The Swyx Mixtape

Show notes and referenced links: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1553456558264164356

Old talk version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzK4IxHv3W0

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Chad Stewart: I think we should set up the whole thing first in case, people might be coming off the street and they don't necessarily know exactly about the chapter of the book. I definitely think you should talk a little bit about that first. 

[00:00:10] swyx: I do opinion introduce it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:13] That'd be great. Do you wanna give it a shot? I wanna see what what your take on it is. Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I'll give it a shot. So, 

[00:00:20] Chad Stewart: So pretty much the idea. Well, so first of all the, currently the chapter actually is at the end of the book. And a lot of you get a lot of, the, you get a lot of other information before you get to this chapter.

[00:00:32] And the kind of idea is that, all that other information is important. It's great. But if you don't necessarily know how to implement. Then, yeah, it's not particularly useful. And so my understanding, you of took the idea of hairs, things that that you could use to start implementing some of these things.

[00:00:53] And then one of the things that actually really enjoyed really liked I read over the chapter again, just to to refresh myself, was the idea of not everything to use all the time. You have tactics which you use whenever they come up, then you have strategy. Which you use, like you use a little bit more often.

[00:01:13] I don't remember what the third one is, but it is like levels of when you use them principles. Yes. Principles. Thank you. When you use them often. So the chapter resonated with me mostly because of a lot of the things that you were talking about is like habits and like laying the foundation for success.

[00:01:30] Part we talked about it in the Mito last week in terms of keeping yourself physically healthy, but just also, it's just generally your habits, both your physical habits, like learning, expanding your knowledge, networking, interacting with people it's just having that foundation laid out so that, leveraging the other topics of the book was is what you call.

[00:01:53] It was easier. I know we had that, this kind of discussion about about maybe putting it earlier in the book, but that's the reason why I decided, Hey, maybe this would be the first thing to talk about because this is something that, we talk up in the industry, but not really, yeah. So just wanted to talk about 

[00:02:11] swyx: anyways. Yeah. That's a great recap. Yeah, that's fantastic recap. Okay. Job done. Thank you everyone. Yeah. Wow. And you didn't even I didn't even tell you I was gonna ask you anyway. I just love hearing about it from other point of view.

[00:02:23] But yeah, you can see how it's weird to put it at the front of the buzz. I have to go through and set up all the context first, which is like 39 chapters of random shit. And then but, and then I come in at the end with a really strong chapter. Right. But I think my reflection is like, Imagine you would hand it the golden book of advice.

[00:02:42] Like maybe my book is like not the golden book of advice, but maybe someone else's book in book of advice. Can you convert that advice into results and the chances are, is it's no, because it's not really, you're not really lacking for advice. You're really lacking for systems to implement that effectively in your career, in your life.

[00:03:03] Right? To actually put things in action and follow through on them. It's not ideas, it's execution, it's not motivation, it's discipline. And so like it's really boring blocking and tackling stuff. But then I felt like if I did not talk then everything I, everything else I talk about is a complete waste because like this that's the real sustainable advantage.

[00:03:24] I think for sure, I was very influenced by atomic habits. Like you can have all the fancy trading strategies that you want, but ultimately, your net worth is a trailing indicator of your financial habits. Did you save enough? and, did you did you did you put did you pay down the interest rate on the things that you're supposed to pay down first before chasing the investment in other categories?

[00:03:48] And I definitely feel like, when people give high level career advice, they tend to overstep in terms of the high stakes, the very dramatic, the very flashy, the very sexy, or very smart sounding ideas. And there's just the boring, like eat of vegetables, versions of the ideas. Isn't talked about enough when actually it is the predominant.

[00:04:08] Thing to get right. So, yeah. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. I cut you off. Oh, no, I see you also join on your personal, so, I'm talking to two CHADS. Oh 

[00:04:15] Chad Stewart: yeah. One that's a duck and one that's an actual person. Yeah. No, so I would, I, so I do agree with you. But, and I guess it's I try not to say too much about the, on, on like you're delivering the chapter as opposed to the chapter's contents itself.

[00:04:30] But like I do agree that, like the thing that everybody's interested in, like you said, the gold as you put it is definitely. The, what you call it the flashy advice, the, this is how you negotiate your salary. These are the technologies that you choose, as opposed to the eat, your vegetables as you call it version is, get up every day and code, get up every day and read tech, tech news, or get up every day and network, specifically the phrase network, where network is just this bland, instruction that you're, that 

[00:05:02] swyx: everybody gives, know, which network what you supposed to do when people say I'm gonna get up to date end network.

[00:05:06] What is that? I 

[00:05:08] Chad Stewart: have no clue. I just, I say it all the time. And then I sit down and okay, what am I supposed to do? Ha 

[00:05:15] swyx: oh, but so my version of that right. Is to learn in public. Right? And I know, this, so, like it's weird to come to, to reach out, to let's, here's an unenlightened version of networking, which is.

[00:05:26] You're just, you're gonna go out there and you're gonna look for some industry mentor and you're gonna cold email them and say, please, can you be my mentor? Which is an unspecified job of indeterminate length for no money. So good luck. But if you learn the public you're putting your interests out there, you're you progress out there and people can help you with specific dimensions and you can build your network that way by building up assets of value that you exchange for something else.

[00:05:50] And I think that's a really positive some way to network and I highly encourage people 

[00:05:54] Chad Stewart: to do that. Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I definitely agree. And I guess like that's like the going back to the operating system of you is like the more kind of boring part, because that is something that you have to do all the time, it's the grind, right?

[00:06:11] Like everybody is trying to tell you to grind, but they don't necessarily tell you. You know why it's important and they don't tell you that it gets boring. Well, I guess it's implied that it gets boring, but, but yeah okay. You know what, I'm just going to say that. I think anyways, you think 

[00:06:26] swyx: what 

[00:06:26] Chad Stewart: kind?

[00:06:27] Yeah. What do you think? No, I was just like, I just, as I was thinking, I just hit a roadblock in my head and I just like, yeah, no. 

[00:06:33] swyx: Okay. That's an action cancellation, when you're playing fighting games and you're doing something and you're like, oh, Nope. oh, you on the path I want to go down.

[00:06:44] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, there's two things. One is keeping going through the daily grinds having good habits, letting them compound part of that is, your physical body, part of that is your mental. Your mental storage space, so, we talk about sleep.

[00:07:00] We talk about building a second brain and then the third section is building a scheduler which is how do you take on multiple tasks and multitask prioritize them and then try not to drop any tasks. I think that's a very foundational skill, I'll talk about that. But the last bit I really which is to keep your kernel alive, which is the process zero, the kernel that, the process that schedules other processes.

[00:07:23] And for me or for most developers that is some concept of drive, right. If you lose your drive, you burn out. And I think something that maybe a lot of people don't discuss is yeah, like there's a lot of burnout in the industry and that's of game over You talk about the differences between lasting in this industry five years versus 50 years, like it's basically, do you have a love for programming?

[00:07:43] Do you have a reason that you do what you do? And I think I tend to try to remind people that it is not about chasing money. It's not just about chasing money. Money's good. But there, there can also be a higher purpose to the things that we work on. 

[00:07:56] Chad Stewart: I definitely agree. And I guess of going down the it's not about chasing money, it's not, so I guess my thing is, it's less about, you want to chase the thing that interests you.

[00:08:08] You know what I mean? Like I, and I think that's something that like, especially in the industry, we do a really good we do a really good job of telling people that these are the things that are important and pushing up the things that they are interested in, yeah. So say, like for instance, you're just a front end Devrel and you love doing UI UX, but everybody just convinces you that UI UX is not the thing to do by the way.

