, feeling that we just don't belong somewhere, that we're not right for this... We're not talented enough to participate, that we haven't been here long enough to have any clout, that our work isn't as valuable as somebody else's work. I know I've had those feelings before and they're wrong. They're absolutely wrong. And I heard this quote recently and I've been just taking it with me everywhere. It seems to pop up. It's not who you are. That's the problem. It's who you think that you're not. And just think on that one for a second. I absolutely love this quote. Every time I start to feel a little, maybe I'm doing this wrong or I'm not good enough, this quote always sends me back the right direction. So for me, it felt good to finally be able to give something back to be a contributing member of the community. It turns out I can be a contributor after all. Who knew? Now all of this was a big changing point in my life, but it didn't come without its price. So now the pressure wasn't to give back, but it was to try and maintain that. So now I'm an open-source maintainer. I have projects up on Drupal.org. So I began contributing more modules. Most of them were rarely used. They were kind of niche for what we were doing, but they were useful for us and for a few other people. Now most of them are out there and have really stale issues because I don't need them anymore. And I feel really bad that I haven't been able to keep up with the contributed modules I've got in their issue queues. You can kind of feel like you sign a contract when you put something out there, be it on Drupal.org or GitHub or anywhere else. If it's an open-source project that you want, your intention is hopefully somebody else can use this and then the issue queue starts filling up and hopefully they're full of constructive comments or useful issues and not this project is crap. You totally screwed this up. I actually don't think I've seen really any of that. I think we're pretty good as a community in Drupal to be supportive of those types of things. But still they feel like more obligations and what if you're not using that module anymore? The things I built that were niche for that time, do I spend my time fixing issues and patching things that people have submitted have worked on for me if I'm not even using that module? I've got to go spin up an old instance of D7 and install the other modules that go with it and test it out and see if it works. It takes a lot of extra time. I was starting to get a little anxiety and burnt out about that. Eventually I stopped putting modules up on Drupal.org again. I've got a handful out there still and every once in a while if I find one that I think is going to be ubiquitous enough I'm not going to lose it or forget about it then I'll put it up there but a lot of them I just leave in the proprietary stack that we're building in the codebase we're building. There are some people who have that passion to be that open source maintainer and they really thrive on that and I enjoy it to a degree but it's not I don't think it was right for me so maybe code contribution wasn't the right way to give back for me so I decided I was going to look at some other options and try and change my mindset about where I fit in the Drupal community so now this is only a few years ago but I was giving back for the right reasons now I feel like I actually had something valuable to share maybe code contribution wasn't it but throughout the life cycle of D7 I became a really good architect developer and I feel confident saying that not in a bragging way but I feel confident in my skills that I was good enough to do that so I thought where can I apply this can I give something back from that maybe I can write how-to articles on how to use a module or how to set up a system using panels or I can come up with some sessions to present a Drupal con so I did I propose sessions and they weren't accepted I didn't have a lot of speaking experience at the time it's about the same topic and I started a lot of those articles those how-to articles and got like three quarters of the way through and just got tired of it I had that feeling like by the time I actually finished this it's going to be outdated the next version is going to be out so I wasn't real keen on spending all that time and work on something that was so ephemeral that wasn't going to last or be applicable within a few months so that burnt out on me too by creating the course material as much as I liked the training and then we as much as we'd heard about D8 coming out I mean we had like two years from the time they announced it that we started creating sessions and writing code and testing and teaching how to use Drupal 8 before it actually hit production ready so we were all geared up for it and then it broke and people started using it and there were Drupal 8 developers now being hired to do these things and I was working at Lullabot at the time and still on a Drupal 7 project for a client I'm still on a Drupal 7 project for a client I have barely touched Drupal 8 code at this point but when that came out now all the sessions are about Drupal 8 and everyone's learning how to do this in Drupal 8 and that in Drupal 8 and it was like the carpet was ripped out from under me I feel like I went from the top rung to the bottom overnight and I remember walking around Drupal Con New Orleans just lost I didn't have a spark left it was really a really strange feeling so I thought I'm not touching the Drupal 8 code I'm so far behind on that maybe I can find a different place and I tried documentation I tried going through the mentoring and I enjoyed those but I still just didn't feel right about it I remember coming home from Drupal Con so many times with my wife calls it Drupalitis which I think technically is an