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00:00:01
It's been a bit of a grind lately
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Been having a hard time getting anything done the last few weeks, and as I pull out of it, I talk about some of the issues around productivity culture in general, and how sometimes it seems like we are less productive than we might have realized.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Hiatus
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my front-end friend, and welcome to my podcast, Journal Musings. My name is Kevin, and in this podcast, I talk about whatever is front of mind for me in any given week, usually in some way that's related to front-end development, though we're doing a little bit of a tangent this week, and partially because i want to talk about why I didn't put out an episode last week, which you may have noticed, or you might not have, which is fine if that's the case. I'm here to tell you I did miss last week.
00:00:22
Speaker
And it's not that I had not recorded it last week. It's just that I'd never posted it. And actually I'd recorded it three separate times. This is my fourth recording for sort of what I'm talking about this week, which is anyway, you'll see how it all comes together, I guess. but ah those other recordings there was nothing actually wrong with them like sometimes i make a youtube video and i only realize at the end that my audio is muted or something stupid like that i've done that way more times than i'd like to admit and i have a few things now in place that i hopefully will prevent that from happening again um yeah
00:00:58
Speaker
I won't talk about all the problems I run into, but you'd think after doing this for eight or nine years now, they would not be something that happens, but it still does from time to time. ah No, this time I had actually recorded all three of them.
Struggles with Authenticity and Positivity
00:01:12
Speaker
They were just all at various levels of not very good to the point where I didn't want to post them. And for a podcast where I tend to just ramble a lot, that's a pretty low bar for me not to actually post something.
00:01:26
Speaker
But part of the reason i felt that they weren't very good was because they weren't genuine or honest. I guess genuine would better word than honest. And to make sense of that a little bit, I think, and and why that meant I didn't want to post them.
00:01:42
Speaker
One of the things that makes me really happy when I meet people in person, when I'm doing conferences or other things, or I just randomly meet people on the street sometimes, which is always pretty cool. um But it's when they tell me that I'm basically exactly how they expected me to be based on the impression they have me from my videos.
00:01:59
Speaker
And that makes me really happy because one of the most important things in all of the public facing work that I do is to try and be as genuine as possible. I don't want to be putting on a persona or something like that when I'm on screen.
00:02:11
Speaker
My kids do tell me I'm a bit happier or excited, especially during the introductions of my video. so My oldest son is often like, why do you get so excited at the start? That's That's not what you're like. And like, well, I do, you know, a lot of the things I talk about do excite me, but that I guess is the one thing where there might be a little bit of a difference. But I think in general, what you see is what you get.
00:02:33
Speaker
And so that's why i put last week's episodes in the bin, because what I was talking about in those wasn't actually what was going on.
Unproductive Phases and Advice Reflection
00:02:42
Speaker
And the main reason for that is i was in a bit of a funk for like two weeks now.
00:02:48
Speaker
And i was trying to use the podcast as a way to project being out of that funk. And so the things I was talking about in it weren't what was actually going on. It was what I was wishing was actually going on. And in the last one I did, I was talking about the steps I had to take in to get out and be productive again and that wasn't actually what was happening.
00:03:14
Speaker
But those ones had varying degrees of me saying, this is the tricks and tips and other things that I used to get out of it, especially the third one. Because I think at that point, I was kind of exasperated with the whole situation. And I was really hoping by saying all of that, it would manifest itself into reality, which is really not what happened.
00:03:33
Speaker
And the things that I was talking about were things that I do often use. that do help and they just they didn't work there and part of that was by recording them i'm getting the ball rolling and that means things you know you find the small things you can do to just help things start progressing in the right direction such as recording an episode and that often for me is a really good way to like actually get other things done after that because i've gotten one thing done that just sort of snowballs from there this time that definitely did not work If anything, the more time went on, the less work I was getting done over the last two weeks.
00:04:08
Speaker
And yeah, now I am out of it and I'm not here to tell you what, how I did it. Because first of all, i don't actually know what I did. ah I just eventually had to do something and then stuff started happening.
00:04:21
Speaker
But I also have realized that like a lot of the things I was talking about were not useful to anybody. And it was me lying to myself in a way about like, this is what I did to pull myself up and get myself out of the situation, which is not a true. It didn't work. It didn't get me out of that situation. I was still stuck in the rut for quite a while.
00:04:41
Speaker
And that was one of the reasons I didn't post the last one, because the last one was mostly these are the different things I've done. And I did talk about things that have genuinely helped me in the past, but they hadn't helped me this time. So I didn't want to talk about them.