[00:08:33] I'm just picking this because probably because I'm most related to it, not necessarily the situation, but just the anyways. But yeah, like this is your thing, but everybody tells you, oh, you really need to get into the cloud. No something else, right? Like it's backend engineering and you do that and you get good at it, but it's not the thing like that will eventually lead to burnout as well.

[00:08:58] Like it's really, at least my understanding of burnout is really when there's like the reward that you're getting for the actions that you're doing, don't match with the rewards that you want. That's probably a bad description of it, but yeah you know what you're getting versus what you actually want.

[00:09:18] If those things don't align and they don't align for long enough, then you know, you just don't want to do it anymore. You're not getting properly rewarded. Yeah. For the things that 

[00:09:27] swyx: you're doing. Yeah. That's that's the burnouts phase. I feel like I had more to share that, but I always like to turn into a discussion, where this is an open discussion.

[00:09:36] If people want to raise their hands and talk about, any of these concepts the, from the physical, to like the brain stuff to scheduling and to burnouts, we can always have that open . actually got some feedback from one of my previous spaces that apparently people can't really raise their hands until they're invited.

[00:09:52] I'm not sure how this works. 

[00:09:54] Chad Stewart: Yeah, I'm not necessarily sure. Either. Like usually, so like you have a request button for people that are new to spaces, you have the request button and then that will tell us that you're you want to come up and then we can bring you up and then you can like, raise your hands and stuff like that.

[00:10:10] I also want to point out I forgot to, to say this, but we have a link as well for a Slido. So say for instance, you actually do have a question and you don't want to necessarily come on stage. It's you can go to the Slido and just ask your question there and monitoring that. So the link to the Slido, if you notice that there's a tweet at the top of this space, we call it jumbotron.

[00:10:34] The tweet has that link to that slack. Ah, there it is. Test 

[00:10:38] swyx: question anonymous. Yeah, that was me. That was. Oh, you see, 

[00:10:42] Chad Stewart: it's anonymous. You're supposed to not let anybody know. Oh, right, right, right. 

[00:10:47] swyx: Okay. Whoop . 

[00:10:49] Chad Stewart: Yeah. So feel free to do that as well. But yeah, this is this kind of an open ended que even though spaces are ne not necessarily, I guess you have to cultivate that, but yeah, this is a open ended space.

[00:11:02] So if you have any questions, feel free to, to jump up and ask them, just ask them however you want. Like even feel free to to tweet at the tweet. 

[00:11:12] swyx: And I'll monitor that as well. This new chat feature in in Twitter. So we can try that out. Okay. So maybe I'll put it this way. Yeah. One thing.

[00:11:21] One thing, one thing I wanted to offer is I think that there's an there's an image that I think you said in your recap resonated with you a lot, which is that we have principles, strategies, and tactics. We talk about the sort of three levels of applications that we offer or that we think about principles are always on.

[00:11:40] Chad Stewart: Are you still there? 

[00:11:41] swyx: I feel like Shawn. Yeah. So strategies are like big apps. You constantly run them. Right. And you always all your datas in them. So you take your time to choose. It's like slack or discord notion of OneNote. F sketch is like a big, bigger decision, but tactics are like utilities.

[00:11:55] So they're one off you, you picked them up when you need them and you drop them when you're done. So, and I really one of the big breakthroughs was really. Seeing that it align to your job strategies, align to your career and principles, align to human life. And that's the individual scale at which each of these things operate.

[00:12:15] And to me, that was like when I realized that I was like, oh, okay. Each of these things apply on different time scales. And part of the joy of being human is, or having operated, have to operate all these things at once. 

[00:12:25] Chad Stewart: Yeah. That's really interesting, actually. Never really. I mean, I have thought about it, but not necessarily to that level of, like you said, the utilities are the things that you pick up really quickly and you leverage really quickly.

[00:12:38] And then, like it's, I've just never thought about it in that kind of timescale that I thank you. I really appreciate, I'm really happy. 

[00:12:45] swyx: This is recording. I'm like in general I, I actually feel like there's a lot of things we can steal from computer science to run like the rest of our lives because.

[00:12:54] It's and this is not a new thing. And there's a book called that tries to take a stab at this, but I think doesn't go far enough. Like one of the things that I did not end up writing about was how we do hyper parameter tuning for machine learning. And it turns out that there is a perimeter that you can tweak to essentially say how excited you should be by progress.

[00:13:21] If you make some progress, how much more aggressive should you be? I think it's the alpha perimeter, but I mean, it doesn't really matter what you call it. If you tune it too high, if you tune it higher, you'll learn faster. Because if you have, if you try something, you have initial bit of success, then you're like, okay, screw it.

[00:13:35] I'm gonna do 10 X more, whatever I just did. And then you're like, okay, I have 20 X more success. All I'm gonna put a hundred X more than whatever I just did. And then you find that there's a usually converge on a, some local global minimum. Minimum is a good thing in machine learning. And, but I also find there's some grads in which you can overshoot by being too excited about stuff.

[00:13:54] And the fact that you have this result in machine learning that you can apply to normal human learning is actually fascinating. So I, I feel like, basically what I wanna do is take computer science learnings and apply their analogies to life. So I don't know if I lost you there 

[00:14:09] Chad Stewart: no.

[00:14:09] I'm so I'm trying to kind imagine that as well. No, I'm just I'm listening. I'm trying, you know what, I'm not gonna lie. Some of it did go over my head 

[00:14:17] swyx: but it's very thorough. I feel I need to draw it out, but like at the same time, that's the point of podcasts or Twitter spaces, you can just mouth blog, the stuff that.

[00:14:26] You don't dare to write down cuz it's not fully . 

[00:14:28] Chad Stewart: Right. And then not only that you can kinda get people's opinions on it. So like I would, so my immediate thought is that yeah, you you want to tune that, but I would also say you're not let to necessarily get it perfect. And it's just like about being constantly improving.

[00:14:46] Yeah. Or, so you don't want to, you don't want to chase perfection because you chase perfection and you're never gonna get anything done. Whereas it's this is good enough for now. And then when you either have time or when you want to, at some event you decide to make improvements.

[00:15:02] Right? Yeah. And the thing is you want to make improvements, but you don't want to make improvement often too much and you don't want to make improvements too little, 

[00:15:12] swyx: Yeah. So, so we have a principle, right? Good enough is better than best. Stop looking for things that are best because that involves obsessing over benchmarks, carrying what influencers think, keeping up with everything new.

[00:15:25] And when you obsess with good enough, you turn from the external facing point of view to the internal painting. Point of view, you focus on what you need done. You focus on what you need, well, and you focus on what you enjoy and once you hit good enough, move on. And I feel like that's a fundamentally healthier with life, I guess.

[00:15:41] Yeah. Yeah definitely agree. Question. Oh, so thanks for, so whoever submitted that Slido that is our first submission. So we do have a Slido pinned to the top of the thingy, the space. Yeah. Twitter should just build this instead of building like co tweeting or or like the hot take reaction button or whatever that is which I'm also very.

[00:16:03] Kind of miff that I didn't get, but whatever, like it's just real, it's just like a really weird feature. Nobody wants to run that company going on. There's no adults supervision going on in, in that company. So the question is, what are your favorite calendar hacks. Do you have any chats?

[00:16:19] Chad Stewart: I don't know, so, okay. I guess, let me think. Man, because my whole calendar strategy is, I don't even know if I wanna call it a hat, but so something that I do is that I will make a calendar event. I don't know if it's a hat, but I'll make a calendar event. And I always make the calendar.

[00:16:35] I always make the event also happen like at 8:00 AM in the morning so that, my day starts and it's oh, okay, I have this is the stuff that I want to do today. And then it will tell me obviously when the event is going to actually happen. And so I set an alarm on my phone for that time, but I set it for the, for 10 minutes before, and then I just hit the snooze button.