inflammation of your Drupal I'm not crazy about that term so I call it Drupal Fever but is that idea that concept you get so energized at these conferences and you want to do all of the things you talk to so many different people and they all have some fun things to do and they want help and they have these new initiatives they're pushing or they need this or that and it's all important that's why it speaks to you that's why you're interested in it but you can't do everything at once so that lack of Drupal Fever in New Orleans really got me thinking about where my place was in my personal life so I began to make some changes to try and reconfigure things because clearly the configuration I had was not working out and I was able to boil that concept of Drupal Fever into three distinct categories this is where I started and you can apply these to any area of life not just Drupal but I noticed it mostly there because I came out with so much in my head so if you're sitting out here right now and you're thinking to yourself what is there to life beyond Drupal do you want to listen up on this part not to deter you from what you're really doing but this made a big impact in my life does anyone else have that Drupal Fever that I want to do all the things you come out of Drupal Con and you're signing up for everything and agreeing to do things that you know you're not going to have any kind of time to do you know what that leads to? burnout real quick burnout, broken promises disappointment everything you can't do everything and do it well so you know I'm the kind of person that when I tell you I'm going to do something I'm going to follow through with it I can't stand breaking promises to people if I tell you I'm going to be there I'm going to be there so these three levels of engagement I call them for coming away from Drupal but pretty much anything the first one is excitement all of these things generate or these events generate a big excitement but there's also interests so you get beyond the excitement and some of those things stick around those become your interests but then you find those really deep rooted ones those ones that speak to you, those passions we're going to talk about each one of these so the excitement is the Drupal Fever that's that I want to do everything and help everybody out that I talk to at Drupal Con kind of feeling and you can extend this like I said beyond just Drupal oops let me go back and read through those yeah so when I would walk out the doors I had I would always have that really great excitement from Drupal Con and even with the best intentions all the people that I said yeah I can work on this I'd get into the issue queue I'll help you out with this I was not attending the meetings that I wanted to I was not grooming the issue queues that I promised that I would I wasn't writing a module that could solve somebody else's problem and I just wasn't happy how could I come away with so much positive energy and be so overloaded and depressed and finally I realized I needed to give Drupal Fever a few days to break you let that calm down and some of those items will start to sift out so those ideas that are left over are your interests now it's easy to discard some of these things when you realize that there are plenty of people who will work on it so it's not all dependent on you don't worry there the group is not going to be offended if you don't show up even though you said you did a lot of people go through the same thing and others are more important to get or are more difficult to get rid of to kind of push off your plate to make room so once that Drupal Fever has sort of subsided and a lot of those ephemeral interests have gone away then you need to decide whatever is left over is that an interest or is that a true passion they're both valid so don't discard anything right away once you get to that point but here's how you kind of whittle that down there so some interests so for me here's a few examples I like playing the guitar I like writing code, I like architecting websites and running, talking in front of people that's good right now writing about my life experiences writing fiction, I like teaching traveling I like organizing things that's a lot of stuff and there's no way I'm going to be able to do all of that and actually get anywhere with it at least not at full strength there's a resource that we all have in common and unfortunately it's non-renewable and it's finite, it's time and it takes time to invest the energy in those things so you need to evaluate those interests and figure out where you want to put that time where is the energy best applied I actually had a college professor I'll never forget this it was my first semester of college he in graphic design and it's back end developer and he told me towards the end of the class first he asked me do you mind if I tell you something about yourself so right away I knew something was coming but I told him okay yeah go ahead he said you're the kind of person who will be good at anything but you will never be great at anything or good at everything but you'll never be great at anything and as an 18 year old my first semester in college my first thought was how dare you I'm invincible what are you talking about but he was right I realized immediately after that thought he was right I'd been that way my whole life as soon as something got too hard I could jump to another interest because I was pretty good at it so I could enjoy all of those different things and I never actually got deep into anything so I believed that for years and that's why I never was able to really find anything but some of these tools that I'm going to show you and some of the things I'm going to talk about really they changed my perspective on things I figured out how to sacrifice some