00:04:53
Speaker
I didn't want to post something after sitting there for a while and being like, oh, this didn't
Critique of Productivity Culture
00:04:58
Speaker
actually work. So ah that's one of the reasons I didn't do it. And then I'm like, this is also an area that I'm not an expert on, right? Like I can sit down and talk about CSS and front end development and other things.
00:05:09
Speaker
ah I shouldn't be sitting down and talking about mental health in any way, shape or form. I don't think it's like, I think we can talk about like, normalizing certain things that like, you know, in terms of like, I was feeling unproductive, which I think made me feel more unproductive than I actually was being. Cause if I looked at what I was doing, I wasn't hitting like this, like standard that I had for myself, which demotivated me a little bit, which then made me do less.
00:05:36
Speaker
And it was a little bit of a cyclical thing there. So I think like talking about how those types of things can impact an individual, I think is fine. And just normalizing like, Oh, sometimes people don't feel great.
00:05:47
Speaker
is fine too and sometimes not being productive is fine and i think especially in like this the culture we live in now with like social media and productivity culture and other things sometimes we feel or the we put a pressure on ourselves because of like this perceived productivity that other people have and I know some people often ask me like how are you so productive Kevin and I'm like oh I'm not that productive And it can seem that way because everything I do is public facing or at least almost everything I do is public facing. So it puts out this like false.
00:06:20
Speaker
It's not false. You see the work I'm doing. But like if you made every single thing that you worked on public facing, it would there people would think you're insanely productive as well. Right. So ah and it's not to say that the work I do doesn't take ah decent amount of work to actually get done, but it's definitely not this like super high level of productivity that I need to maintain on a regular basis. I think I'm doing a pretty regular amount of work within a pretty regular amount of time during the week.
Mental Health and Communication
00:06:47
Speaker
I don't do 80 hour weeks anymore.
00:06:49
Speaker
i don't, you know, I don't. yeah, I haven't done like a crazy amount of work in a while. And even when I try and work at night now, I can't like, I'm just tired. I'm 40 now and more over 40 now.
00:06:59
Speaker
Uh, and those old days of evening sessions, i can write some things like articles or stuff like that. I am our lessons. I can do writing at night, but like anything that's like,
00:07:11
Speaker
planning, I don't know, like, that it's weird, For writing, I'm okay with. but I just thought of that, because I do some writing at night, not very often, but if I'm doing courses or other things where I need to, like, get a little bit of extra work done, I have done that in the past, but Like I can't, I can write something to explain things. I'm not about to like code a demo up at night or record something at night like I used to do when this was my my side hustle and all that. But I'm sort of rambling as is normal with this podcast right now. I should change this from general musings to like random ramblings or something. But
00:07:46
Speaker
um Yeah, it's just all to say like the the outward things that we see sometimes give us false impressions. And there's the whole productivity culture thing now that I think can be quite bad for mental health.
00:07:59
Speaker
And all that to say that, yeah, talking about like these are the things that I've used to pick myself up. I don't think are the most useful just because. What potentially can happen is somebody who is not feeling fantastic at the time might listen to that, try them and it doesn't work. And then it just continues that cycle of negativity that they might be feeling. And yeah, mental health is a tricky subject. And I don't want to give suggestions on how people can improve on that front because I'm through the two weeks I just went through definitely I'm not an expert on being you know knowing anything about this other than don't be too hard on yourself if you can but that's like the worst advice you could possibly give right to somebody who's not feeling great um so yeah just if you I guess the main advice I can give is if you have been in a prolonged period of
00:08:47
Speaker
not feeling fantastic that talking to other people can definitely help. ah Maybe that was the one thing that did help me a lot was talking to my wife about how I was. And that took me a while to get around to even doing it, even though we're super close and share everything.
00:08:59
Speaker
um And whether it's not somebody who's really close to you or professional anything like that. um Because yeah, that's, I don't want to, be giving advice on really important topics that I'm definitely not an expert on other than giving that, you know talk to people, whether it's a professional or just people that are close to you or whatever it is, which can be really, really, really hard to do.
Reality vs. Perception of Productivity
00:09:21
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's probably the only thing that is safe advice that I can give that ah or ah that I feel comfortable giving on a public platform like this.
00:09:30
Speaker
But i yeah, and I think the other thing is what I just mentioned about like the, the false, Not the fault, but it's like anything we see on social media when we see how other productive other people are, whether it's just like this impression we get of people or the people that are actually like productivity people that are just showing all these things they do to help maintain their insane productivity. like It's all edited and done. And like, it's the same when I do a video and people are like, oh, that's what a professional coder looks like. And it's like, no, that's what a somebody who sat down and put together a demo ahead of time and research things and knows this, even though they know the subject really well, they still spend time putting all of this work beforehand. So I could record something that comes across as relatively competent.