[00:16:56] I don't know if that's helpful, , but like it, I'm just like it. I very rarely miss meetings because of that whole setup, 

[00:17:01] swyx: yeah know. Yeah. That's super smart. I wanna offer the operating systems analogy, right. Which is amazing. We, for someone like me, I, I never really did an operating systems course, but I just I pulled up, I watched some lectures and I pulled up some texts on that and just read the basic, overview of stuff.

[00:17:20] There are scheduling algorithms for processes and it, and one of these I wish I could show an image here. I can't really show an image. So there are three main things that you wanna have, right? You wanna have a single source of truth to store all the queues that you're on the task uses that you're accumulating.

[00:17:36] You wanna be able to prioritize, so you need some kind of garbage collection slash planning period. And then you need to batch work. So you reduce context switching. So, the first algorithm. Is basically just process scheduling queues. And I'm just gonna read from this slide. It says process migrates among the queues throughout this slide.

[00:17:52] So, I have an image here of what a CPU does to do scheduling or what an operating system does is do scheduling has a ready queue in IO Q and it waits for child execution and it waits for interrupts. And those are. Analogous to the types of things that can come into and out of our operating system and the next task, I think is really interesting.

[00:18:11] There most job pool systems have a long term scheduler versus a short term scheduler. So you can, you have a long term storage of jobs. You pop some off into a ready queue for your CPU, which is. To process. And that goes from long term to short term. And once your short term scheduling is done, you put the, put it back into either your exit or if you can't finish it, you put it back into a waiting queue.

[00:18:34] That's just such a really good analogy for the stuff that you have to do long-term versus the short term and to manage it really well. There's more than that. There's like other decisions. There's also ways to decide about scheduling. So for example, you can design by requirements, you scheduling criteria, you wanna maximize CPU that utilization and you wanna maximize throughput.

[00:18:53] In other words, you wanna maximize, the amount of resources that you're, that you've utilizing, and you wanna maximize the amount of work that you're doing. You wanna minimize turnaround time. You wanna minimize waiting time. You wanna minimize response time. In other words, like when people rely on you, you want to have your operating system work and in such a way that they get response in some kind of minimum as LA.

[00:19:12] All of these are just like very reasonable requirements if to design for, but because we don't really design our own operating system, we, the emergent property is that, well, sometimes I take two months to reply to an email cuz , cuz I'm still working on this. But I think having.

[00:19:26] Desirable properties and then working backwards, scheduling algorithm is, can really help. There are, there's a whole like library of them. I'm just gonna read some out for people to search there's round, rubbing round Robin scheduling, shortest job, first shortest, remaining time priority scheduling first come first serve.

[00:19:46] And then the most complex one, which is multi-level Q scheduling. Those are the in terms of my sort of research. Those are the scheduling algorithms that I researched. I don't know. Does any of those appeal to you? ? 

[00:19:58] Chad Stewart: It's hard for me because I'm trying to imagine like literally the process, and as you were mentioning, like you have a lot of the kind of images I'm trying to imagine.

[00:20:06] A lot of the 

[00:20:06] swyx: processes it's got for audio only medium. Maybe I'll tweet it out and then I'll attach it to the, I was 

[00:20:14] Chad Stewart: about to say the same thing. I was about to say the same thing. It's 

[00:20:16] swyx: just okay. Yeah. No. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I'm just like, I think like whatever this is we should research the, like scheduling the philosophy of scheduling or the algorithms of scheduling are not limited to CPUs are not limited to operating systems.

[00:20:30] Like we could just use them for ourselves. Why don't we use them for ourselves? That seems right.

[00:20:38] that seems weird. So, so yeah, I mean, that's my essential assertion and I've been researching this for a while. I've got one more, but if no one, and obviously if anyone has like comments on scheduling systems that work for them you can jump on in. So, you want to work on all these prioritization.

[00:20:53] There's a really good article from Sarah ner. It's basically on prioritizing how she works on that. She used to be my boss at nullify. And she says lately I've been working on grouping similar tasks. For example, meetings should happen in succession because it's easier for me to jump from one to another than it is having an hour in between.

[00:21:12] I'm more keen to communicate with others on Monday when I'm getting the lay of the land towards the end of the week, my energy is higher. If I'm dedicated to coding, especially if I've allotted uninterrupted time. So essentially what she's telling you is like she's observed herself, what she prefers to do during the week.

[00:21:26] And then she's allocated her calendar accordingly. And I saw that I worked with her. I worked for her and Thursday was her. And blocked day to, to work on individual projects. And Monday was the was meeting day. And I definitely think some of 'em are batching actually helps with scheduling because of contact switching and also adapting your own task to whenever you feel like you're most, you're most attuned to finishing them.

[00:21:48] So, I thought it was really useful. The article, I think is CSS trick.com/prioritizing still one of the best prioritizing articles I've ever read. I should be tweeting this up, but like, where do I attach it? Do I attach it? 

[00:21:59] Chad Stewart: So when you tweet something it's weird, when you tweet something, you have to go and then you click the share button in the tweet.

[00:22:07] And one of the, one of the options is this. And then you'd be able to put it up in the jumbotron, but it's funny that you mentioned that cuz there is an actual question here that was talking about how do you keep from changing focus too quickly? And I think you did a good job of, of talking about that to be quite honest with you, like act I would even go as far to say that's something that I struggle with even though to be fair.

[00:22:33] I'm actually fairly good at context switching, but I never I really think about my week I'm like the furthest I would go is like my day. Like I'll just organize my day in a sense, and I don't necessarily organize my entire week in terms of my level of energy throughout the week.

[00:22:52] Oh yeah. It's just always this assumption that my, my level of energy is going to be the same unless an event happens, 

[00:22:59] swyx: so the most opinionated advice I've been given. So, now that I'm a manager. Is it's weird to have opinions on day of the week. Like what you should do on the day of the week.

[00:23:09] It's like they be the same as Friday. Obviously not cuz like Friday, you're like close to weekend. But they're like schedule your one-on-ones earlier in the week because if you need to bump them, you can bump them later and it's still the same week and I'm like, wow, to have such strong opinions on this.

[00:23:24] This is is pretty special. So I think that's definitely true. We have Fridays at air by as well. So I think that's, that can be really helpful. And yeah, just scheduling focus time for shipping long projects and then scheduling, scheduling, meeting times together.

[00:23:36] I think definitely is very useful for for batching. No, I definitely agree. 

[00:23:40] Chad Stewart: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I cut you off. 

[00:23:42] swyx: Well, calendar there. There's one person saying calendar hacks, right? I think I would be remiss. I didn't mention the ultimate calendar hack. If you do a lot of external. You should use ly.

[00:23:52] I uses cow, which is a ly competitor. It's basically the same price, same it's got slightly different features. It's got slightly nicer design and it's by Derek Reimer. Who's a indie hacker. So I just choose this indie hacker that I know compared to a $4 billion giant. But yeah, I think the stigma around can Lee has gone away despite what some venture capitalists mentioned.

[00:24:13] And it really saves time scheduling, with the email ping pong of what type available, if you're three times that might work for you, so yeah, that, I guess, as far as hacks go, I think that's a big one. 

[00:24:23] Chad Stewart: Yeah. I definitely agree. I, which is funny.

[00:24:26] I don't even use it as much something I've seriously been contemplating mostly cause I had a lot of people kind reach out, but yeah, I definitely agree with that. So something I also, which I actually struggled with, I would also like kind having just one place to view your entire calendar.

[00:24:42] Yeah. So if you have a personal calendar, right. Because you may have a work email, like that is also a big deal as well, just so that, you, don't schedule something when you just simply couldn't see that you had another event, even if it's just like I have two calendars now, one for work and then one for my personal thing, and for whatever reason, it just says busy, doesn't say the actual event, that definitely has been like big 

[00:25:06] swyx: help as well.