of the things that were less important or that were just the interests and prioritize those that I could actually find those passions and now I've decided I'm going to be great at something I have that confidence to do it and I know how to find it so a passion what is a passion it's that feeling that like you feel it burning in your heart it's when hours pass by and you don't even realize it it feels like minutes like how many people have actually looked out the window after coding and realized oh crap the sun's coming up yeah it's when that happens when you forget to eat or sleep while you're doing it it's like being in love with an idea when you're not doing it it's all you want to do it charges you up here's the big determiner here's the question to ask yourself if you're not sure you've got to love the process as much as you love the product you have to love the part that gets you to the end the means to the end as well as just the end when I figured that part out I realized looking back on some of these things that that was my big that was the part that I was missing so that helped me determine which pieces I needed to just set aside as interest and which ones I wanted to actually dive into and pursue it at and I think many of us here are here because we have a passion for what we do as well as being here for the work so a few examples we'll go through these kind of quickly here but so I really like to play the guitar did anyone see the pre note is anyone here for that one or two people so oh okay if you no one wants to admit it like we saw you don't make us talk about it yeah I've been playing for about 15 years and that's about as good as it gets but I don't I like to play for me you know I've never officially taken lessons I'm self-taught from the internet it's fun for me to just sort of zone out for a little while and play like my fundamentals are not so good my techniques okay but it's relaxing for me but at one point recently I decided I wanted to get good enough to like start playing coffee shops to get up on stage somewhere so I took some lessons I actually paid for them and I really tried to buckle down improve my fundamentals and you know practicing scales and patterns and progressions and I just didn't enjoy that so I realized I wasn't in love with the process as much as I was the product I was perfectly happy still I'm perfectly happy just taking 5-10 minutes here there and putting something together and even just as an interest like do it on the side or a little bit of free time when I want to change my pace I can still be good enough well to get up on stage I can say I've played guitar on a stage in Nashville and I'm into cool so I'm okay with that I've decided that is my interest that goes on the side for right now so I mean if you're passionate about traveling you've got to be okay not living in your house or your apartment or getting rid of it completely you've got to be comfortable being in a country where you don't speak the language or know what food is going to be there those things I mean I love traveling but those things cause so much anxiety for me traveling will put that as an interest on the side like I like getting out and trying things but I like being at home too I think a little bit more so the next thing I want to talk about is some of the things I did to try and figure this out and achieve this balance between interest and passion so this is the load balancing portion the three things that ooh oh this is the part I skipped so yeah I realized to make the right decisions between figuring all these out I needed to have a good base to start from when you start making decisions off the cuff you don't always end up where you should be so that meant I needed to start finding some balance and it's good before you start making important decisions or changes in your life that you start from the right place so this is where I put all that together and find that balance in that platform so the foundation in most spiritual cultures is mind body and spirit and you know how good things always come in threes I like that it's going to be a running theme here as an introvert you could also sort of think of them this way the mind is sort of your professional side that's your analytical well for most of us developers that would be the analytical side it's going to be different for everybody but you can still figure out which piece is fit or what each piece represents for you so the mind is the professional side the learning side body is kind of the personal side that for me personally that is hanging out with my friends or that's running that's doing projects around the house things like that and we're going to talk about these in a little more detail but the spirit then for if you're thinking on it on an introvert's term that's the private side that's my me time when I'm away from everybody else so talk about the mind for a little bit so this is like I said the time I spend on work this is my analytical brain this is my computer time my thinking, my processing, my creative problem solving and it's going to be different for everybody depending on where you fall into if you want to go with those Myers-Briggs I'm not crazy about that one in particular but you know your mind so that's your professional side your thinking side for me the body the personal that's exercising, spending time with my wife my friends working on projects that's kind of the opposite of when I'm working so you can think of it that way but then this is the me time the running, the meditating reading the things I want to read writing the things I want to write now extroverts you get your energy from being around other people so shift these around to fit for you but the important thing is to find this balance between the three and when you do this this is zone