00:10:14
Speaker
Right. So like, and I've talked about this before, so I'm not going to deep dive it, but like, there's been a lot of people that have watched one of my live streams and then been like, oh, you look things up while you're doing work. I didn't realize that. and And I think people if they have primarily learned through watching video, have false impressions of what it actually means to code.
00:10:34
Speaker
And, ah that happens with everything. So like, it's the same thing if you're watching these productivity, I mean, I've seen some productivity people on YouTube and I've watched stuff just because like, for me, like getting good workflows in helps for me, but like I've had, I've seen some people that are there that have like seven, like they'll have like this productivity workflow. And then a week later is a different productivity workflow. And then a week later is another productivity workflow.
00:10:58
Speaker
or like a new notion thing and then like there's always like this new new new and it's like well if any of these systems were what they were using on a regular basis that would be their one system that they use because if it really is working for them they're not about to continually change their thing they're just finding different productivity systems that are out there and talking about them and showing people how they work and i'd be very curious about you know to me the one that matters is the one that these people actually use but i wouldn't be surprised if they don't use anything fancy And so they they often have to talk about And this isn't all of them. There are people that are a lot more consistent and just talk more about things that work for them.
00:11:36
Speaker
But I think just with how all of this works, and of course, this is the same for anything, right? I'm talking about productivity and coding because those are sort of topics I'm interested in. um to to varying degrees with the productivity one.
00:11:49
Speaker
I just like finding simple things that work for me. That's, I guess, productivity tip for for me is find simple systems that work
Personal Productivity Tips and Future Plans
00:11:56
Speaker
for you. the simpler it is, the better. Because as soon as it gets more complicated, you end up just spending time
00:12:04
Speaker
configuring the system and not and and optimizing the system and not actually optimizing the work that the system is meant for you to be optimizing like simpler the better um and tweak it over time and it can get more complex as time goes on because it sort of builds on itself. That's sort of like where I'm at now and I'm pretty happy with the things I have in place, but they're also very niche for the type of work I do and the way I like to work. And I think that's the important thing is a simple system can take that approach. And then it can also, when you get into your funks or your times where you're not being very productive,
00:12:41
Speaker
because it's simple, it's easy to get back to the core of it when you need to get that reboot going. um Because, yeah, having to get a whole bunch of videos done, like I had recently, i don't know if I mentioned earlier, I recorded like four videos ah in one afternoon. And that was just because I sort of got back into the swing of things, going to a very simple approach, which helped me just, okay, let's get it. Let's finally get this done now that I'm in more of a work mode.
00:13:06
Speaker
And my brain sort of escaped the the ne negativity cycle that I had been on. It wasn't negativity. It was just procrastination slash not wanting to do anything.
00:13:18
Speaker
And yeah, I do think that the deadline was the big push there. um But yeah, I'm definitely on more of a ramble than I was planning on going on for this one. So I just want to give a little bit of a heads up that while we had a break last week, we're going to be having a longer break going forward because I'm to be putting this podcast into a little summer vacation.
00:13:37
Speaker
When I say little, it's a long summer vacation. ah It'll probably be four to six weeks long. I don't know exactly yet because my summer plans are a little bit up in the air at the moment, especially after the next two weeks.
00:13:49
Speaker
So, ah yeah, I don't know timing on everything. It might come back sooner than expected. There might be a random episode in the middle of that or two or three or none. I don't know if I have time to record something and I have something that's worth talking about. I'll try and do that.
00:14:05
Speaker
ah But otherwise, four to six week little vacation, long vacation, whatever we want to call that. and then we'll be back uh i know sometimes breaks are the death knell for podcasts but i've done longer breaks than that and here we are this podcast is still going and i actually have some interviews planned for once i'm back that i'm very much looking forward to so that will help sort of ensure that things actually get back off the ground there'll probably be a few solo episodes first and then we'll get back into having some podcasty stuff uh and then we'll get into the interviews or not into don't
00:14:36
Speaker
their interviews, i think conversations is better. I want them to be conversations more than interviews. ah Though if you do have anyone that you'd like to see me interview or have a conversation with, ah if you're on YouTube, leave a comment down below. If you're listening to this in a podcast form, then just message me on Blue Sky or whatever to let me know who your suggestions are, because I'm always looking for more people to talk with and I'm very much open for suggestions.
00:15:02
Speaker
And yeah, that's it for this week and the next however many weeks until we are back. Thank you very much for listening. And until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.