[00:25:06] You can tweak that into settings. So yeah, I have it set up so that my personal reflects onto my work and yeah, I try to manage, sometimes I get double booked, which is very annoying, but I mean, it works. I wish Gmail would make it more native. Cuz sometimes I have lesser use emails for business stuff. And sometimes those have calendar events. it starts to break down after a while. yeah. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Calendar hacks. Well, so there's, there is an app called I think it's k.com. It's a, it's one of those YC sort of superhuman for calendar apps. I haven't personally used it, but if I just wanna mention it, cuz it always is in the mix when someone else is talking about this.

[00:25:46] Oh, it looks like they got a corporate notion. Oh, not too long ago. Last last month. Interesting. That is either positive or negative. They didn't mention the price. Interesting. 

[00:25:57] Chad Stewart: That's like the exact, they do exact same as, I don't know, 

[00:26:00] swyx: to see it's an IDK, but if they were yeah.

[00:26:03] Whatever. Anyway, I think I applaud them for trying. I think there are a lot of people also trying to do AI scheduling for for your calendar. So if you just plug it in, they will try to find the best slots for you and optimize your meetings. I haven't really heard from anyone who's used that positively, but I think there are all these people trying to do time block planning for you.

[00:26:21] I tried AKI flow for a while, which is a really good time block planning app. It was just a bit too resource intensive for me. And I've given them that sort of performance feedback. Ah, okay. I wanted to throw before we get off this calendar hacking, cuz that there's been a couple other questions that came in on the Slido before we get off the calendar hacking I wanted to go through what I got from calendar port.

[00:26:40] So for those who. County Park's fairly famous. So it, I, first of all, I find this his distribution strategy. Very interesting. He very famously does not use social media. But he just writes really good content and then lets other people on social media tell others about him. So I feel like in doing this on this space, I'm of doing his bidding.

[00:26:59] It's weird, but it's just a good idea. So I'm just gonna share it. So, he has a podcast. So counterpoint is the, is a computer science professor, but also an author. He wrote deep work, which a lot of people know him for. And he has a podcast called deep S where he goes a little bit more into the ideas behind his book, by the way, every book should have a podcast.

[00:27:17] Every book should have a community because then you can engage more with the ideas. It makes you reading much more worthwhile. That's why I do this unity thing. But anyway, so, he actually imple, he actually came up with a genius implementation of how to get control of your time.

[00:27:32] It's I think a lot of the scheduling comments and ideas, especially the stuff that we just said, it's oh yeah. I've read it uncles like these. And I, my life hasn't really materially changed cause I don't really have a game plan to implement them in my life. And so he gave it a, he gave it a shot.

[00:27:45] He actually did a Dave Ramsey style list of baby steps. Like a seven step plan to. Get control of your life. And I think this is episode 180 4 for people who want to listen to it. I have it clipped on my own mix tape. If you wanna go to Swyx mix tape, or you can go to his podcast but I'll just give you a preview for those listening of this, because I just thought it was so good.

[00:28:08] And I thought it was so well matched. The scheduling analogy that we are setting up for the operating system of you. And I just, I cannot think of anything better because he'll even sequenced it correctly all, so let me just get into it. And then we'll talk about the meta. So the first step outta seven is time block planning, give every minute a job, right?

[00:28:23] It's no use piling up task in your to-do list. Because you don't ever have a plan for when you're actually gonna do it. So you're just gonna accumulate a giant back level to-do list. You're gonna feel guilty about yourself, and then you're gonna eventually start over and have a new list because your oldest filled up with too much.

[00:28:38] So time block plan is basically saying, use your calendar as your to-do list. I have about this, that I can go back and pin, but I think it just makes a lot of sense. If you don't have a plan for setting aside time to do a thing, then you don't have a plan to do it at all. Great.

[00:28:50] So I, yeah, I, which is like super brutal, right? I just I mean, it's a lot of work, but I'll put things like read, article on, in a five minute, 10 minute block on my calendar. And that would actually work. I'm pinning it now to the channel. If for those who have never heard of time block planning he has a book, I think he's called time block planner.com.

[00:29:08] If you like to, every productivity influencer eventually sells you. A journal of blank pages, right? Whether it's the bullet journal guy, whether it's like the, the time block planning guy, everyone's like, how can we sell you a book of blank, empty pages and make you pay like 23 bucks for it.

[00:29:25] But I think it's, , it's worth it. But this, I mean, it's not really about, obviously it makes more money elsewhere, but I just think it's funny in the evolution of influencers, like eventually you shall grow up to either sell your own burgers. If you're Mr. Beast or you shall sell your own productivity planner.

[00:29:40] So, so that's the first part of seven, which is time block planning. I think that is a really good baseline to get into the habit of planning out your day consciously and. Making sure that you have space to do the things that you sign up to do and to drop or schedule elsewhere, and the things that you don't have time to do.

[00:29:58] Then the second thing is to set up task boards. I think this is biggest Trello a bunch of boards keep track of every task. And in other words, you need to stop drop, right? Like anytime anyone has any expectations on you or you sign up to do anything needs to go somewhere, needs to go in a trusted place, needs to go somewhere, cross platform that you'll see it and you'll address it.

[00:30:15] You won't just leave it hanging. And for him, like one, what the value add for him here was he actually gave suggestions on what passports to have, because I think you can have way too many. And that starts to be really really unmanageable as well. So he has four, he has this week, he has ambiguous, he has major projects and he has waiting to hear back.

[00:30:35] And I like, I really liked that last one waiting to hear back, which means let's say I do a task this week. And I'll do it. And usually it depends on someone else. Right? Usually I'm like, I'm sending email and I'm like, all, this is long-term project and I'm done with, it goes off my board. And then let's say the other person drops my task.

[00:30:50] I don't have a process to go two months later, I go Hey, wasn't I, well, they're supposed to get an email for this and stuff to gets dropped and doesn't get done. So you move a task once you're done with it to waiting to hear back column if you're relying on someone else. And I think I think that's a really fascinating system that that sets this up.

[00:31:06] But you realize like this is the first time you start to intersect between long-term planning and short-term planning. The time block plan is for your individual day and the long the task board is for your, your weak plus minus you. Two to three weeks. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

[00:31:20] In other words there, there are a lot of things where you cannot use your calendars, your to-do list, cuz like you don't particularly have a time to do them when so you just set up a task board and then and when you do your weekly planning, that's when you move your task board into your calendar, your daily calendar and you set aside that stuff that you sign up to do that makes just a ton of sense.

[00:31:38] I, I, when I looked at this, I was like, oh yeah. I mean, out of all the productivity systems that I've seen, like all them were too complex. I couldn't really keep up with that, but I can do these two steps. The third step is full capture. So for him and this is very much a getting things done GTD which is the.

[00:31:56] Manual of the of the productivity industry. It's by David Allen. David Allen is a podcast where he airs the entire audio of his GTD workshops, where people pay thousands dollars to list to it. And I've been of going through it. It's really super long, but his examples are super good and it's all free.

[00:32:12] So why not? If you want to, if you wanna, if you're interested in getting things done and who the hell is not interested in getting things done it's such an fantastic name. I wish I thought of it. Third step is full capture it. By the end of every day, every obligation has to be out of your head in a trusted system.

[00:32:26] What are your trusted systems? There are three trusted systems that he has. One is your email inbox. Two is your calendar. Three is your task board. It should, nothing should exist in your memory because you, your memory's unreliable and you will forget. And you and so I just think like establishing this as a harder task role, it's just such a good thing, because then you have a clear mind to have your personal life.