in the middle which I didn't want to try and jam words in there because I didn't think I'd have space on the slide that's where your self-awareness comes from everything balanced that spot in the middle starts to overlap or everything overlaps to form that spot in the middle and it lines up and that's where I feel confident and calm and like where I understand where my life is I feel in control that way and you can see in between where they overlap if things start to skew out of proportion it's going to start affecting you if you spend all your time working which I've done before where you give up all your free time your personal time to just work on the project you're going to start falling out of balance your emotional state is going to start to decline you're going to run out of energy your subconscious is going to start going out of control you start to lose your happy place and you start making decisions from an unbalanced platform so it's kind of a really sorry the word there I don't like thinking in these exact terms all the time but when you start to put things into these categories it really started to make sense for me so I started thinking like how there was a point a few years ago I started wondering how people were accomplishing so much more than I was you know I'm figuring these things out they don't have more time than I do we all have the same amount of time so I figured they must just be better tuned than I was so this was the next step I started doing I got to figure out how to where's my time going and where can I apply it better so how can I tune myself up here we go first one ready for this big surprise diet and exercise turns out you do a little bit of this because of a long way so I've been working on these for a while I started paying more attention to what I ate how much I ate and when I ate and I'm not going to rag on any of these for too long here but here's a couple quick steps that I made a world of difference for me so first the sugary drinks and the fast food got to go you cut that crap out of your diet it's like having a second person you just have so much more energy eating a few plants instead of meats and cheeses all the time I've done that and it's I just feel a less lethargic, more active a little bit smaller portions you can eat more of them just make them smaller each time don't eat till you're full eat till you're satisfied you avoid that food coma feeling and finally don't eat right before bed this one was really crazy so I set an alarm on my watch to eat at like three hours before I would go to bed and by the time it was time to go to bed I maybe sometimes felt a little bit hungry but usually I was just excited for breakfast in the morning so I was like ready to wake up and go and then you wake up in the morning a lot easier that way let me go back one oh it's going to make me a pancerale so these are just really basic steps I could go on a lot more about these and there's lots of information out there about them but doing these things it made me happier I felt more productive, I felt like I had more energy and I could focus better on the things I wanted to do and then the exercise stuff this doesn't have to be super strenuous either this is very simple things stand up and take a break every once in a while from your computer the Pomodoro effect is, I don't think I wrote this one down in here set a timer for every 25 minutes and when that timer goes off stand up for five just look away from your computer screen do a few push ups, go take your cereal bowl back down to the kitchen walk around your office just take five minutes every 25 you don't have to stop your billable hour timer because when you come back to your screen it's like you're kind of starting over but your energy level, your focus goes up again so you're getting more out of the work and your day will go by faster you will feel better and you won't be as stressed and tired at the end of the day you can walk for 30 minutes if you can get outside that's even better but just spending like 30 minutes a day to get your heart rate up does wonders for your focus and for your mind if you can get outside that's awesome there's lots of studies that show vitamin D fresh air has a calming effect and will improve your mood and if you can layer out there put work on hold and try and start all these things early but put work on hold let your thoughts just sit on the shelf and just be where you are if you can't, you have too much going on in your head that's a great time to just let your mind wander and get that crap cleared out, you come back refreshed and focused and ready to go and then starting early if you can do this early in the morning getting your heart rate up before you start work or at lunch right before you start your second half of the day avoids those doldrums completely this was such a major change to getting through the day and being more productive and burnt out and overloaded and again you could go on for more and more with the studies for this but those basic things were really important so the next behavior shift that I decided to go through was defragging my life is that even still a thing? I don't have a Windows computer but this was basically decluttering and the reason I realized that I needed to do this was because I was really angry a lot of the time because I was running into crap in my house like literally hitting it with my knee or knocking it off a shelf not having any place to put stuff down when I got home and I'm like there's no space in the house it turns out I had too much shit in my house so when I get tossed back and forth between things like projects at work or this and somebody else has control of my time that drives me nuts and it doesn't do the same sort of thing to you some situations are always going to be out