[00:32:45] To enjoy yourself to do go do whatever, because you can pick it up again when you get back to work, but otherwise, how do you enable work life separation? If you're thinking about work while you're still in the rest of your life, like you need to unload. And it's of like a weird operating system thing where, you know, when you spin down your container or whatever, you wanna save your state.

[00:33:03] And I think those trusted systems are super. I'll go through the last four really quickly. Four is your weekly plan. So going from daily to weekly at the beginning of each week, build your plan for the week block time for your critical things and make your daily time block plan.

[00:33:15] Five is your strategic plan. So now by by stage four outta seven so let me recap. The four first is time block plan two is set up task boards. Three is full capture. Four is weekly plan. So by stage four, outta seven, you should have your week in order. Like every. You should have a plan for that week.

[00:33:31] You should you should be much in a much more productive phase in your life because you, or at least know, what's going on. You're being proactive about your time. Five is your spend setting your vision for your professional life on a court annual basis, five year basis, 10 year, 20 year, 30 or 40 year.

[00:33:46] And it then eventually feeds into your weekly plan. So this is much more strategic thinking. Six is automate and eliminate. So this, like he leaves the automation step all the way to the end. So basically saying I will source it to an executive assistant if I want to I will reduce the round of context switching by trying to batch stuff like this is off, we talked about with Sarah ner will say no to things that we've signed up for.

[00:34:05] And when I look at the totality of everything I want to do, this just is like priority number seven and add to it. So. Let's just not beat around the Bush. I'm just gonna say no to this. Right. And leaving and stepping away from stuff is the most high leverage thing you can possibly do, because that gives you more time to focus on the things that really matter to you.

[00:34:22] And yeah, I mean that, that is so brutal, but it's still clear. And then finally seven out of the seven step he says, go for it. Like basically once you have control of your time, take more ambitious projects at big swings because that's the way to build a fantastic career. So, what do you think the seven step plan?

[00:34:37] Chad Stewart: No, that's pretty, so, I alright to be, I was trying to absorb as much of that as possible. Like definitely. What was it for me personally, I have the biggest issue with like I do. I have a lot of things that kind of live in my head and I try to put as much of it as I. In places as possible, but to be quite honest, a lot of it still lives in my head, same, and so definitely that's the thing that resonated with me the most. The second thing to be quite honest also is giving once you have everything, when you see like the priority of things that you have, no, being strong enough to be like, look, this is just not going to get done.

[00:35:18] I can't get this done. And to just freeing up your time, because I'm definitely one of those people that will be like, Hey, can you do this? Yes. And I will grit my teeth. Yes. And do it anyway. And I just don't have a lot of time for myself. Like me personally, I'm trying to learn more system design stuff because that's my interest.

[00:35:39] And I find that I do a lot of my system design stuff at nine 30 at night when I'm trying to get to bed at 10, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm like struggling through it and I, I keep up the habit I'm doing it, but, I don't feel like I'm retaining anything, but at the very least I'm keeping up the habit, like it's, that's wasted in my opinion or potentially right.

[00:36:01] Because I don't retain anything. So definitely just I don't have the time to do this, please, 

[00:36:08] swyx: you're gonna have to figure that out. This is the fine art of making time, which is fantastic. Okay. So yeah. So first of all I, and I had, I got a little bit better about this over the past two years.

[00:36:17] So you must have an app in your phone that you can just dump notes to yourself. It's, it must be offline first. It must sink every. And you must trust it kinda completely. Right. So for me, it's my second brain. Which I use obsidian for and sings the GitHub. So I know if I ever lose it, if if anything, any data ever corrupts, I can just go to GitHub.

[00:36:37] And I think you can use notion for that. You can use things, you can use apple notes. Doesn't really matter. There's this meme, actually, this week, you saw that meme, right? The apple notes meme. It's the tools for thought people you start on with the low IQ people using apple notes, and then the mid IQ people start using.

[00:36:54] I don't know, Rome research and obsidian, the things . And then the really high IQ people just back to using apple notes again. I think that kind of makes sense for sure. Jack Dorsey talks about his to-do list and he keeps it in apple notes. And if that guy can run his life on apple notes, why can't you

[00:37:11] So I mean, not that I hold him up to be like the Paragon of, of human being, but you can't deny that he's been successful. Right? Right. He has a don't do and don't list. I feel like I clipped this before, but I'm really gonna have trouble pulling it up because I clipped this a long time ago.

[00:37:29] Maybe I'll just Jack Dorsey, maybe I'll oh, no, I don't have that. Jack Dorsey don't list. Yeah, won't do list. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's just Google Jack Dorsey. Won't do this. He talks about this in 2018. And I just thought he's just fantastic. Oh, here's this here? He says, okay. It's apple notes.

[00:37:45] Oh my God. Okay. He says today, do meditate, workout, tweet, aggression, read, write, consider, follow up. Won't do alcohol, just decided on, he just has a list of like stuff that he just won't do. And, it looks like he's so, he's just always every single day, he just wants to not do alcohol.

[00:38:04] And I think that's a super useful question. And then for and then he falls, he finishes off his day with daily questions. What truth did I discover? What am I grateful for? And who did I help? I, this reminds me of actually Benjamin Franklin. Like at the end of his day, he would talk about what good I, what good did I do in my day today?

[00:38:20] Like how did I benefit humanity? And I think like having that reflection and consciously living towards. Some small set of purposeful goals, like really helps to align yourself. 

[00:38:30] Chad Stewart: Definitely agree. As you were say, as you were saying, all of that, the first thing that kind of run to me was atomic habits.

[00:38:37] And how one of the stories that the author told was James clear. One of the stories that he told was how he had a friend who was trying to lose weight. And one of the questions she would ask herself is what would a healthy person do? And that effectively became the guide the guide for her.

[00:38:57] Not necessarily her life, but her weight loss goals is that she would just always ask that question and it made it more of an intrinsic motivator for her. I, I know in the book he has like levels of, I don't know if it's motivation, but it's like where you want.

[00:39:11] To get the drive, to push yourself to do habits. And you have things that's you, your ex, when you have an external motivators, like you want money, you want fame or you want something to pull you towards it. And then when you like the, what he's getting at is you should be more intrinsically motivated where it's you want to be pushed by an idea.

[00:39:32] And then that idea is the way you think about you both approaching the world in a sense, yeah. So I, that was like the thing that kind of run out to me as you are, as you're going through the list, it's also very interesting that he that Jack Dorsey takes the time to be grateful.

[00:39:48] I feel like that's something that we tend to be very forgetful about, is just like a lot of the times where we're in a very privileged position. Like not to say that everybody is in a great position, but we're a lot of times we're in a very privileged position and is just like being grateful for all the things that we already have, while still trying to achieve more.

[00:40:07] It's just interesting that he has that. 

[00:40:10] swyx: Yeah. Have you, have I read you my favorite quote on motivation and intrinsic pharmacists. Okay. Let me attach it to the tweet so that other people can read along. I read this four years ago and it really. Has guided a lot of my career choices as well.

[00:40:25] By then, so I've just pined it up for those following along. And it's from Dan Pink's drive and he calls it extrinsic promises, destroy intrinsic motivation. As children, we are driven by our inner desires to learn, to discover to help others. But as we grow, we are programmed by society to need extrinsic motivations.

[00:40:43] We take out the trash, we study hard, we work tirelessly, we'll be rewarded with friendly praise, high grades, and good paychecks slowly. We lose more and more of our intrinsic motivation because extrinsic promises destroy intrinsic motivation. And I'm just like, wow. Yeah, like how much do I, not how much do I do anymore?

[00:41:01] Or don't do because no, one's paying me to do it. So I don't do it. And and how different is that from kids who are like, yeah, this looks fun. Let's just go do it. Let's just write out, 

[00:41:10] Chad Stewart: yeah, no, it's, to be honest with you, I would even go as far as to say that The way I do everything is I guess it's chasing that original kind of ideal of this is just something interested in doing, and I'm just like, I'm just trying to put position my life in a place where it's I can get back to maybe not necessarily reacting oh, this is interesting.

[00:41:29] I want to attempt this, but I have all of these other things I have to do, I have all of these other responsibilities or just things that I said that I, well, I guess, responsibilities. So I was just trying to getting back to that, but yeah, it's. Yeah, 

[00:41:43] swyx: definitely. Cool. Cool, cool.

[00:41:45] Did we talk about what keeps you, so we're going back to questions on Slido. Let's finish these out. There's three more questions. What keeps you from changing focus too quickly? Do we talk about that? Yes, that was like things we talked about. That's cool. It's cool. If anyone has has follow up questions, obviously feel free to chat.

[00:41:59] Let's go with some more can you share some examples of how you specifically implement operating schedule OS scheduling concepts into how you design your week advances task and doing, thank you. Yeah, so, I think we talked a little bit about the planning phase for, if you, so I listened to the manager tools podcast, and I listen to county reports podcast, and mostly you wanna do your planning on.

[00:42:20] Monday morning, you only plan a week out. Right. And part of that is going to be determined for you. You have weekly standing meetings, try to have one-on-ones earlier in a week. And then towards the end of the week, try to do what they call a 15, what they call a 15 five writeup, which is essentially sum up the week in 15 minutes so that you yourself or your manager can look back and track like what, your progress and how you think your week ran.

[00:42:46] We have a limited amount of these things, and I think it's incumbent upon us to not let every week go by business as usual going feeling three outta five, instead of a four outta five or 505, like you wake up too many times in the same day, in the same week and are not excited about what you're doing, then we need to start changing that.

[00:43:02] Right. So I think for me, that. Well, one thing that I'm part in particularly working on right now in terms of operating, scheduling, operating schedule concepts it's very much the queue thing, right? So I tweeted out earlier it's pinned up here on, on the tweet stream, but having those task boards are basically, which are basically task queues is exactly how an operating system would work.

[00:43:23] And you need some sort of scheduling algorithm to prioritize them and take them off of task use into your short term task list, which is the linear sequential list of things you're gonna do throughout your day. EV every single one of us has 24 hours. We hopefully work eight, I don't know, eight to 10 hours a day.

[00:43:37] And that's all we have, right? So we have to make the most of what we do there. So, the way that we translate task list to our calendar is essentially the scheduling problem. And I think that, the whole analogy of, what is an operating system, but a general. Way to run a bunch of applications and applications generate tasks.

[00:43:55] And we're running those tasks on limited hardware. That is that hardware is our bodies is our time. So it's an optimization problem. We study this algorithm extensively in operating systems. It's time to apply it to. Our own time. 

[00:44:09] Chad Stewart: so I have a quick question. What happens when you have say for instance, I guess an emergency, yeah. A task comes out of nowhere. It needs to get done. I guess now that I'm thinking about as literally, as I was talking about it, I was reminded of one of Greg's tweets that he mentioned 

[00:44:27] swyx: GGE he's Hungarian 

[00:44:28] Chad Stewart: GGE. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've had no idea how to pronounce his name. I know GGE yeah.

[00:44:33] GGE one of his, 

[00:44:35] swyx: try his last name. If you wanna challenge. Yeah, I'm good. 

[00:44:37] Chad Stewart: Nah, I'm not trying to advise myself, 

[00:44:39] swyx: but yeah. 

[00:44:40] Chad Stewart: One of, one of his tweets that he mentioned as a, as an engineering manager, which is essentially, everybody comes and says, oh, we need to get this task done right now.

[00:44:49] I hold too much into it because I actually still want to ask the question, but like, how do you not, yeah. How do you how have you dealt with the, the reactionary tasks that come? What, how do you, how have you sorted that out? 

[00:45:02] swyx: Okay. When emergencies happen. Right. First of all I don't know.

[00:45:04] I don't feel like I have that many emergencies. So maybe I'm not that experienced. If anyone else has more experience, more advice, please jump in Jay. You're always a good in our sessions. You're always a good source of advice and wisdom. So now feel free to jump in on that one. I think most things are movable.

[00:45:23] And if you just tell people in a very reasonable tone Hey, we had this prior commitments, but this other thing came up and here's why I have to drop you. They'll understand. I think the fortunate thing about being in knowledge work is that usually not firm deadline that you cannot move for valid reasons.

[00:45:37] I think just having clear communication and knowing what commitments you've made, being able to ping back essentially have a webhook on your commitments and say Hey, like I gotta job you. I, I got this other thing going on. I think that's the fine way to do it. Yeah. I guess 

[00:45:51] Chad Stewart: it is like you have to have, you also have to have that level of, I don't know, because I feel like I have the opposite effect where it's just Hey, I have something really important I need to do.

[00:46:00] And then the person's yeah, I'm the most important thing. Why aren't you doing it? But 

[00:46:03] swyx: I'll say one. Yeah, sorry. Having slack is really good, right? You don't wanna run a 100% utilization, just like saying any any cloud service, any I don't know, cluster of any data center. It is actually a bad idea to run.

[00:46:16] Try to run your your app, your applications, or your server cluster at a hundred percent utilization at base load. You want to have some slack, you wanna maybe run it 60% so that when bikes happen, you have the ability to absorb at least a little bit of emergency workload. So I, I do think that's true.

[00:46:32] That's obviously not what you wanna hear as an employer, to have your people slacking around for some time. But I do think if you are a knowledge worker, if you're a creative worker in particular we should work like lions instead of cow. Right. We should sprint. We should hunt. And then we should laser around waiting for the next big hit.

[00:46:50] Whereas for cows, you're just constantly grazing. And so we are not factory workers. We're not, we're not on an assembly line. Humans have, hot streaks and cold streaks and hopefully we just have, better hot streaks than we have cold. But I do think that someone on slack is important.

[00:47:03] Chad Stewart: So I'm I'm not at derail the entire conversation, but when you said slack, I was literally like, oh wow. Slack the application. I'm sorry. I just had to make that joke. 

[00:47:13] swyx: but 

[00:47:13] Jay Massimilano: pretty Kathy Sierra said something. Yeah. Hey, this is Jay 

[00:47:17] swyx: that similar, right. Let me introduce Jay. Jay is one of the I don't know what he's doing in our community, but like he's one, like by far way more experienced than any one of us in software.

[00:47:26] And he's, yeah, he's one of the biggest source of advice. So I'm super happy that you hear man. 

[00:47:30] Jay Massimilano: Well, yeah I learned a ton from this from the coding career meetup and I'm, I love that it's I've learned a ton, so it's, that is it's. I think it's, I've learned more than what I've said for sure.

[00:47:42] So on, on the topic that you're mentioning about that you'll have to be like lions, Kathy Sierra I think it's in somewhere she's published a while ago. She said only in, in the tech industry, you are expected to. So if you're in medicine, you get to practice what you do is called a practice, right?

[00:48:02] So you, and even if you do carpentry or anything, there's always throw away work. You practice, you train for a bit and. You do something new, right. But only in our industry, we expect you pick up a new tool and deploy that to production. Like without any gap or without any element for throwing things away.

[00:48:19] Right. There is, there's just now we are not allowed or at least it's just been culturally, not common for us to for a company to allow us to experiment and throw things away. If you start with a new tool, it needs to be you have to take it to production. And maybe a lot of her problems are because of not allowing for throwing things away, work away.

[00:48:37] Right. But and she says like in medicine, literally what they do is called practice. But not, that's not the case in ours. So there has to be a lot of learning and I think like when you say lions, it's like, You learn, you compress all your learning digested, and then when you're ready to P your, what exactly you're doing and it's, the output is professional.