of our control like we can't control the weather but there are a lot of things we can control and we can remove a lot of these distractions we have a better grip on our time a better focus so the idea is to remove the clutter, remove the things we don't need and keep the things that provide a value to us and it's easy to say that in one sentence it's a much more difficult thing to practice that right off the bat and there are lots of resources out there for how to do it but if you can, it makes a big difference the first step is identifying what the clutter is and there are three forms this comes in again, the threes so when we hear decluttering we tend to think cleaning off the desk, dumping out the drunk drawer or like weeding out the closet those are important steps but there's actually three areas that you want to look at the first is the physical clutter, those things the second area oh these things finally there's also mental clutter you need to consider and that's kind of keeping your mind straight so again we're just scratching the surface on some of these and there's lots more and I'm happy to talk about it at any time just be prepared, I like to talk about it if you ask me about it, but I am happy to talk about it but the physical clutter a lot of the stuff I had laying around my house turned out it was like just in case items or it was just stuff that hadn't been thrown away, junk mail books that we weren't reading anymore like why the hell did I keep all my college textbooks there's like thousands of dollars if you go with the book price when I bought them sitting on my shelf worth $7.42 when I looked them up and tried to return them so I just went in the donation bin I started clearing everything out so if you find those just in case items or you start to look through and find pieces that you don't actually need that aren't doing something in your life, try getting rid of them you can open up space work space in your office getting those things out of your visual realm if you can they would be less distracting for you there's studies that have found that physical clutter actually will compete for your attention when your eyes are being drawn to these different things all over the place so if you're the kind of person who needs to sit and focus try pushing some of that stuff out of the way clean off your desk and try and keep it that way if you can I mean this goes for everything from clothes books, those are the easy ones those get to be a little more difficult but then the nostalgic items I'm not going to get into that those are the hardest to do but you can go all the way through there and once you start that process it's amazing how getting rid of those distractions will let you be more focused and how sort of freer you feel when you don't have all of that junk sitting around like staring back at you the digital clutter is another thing so we have all these screens now that light up and flash and make noise and buzz it seems like every time you turn them off they invent new ways to throw stuff back in your face how many people have at least two devices on them right now that will buzz or make noise at them when something happens I've got two three I've got a son of a bitch that's fun when you're on a call and you've got to put do not disturb mode on four devices that's nuts there's a whole industry that's growing up around this now where people's jobs are to figure out how to make you look at their app how to make you look at their stuff because the more time you spend the more of your time there's that word again that you spend on their things that increases their revenue that increases their brand name so while they're trying to monetize our attention if you can try doing things like leave your phone behind if you go for a walk or when you go out to eat put it on silent leave it in your pocket puts their phone on the table upside down on top of one another first person to reach for their phone pays the bill try that one at lunch after this especially if you go out on a big group so if you can leave your phone behind this is another big adjustment don't try all these at once don't charge your devices where you sleep if I can I will leave my phone in the office to charge I don't care I do read on my iPad at night but I try to leave all that stuff in the office or I'll intentionally wear like if I work from home so I'll wear shorts that don't have pockets in them so I can't like take my phone with me as easily turns out I'm not really missing that much so the next piece of this don't figure out what's actually important to be notified about there are I had an app on my phone once following sports scores and it was during football season just constantly like oh the chargers are winning the Broncos are losing and everything is going on I called it the relationship killer app I'm no longer dating the girl I was dating when I had that app it was really annoying and that's just an extreme example do you really need to know the score of the sports game right now think about that this is designed to get your attention right now it's distracting you from the things you want to be doing that you should be doing and your focus is going all over the place don't turn off any notifications that are not important the only ones I keep on my phone now are when somebody is trying to contact me directly if I get a phone call a text message like a Twitter direct mention or whatever method of communication I use on those apps if someone is trying to get a hold of me and I need to respond to it that's what I have on there everything else I let go I don't even have I don't have any email notifications on my phone anymore it's as much as you tried though that's not always enough because these things I hate these these are designed to draw your attention