[00:48:58] And at least in real world, when I, the work that I've seen that we have done when we pick on pick up new technologies and so on is it's usually we implement it wrong. The first version that goes out is, and it hurts customers and not right. And it so yeah, when I when I heard the line thought that's what came to me, what Kathy Sierra said, you need to back more.

[00:49:20] swyx: Yeah. Is that any is so Kathy Sarah left the tech before I joined. Okay. She was harassed off of the tech. I. Is that a book? How do you come across her work? She she had a hype, 

[00:49:32] Jay Massimilano: Head rush. I think her 

[00:49:33] swyx: blog rush head first 

[00:49:35] Jay Massimilano: head rush. Let 

[00:49:37] swyx: me look up. She used to write the head first books. That's how I know her.

[00:49:40] Yeah, that, that 

[00:49:41] Jay Massimilano: is she wrote a blog on headrush dot hype ad.com. It was one of the first blogs I read when I bought my computer. So it's not online anymore. 

[00:49:50] swyx: Typepad no, I found it. I found it. Oh yeah. Head address that Typepad 

[00:49:53] Jay Massimilano: yeah, that's a it's it's still online. That's great. Yeah, it's, A's a well up information 

[00:49:58] Chad Stewart: probably should tweet it and so we can 

[00:50:00] swyx: post it up here as well.

[00:50:01] I'm adding into my thread. So if anyone's following along there is pin tweets at the top of this space and I've just been taking notes. Just cuz what, cuz I love show notes. I love giving. Homework

[00:50:14] you guys know that, right? That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Kathy, the other thing that, that Kathy is famous for is the fire flower, right? The there's the picture of the Mario this picture, the fire flower. And then there's a picture of fire, Mario. Yeah. And most vendors or most entrepreneurs try to sell the fire flower when actually users wanna be the fire Mario.

[00:50:32] Right. 

[00:50:33] Jay Massimilano: And I don't know I really miss her. She was one of those who mixes, who I think her LA her most recent book was, is called badass. Yeah. And I that's her jam. Like she, she really care thinks about how to deliver something. Like how creating an impact on the person who is consumed who is using work like, and her advice is around.

[00:50:54] For creators, how to make impactful work, how to do impactful work. So, and yeah, I think anyone who has, if you have not heard it I'm sure a lot of people here have never heard 

[00:51:06] swyx: yeah. I mean, it looks like she stopped blogging in 2007. So this is a long while ago. Yeah. 

[00:51:10] Jay Massimilano: She was she was docked and someone harassed her.

[00:51:14] Yeah. Yeah. And she had leave the scene and yeah, I wish we couldn't have her 

[00:51:19] swyx: back. Yeah same here. But maybe maybe I'll request this from you, Jay. Because you are very familiar with her work. I love a thread of the best of Kathy Sierra, just write that.

[00:51:29] Is he still here? He's just dropped out. 

[00:51:31] Chad Stewart: Twitter spaces being Twitter spaces. 

[00:51:32] swyx: Oh man. Oh man. I just made a big ass to him and then he dropped out. Ah, I mean the space is recorded, so it you're still hack. I 

[00:51:44] Jay Massimilano: had a time limit on my iPhone for one hour Twitter.

[00:51:46] swyx: Anyway yes. No, so no, I was basically asking you since you're the Kathy Sarah expert. Can you do a best of Kathy Sierra so that other people can benefit? I, yeah, 

[00:51:55] Jay Massimilano: I will definitely write one. For sure. 

[00:51:57] swyx: Just do a Twitter thread. Just go here's like top five things you need to read.

[00:51:59] Yes. Yeah. Cool. See content idea, right? Yeah. and it's really not that hard. Like people are interested in like superlative, like best of worst off first time, last time whenever. Yeah. There 

[00:52:11] Jay Massimilano: are other folks who are also close to her maybe than even know her personally Ryan singer, who used to be at base camp.

[00:52:15] swyx: Wait, is he no longer at base cap? He's no longer at base after 

[00:52:18] Jay Massimilano: the a year ago. 

[00:52:20] swyx: Oh yeah. I thought he was one of those. Okay. Okay. Yeah. 

[00:52:25] Jay Massimilano: Oh yeah. So he's no longer at base camp. 

[00:52:26] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:52:27] Jay Massimilano: He also speaks very highly for like in his work. He Heights are. 

[00:52:33] swyx: Cool. Well, you can do the same. Yeah, sure.

[00:52:35] Yeah. Cool. Cool, cool. So, yeah. 

[00:52:37] Chad Stewart: Yeah, so I actually wanted to ask, I mean, I think this is one of the, one of the last questions was how do you manage emails? Do you have something like K screener or something like that? I guess wanted to point that out there. Oh 

[00:52:50] swyx: man. Can I just say I paid the $99 for hay and it was very disappointing.

[00:52:57] It's supposed to be fast. It's supposed to be like a new invention of email, whatever. And it was so slow. Every key press took like a second to resolve. I don't know what people's experiences were here, but I was in Singapore at the time and it just didn't have Singapore service or something, but it was just unacceptably slow.

[00:53:14] But the screening I thought was interesting. I think it's over, maybe over-optimized for screening things out. I used superhu I've just canceled it. Because I think superhuman, the thing about superhuman is fantastic. Local productivity with shortcuts and offline syncing, right? That is what you want for the fastest possible interaction with your email.

[00:53:34] And you've got nice scheduling. They've got nice, learning curve as well as they'll rewards you for reaching inbox zero. Something that they suck at, which I need is filters. It's to set up filters to say all these patterns of email, they come in, I want to go tag them here, archive them, delete them, do whatever.

[00:53:51] Right. And they haven't implemented that in four years of existence. So I just, I got tired of waiting and paying, $300 a year for this one missing functionality. And I'm going back to Gmail.

[00:54:01] Chad Stewart: How oh, so how do you, I guess, how long have you been using Gmail? I guess how long have you been since you've returned to Gmail? Cause I wanted to pick your brain on some of the 

[00:54:11] swyx: stuff that you do with Gmail now. Oh, I mean, yeah. I mean, well, I never really left, but guess I'm back on Gmail now.

[00:54:17] Yeah. Not too long like a few weeks. I've like I've given superhuman a try twice. One once when my employer paid for it and then two on my own. But I, it just I need filters. I need to be able to easily set up filters and everything else. Like I, the keyboard shortcuts you can get in Gmail as well.

[00:54:33] Like I used, I didn't co justify like paying 300 something for, slightly faster email. 

[00:54:37] Chad Stewart: I hear you. I dunno. I feel left off the loop cause I'm just mostly I don't know. I just, I don't know, like more recently I've been getting a ton of like work emails, cause like I get a lot of notifications from GitHub and like it was ridiculously 

[00:54:53] swyx: no don't get, yeah leave GitHub notifications outside email, just, leave it inside a GitHub and then, check it whenever you're doing code stuff, but otherwise don't, I think those GitHub was the first thing, one of the first notifications streams that turned off I'll say yeah, make extensive of filters.

[00:55:08] Snippets are really useful. Like Bigham, like pre baked replies to everything. Instant shows can help a little bit. And that's when you BCC some, you take someone off to BCC and then you promote up the two list. All those things like having memorizing the keyboard shortcuts, like everyone's working on some version of that.

[00:55:24] I think there's a, the, there's some former Gmail engineers who spun out and are making their own take on what a better Gmail could look like. I think it's called shortcut. I haven't tried, I haven't like I've, I haven't mentally on my list to try them. Yeah. I mean, like base is fine.

[00:55:39] Just use filters wisely use snippets and I think you're use, use the keyboard shortcuts. 