in these stupid things are like the creepy dudes with vans and candy of the tech world because they're calling you like hey look oh look somebody else hey you should come oh my gosh every piece of me is saying don't open the app but inevitably it's like there's 9 I have to see what's going on in there anyone else's anxiety going through the roof just watching that because I hated making that slide so yeah if you can turn off the red dots too oh man when you have like a complete clear display on your phone with no dots oh it's amazing but this goes for your computer too turn off notifications on your computer shut down your email client while you're not looking at email I mean everyone's the job is a little different I understand that but for developers at least and I'm from the designers I've talked to email is generally like the clients know if they need to get a hold of you you go to Slack email is secondary level communication that's passive communication so I will wait for a little while like check my email at lunch maybe or sometimes I forget all day and guess what I haven't missed anything yet so I definitely recommend that but any distracting apps that you keep open I would always like tab back over to that so cut that out and you can even install apps and services that will block distracting things from you or stop your time when you're getting out of those distracting websites but your brains too they're amazing things but they have their limits so we can be bombarded with great ideas and all these things all the time so even while you're here at DrupalCon especially use it to do list if you get a great idea just write something down and then you can come back to it later it doesn't have to be done right now writing down those ideas not acting immediately on them gives you time to prioritize them later and figure out which ones are most important while maintaining your focus on what you're in right now journaling especially is good for that I found if you can journal just even a sentence or two right before you go to bed like here's what I did today here's the next thing I want to do tomorrow you will sleep so much better because your brain is not processing those thoughts anymore it's written down for you to come back to later and walking even spend a little time walking and clear that out I'm going to try and go a little quickly so we have time for Q&A through some of these so I apologize if I'm talking too fast so do all these if you're interested in doing any of these things don't try and do them all at once do pieces at a time I've been working on this for years and trying to improve some things about myself so the eating better, the exercising start little bit by little bit you have these sodas all the time and you want to try and improve your health by cutting back on those cut back like one soda a day or one a week and then next week do two and then next week three and work yourself up to it so you're not shocking yourself into some of these changes because this is a lot of drastic stuff if you try and do it all at once but you'll start to realize those benefits if you start to do those things so the retooling kind of building on this new foundation now so here are some of the tools I discovered along the way that helped me get to work through some of those those balancing acts and the decluttering and such so learning to say no or at least say not yet I would say yes to everything because I thought it was important I wanted to do it and the most successful people in the world get approached all the time for interviews and new business ventures and meetings and this and that and you know what they say when they get all those things they say no which is a slide I don't have in there you say no now so you can say hell yes to the important things that come up later you don't overwhelm yourself with everything it's perfectly acceptable if somebody asks you like can you help me with this be honest with them like I've got a lot of stuff going on now let me write it down just figure out if I got time to do this and I'll get back to you perfectly acceptable answer then say yeah yeah let's go do that that got me into trouble a lot of times so here if you've got a lot of stuff on your plate now we're going to get into some of the if you want to take photos you can but the slides will all be available later but here's some more of the fun graphical things the Eisenhower matrix everyone heard of this one before this is where you make a grid four by four or a two by two grid and you label the top you label the columns important not important and the rows urgent not urgent and then you fill up each quadrant with the things on your list so if you've got a ton of things a ton of responsibilities and you feel like you're being pulled in a hundred different directions try this just write them all down and then fill them in here the most important urgent things and define importance by what it is you're trying to achieve so it's going to be different for everybody do those right away the things that are you have to do now the urgent things but they're not important put those on your schedule figure out a time when you have when you can do those so something with a deadline will say would fall under the urgent not urgent and important see if you can delegate those to somebody else asking someone for help or if you have coworkers you could take on something or let your boss know I've got too much going on you need to get rid of some of those tasks it's important but it doesn't need to get done right now and I have too many other things to do you find things on your list that are not important and not urgent at least for the universe that you're working in in the regards to these particular tasks so like for me preparing for DrupalCon playing the guitar well, aside from the pre-note stuff that fell into the not important not urgent like I could practice and play around on my own except for the stuff I needed to do just for the pre-note so for that particular case fell into the eliminate category this kind of ties back into the first few things I was talking about if you're struggling with whether or not you should go for an idea or you're trying to figure out where to start Simon Sinek's Golden Circle I really like this most people end up starting from the wrong direction so remember how I said I wanted to be an expert because I wanted to be a rockstar I wanted the notoriety and the fame and I wanted to feel important that's the product of the process the process is I want to be a contributor to Drupal but why do I want to be a contributor to Drupal so it's more like why do I want to be a rockstar the rockstar here is the what so you start from the inner side the why why do I want to do this I want to give back to the community I want to share the knowledge that I have and if you really have a solid why then you figure out how you're going to do that and finally what the product is going to be be careful not to confuse your why and your what so for example making money being a rockstar those are things that are the products of finding your why your how moving that through so this is a Japanese word icky guy it means reason for being and this one's a little hard to see but don't worry I have a different one I'm going to show up there I wanted to put this there because it's a little bit clear in some of the words and it's more common in this format at least but I have another one that I like a little bit better there's a little more to it but it's essentially the it is the same thing but if you take a look at those big pieces on the top what are you good at what earns you money what you love what the world needs and I know this sounds a little bit cliche but when I started looking at this and figuring out where I was landing on this chart figure out sort of where I am in that journey okay now I understand the pieces that I'm missing or where I want to take this in the next step sometimes I'm working as a developer but where do I go next what do I really want to do and I realize that was at the core of why I wasn't figuring out what I wanted to do so if you can find something that fits all of these you're good at it it earns you money you love doing it and the world needs it you found that sweet spot right in the middle your purpose but each place that they overlap has its own label so if you love it and it earns you money then that's a good job if you're also good at it that's an opportunity for service and so on and you can find well chart obviously in the slide but you can find these things on the web as well but I really liked the way that sort of outlined outlined all those items so Stack Overflow I talked about a lot of stuff a lot of tools, methods different organizing techniques and being productive I also I mean I read a lot of books blog post articles so I found a lot of stuff that way there are so many things you can do meditation, exercise I can't cover all that stuff here and I've already covered a lot but I do often tweet and blog about these things and I do love talking about it too so if you want to catch me at some point while you're here I'm happy to talk about these in further detail or give you some tips on some of the stuff that I've gone through and this is by no means a roadmap a map shows you a starting place and an ending place so you would draw a line from your origin to your destination but if you don't know what exactly your destination is you can't draw that line you can't connect dots that don't exist yet so instead think of this as a compass it's a navigational beacon it gives you direction but you always need to be recalibrating it when you get to the next step pull out your compass again make sure you're going the right direction because the end might not be where you predicted to be ten years ago ten years ago I couldn't tell you that I would be standing on a stage in Nashville playing the guitar but I ended up here by calibrating my compass as I went so all these behavior changes these things they will always have some level of pushback for you by nature we tend to be adverse to change so when we start to change these things our body, our subconscious says no no no hey we're comfortable over there what are we doing over here in the uncomfortable zone you gotta get out of your comfort zone before you can grow and improve yourself so through all this I learned a few things here I am the community turns out still people I just understand them better now I've met some extremely interesting, some dedicated some passionate people this is why I started that podcast I like telling those stories and I love to teach so and I still love the code I found a new passion in the code as well but that's it's only one thing and it's not my primary thing so don't feel obligated to give back you can't find your place in the community but you feel that pressure that's fine you don't have to do anything I feel very grateful that I can do it and I found these things and these tools have helped me get there I finally feel like I'm giving back to the community that gave me so much so aside from that slide that I heard that presentation I mentioned earlier on which had the URL on it just here's a few other recommendations for some of the tools that I learned from figuring all these things out some of the books on the side there you are a badass by Jensen Sherrill fantastic book I won't read through all these because I want to have a few minutes here for questions but that's the presentation so thank you and are there any questions if there are please come on up to the microphone