[00:55:45] Chad Stewart: Yeah, I guess I'll give that a shot. Like I just haven't really, I guess I haven't thought about optimizing my, my, my email, cuz it's always been like, oh, this one email is actually useful.

[00:55:56] Everything else 

[00:55:57] swyx: is garbage for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I think that's it for the questions. This is great for a session, man. 

[00:56:04] Chad Stewart: Yeah. Great turnout by the way, I really appreciate everybody for coming out and taking in everything really appreciate that. Thank you so much, especially, well, I guess it wasn't necessarily short, 

[00:56:15] swyx: but yeah, just, we appreciate no notice.

[00:56:17] Yeah. So essentially, for the past, like 4, 5, 6 months, we've been doing private meetings in the community because it's a book cloud. So we're just talking about the book, but now I think we're just trying to open it up. More like other topics. This first one I think, is just the most interesting topic at the top of Chad's mind, Chad is by the way Chad Stewart is in the room.

[00:56:35] If you wanna check him out go check it out. He's been hosting. But yeah, I think we'll just do this weekly and same time every week, I guess, if you wanna move it around, we'll let you know. 

[00:56:43] Chad Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I guess we could just take topics from the book, but I, we could be very reactionary to like things that are going on.

[00:56:51] Yeah. And talk about that. 

[00:56:53] swyx: yeah. We can talk about news. I love talking about news. I think that's something that's that was missing from people are excited about news, like they want, they wanna hear. They don't wanna hear thousand year old advice that is still relevant today?

[00:57:02] No. They want to hear like the things, the thing that just happened yesterday that will be gone tomorrow, everyone's talking about it, what are topics? Yeah. 

[00:57:10] Chad Stewart: Yeah. Like one of the things that's actually found really interesting was the video that you made about fun and Deno oh yeah.

[00:57:17] You wanna talk about that? It took me a while to watch all of it, but I really enjoyed it. No. It's my, I have like I get a bunch of things and then I pile them all, all into my like browser and then have to pick like a day to okay, I need to read all of these or I'm gonna just delete them.

[00:57:33] And, like I, I ended up finishing it yesterday and I was just like, it's just really interesting because I tend to not necessarily get like that kind of news to be quite honest with you where, you have that like super in depth. Talk about, about two technologies. I just don't get that very often but I 

[00:57:49] swyx: found it very interesting actually, which is funny.

[00:57:51] Right. So, Okay. The impetus for me is this right? Like I knew that there's a lot of interest in bun. And I knew I had met, I knew enough of bun, both bun and Deno that no one else had really done a comparison talk. And I knew that if I did this, I would be the first to do it.

[00:58:05] So I just went ahead and did it. And the tricky thing is to present both sides fairly in a way that they would agree. And both sides were happy with it. I know that both Jared and Ryan both watched it and gave me feedback. So yeah, I think it's a skill. I think more people should try it.

[00:58:18] And it's timely. Right? That's the other thing like now is when bun and people are interested in bun three months from now, people will just be like, oh, what's, where's, what's going on there. The excitement will die down and we'll be moving on the next thing. But I think some amount, the timely action is useful.

[00:58:30] But I also think like you can train yourself, as a conference speaker, whatever used to wait until I had a conference event to come out with a talk and then deliver that talk. But I'm just like, why not? Why don't just do one per week on YouTube. That's a YouTube video.

[00:58:44] Chad Stewart: yeah. That's effectively what it's right. Especially like lightning talks, right? Like the five minute talks, those are 

[00:58:49] swyx: effectively YouTube videos. Oh man. Those. Yeah, exactly. The thing is like the production, the minimum production quality on YouTube is so high that people are scared off.

[00:58:57] They're like, oh man, I gotta pay an editor, like 400 bucks to go, put together this video and it's gonna get, I don't know, 20 views. And what the hell is the ROI on that? So people don't do it, but I, I don't know. Like I think some amount of like putting in the reps helps and then getting some hits early on and then putting in some investment to build your own personal media following.

[00:59:17] I think that can work. I think there's some formats where the cost to, outcome ratio is beneficial. We just have to find it. 

[00:59:28] Chad Stewart: Yeah. I think definitely also that like people go into YouTube thinking, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to make it big, whatever, 

[00:59:36] swyx: make it big is to them. Yeah, exactly.

[00:59:38] Chad Stewart: And they're just like, and then, they find that after a couple of videos, it just doesn't, it's not working out. So they find the next thing to dream about, I'm gonna let you know, to be quite honest, I've done the same. Like I, I have a YouTube channel. I did a few video and I was super low effort.

[00:59:54] I was just like, I have something I want to talk about because that's who I am. I just want to talk about stuff. Right. So, but it was like super low effort. Like I just turned on the camera and then I just, I just talked about the topic that I found interesting and I put it on YouTube, but then it just it, I guess it's the same thing of man, I'm not getting the, I'm not getting the a hundred views or a thousand views, and then, you just end up finding something else to do

[01:00:19] So I of want to also point this out. Nick has been posting a few things in the thread about the, about about the space. And one of the things he mentioned was that he spoke with some, with somebody from the Deno team. Oh, Luka. Yeah. Who had a, yeah, he has it on YouTube. So I'd probably, let me post it on the 

[01:00:37] swyx: jumbotron, just in case anybody else's interest.

[01:00:40] Is that what it's called? 

[01:00:41] Chad Stewart: Well, I don't think it has an official name, people came up with the jumbotron and to be quite honest, that's the funniest thing that I think I can think of. So I'm calling it that 

[01:00:52] swyx: yeah, well, yeah, that's awesome. Learning in public. That's what it is. That's the game.

[01:00:56] It's a, it's an infinite game. It's a long one, but it's really changed my career. yeah, it's changed a lot of careers. 

[01:01:04] Chad Stewart: Yeah. What is it called? Simon CEK is one that talks about it all the time, the infinite game, that's what you try to play. You don't try to, you, don't try to play a game that you're trying to win.

[01:01:14] You just try to exist in the game as long as you can. 

[01:01:17] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. And to build relationship with others also playing that game. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really it. Cool. Perfect. We'll see you next week. Thanks for everything. Thanks everyone for joining. And hopefully we'll publish this audio somewhere.

[01:01:31] I'm gonna go clip it. I have a, I have the top ranking host, I think on how to download Twitter spaces. Hey please. Let me verify this because I may have been knocked off because there's now a dedicated SaaS that did it and they start, they came into my my comments and oh no, I'm number two now business insider.

[01:01:47] Beat me. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So most of the advice is how to download Twitter space. Audio. That is yours. That is the recording that you made mine is how to download Twitter spaces that aren't yours. So if you listen to something, you really liked it. You want to clip it. You wanna refer to some somewhere, but you don't own it.

[01:02:03] There's a, there's an undocumented API that someone else has figured out. And I just documented the CLI command around it. So I have all these, like non-technical people saying like, how do I download good? Oh, no coming in. But I just think this is a fantastic EO thing cuz when you know that something is new, Twitter spaces is fairly new and there's a hole in new universe and Eagle fill that whole Google will send people your way.

[01:02:23] So I, I knew that this was gonna happen and yeah, I mean I think it ran pretty. 

[01:02:27] Chad Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. I know there, I know somebody made a Twitter bot that specifically downloaded Twitter spaces and then it would do the formatting. So it would spit out like an MP3 or something where, because if you download the actual raw data, you get the Ts file, which I have a bunch of them on my machine.

[01:02:45] And I only recently found out that I can't just, I can't just listen through all of them for whatever reason so I have all the data there, but either way. 

[01:02:53] swyx: Cool. Yeah. All, well, this is run long, but thank you everyone. And we'll see you next week. 

[01:02:57] Chad Stewart: All have a good one. All guys.