Slow Productivity, Write the Docs  ## Metadata - Author: [[Build and Learn]] - Full Title: Slow Productivity, Write the Docs - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8b95f566-626f-48e5-bdef-7389a1adef53 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Calvin Fung's Promotion Advice** - Calvin Fung gave a talk on documenting your work aligned with your job description to prove readiness for promotion. - He emphasized creating a brag document to avoid surprises in career advancement discussions. Transcript: Speaker 1 So free little tip for you. Speaker 2 That's a great tip. Yeah. Were there any talks that really stood out? Speaker 1 So I was still aware of all the talks because I was in the wings. So I was there in case like Mike's died and stuff like that. So I was listening to all the talks. A good friend of the show, Calvin Fung, he was one of the speakers and he did a really good talk that was focused on how to document and track your work and tying it to your job description And levels so that when you have a conversation about getting to the next level or getting a promotion, it's not left to chance. Like how to work with your manager to prove that like the list that you're following and the artifacts you're creating to prove that you're ready for a promotion are the ones that they Agree with. So there's no surprises. If you're a single writer on a team and you don't have a really well defined job description, like basically like you make one for yourself and you track it and you're using like a progress Tracker like in a video game. That talk will definitely share when it comes out. But I think it was very much appreciated by the audience where it seemed like a lot of people were either looking for work or trying to figure out how to break into that next level of I've Been doing everything right. But I'm getting passed up on promotions or new projects, things like that. Sometimes the things that are happening in our head is not necessarily what's happening in reality or we just do the work. I'm very guilty of this. Like I'll just do things because it's my job and I don't necessarily go shout it out there and then nobody knows that it happened. ([Time 0:02:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4454a4f1-98e3-467f-9aa5-ee5267015318)) - **Enhance Docs with Evergreen Content** - Use multiple media types like illustrations and evergreen videos in docs to keep content up-to-date. - Avoid relying on video for code that changes rapidly to reduce maintenance burden. Transcript: Speaker 1 But yeah, working in the physical world is always a little bit more challenging. So totally. Speaker 2 One of the talks that looked really interesting in terms of the title that I would love to go back and check out is the one about interactive code nip in the docs. It looks like it's called code and content using dynamic interactive elements in your technical writing. Yeah. Speaker 1 So that one was from Taylor from Redochley and they talked a little bit about Mark Doc. They talked a little about MDX. They talked a little bit about redochley. It wasn't like a sponsored session, but it was cool to see like, how do you verify and validate that like your code samples work? And I would say that this conference, I think, was more writers than coders. So a little bit more mysticism around Doc's code. A little bit like I think like a get for technical writers would be a big hit with this crowd. Well, so maybe that'll be a talk submission for next year. But sweet. Speaker 2 Yeah. I was curious what the composition was, at least, or your perception of it in terms of dev rel versus docs writers versus engineers that build docs products. Yeah. It was pretty good. Speaker 1 It was a lot of writers. I like that they had this term. I don't even know if it's a real world, but that documentarians. Okay. Writers because you have ops and CI and CD. You have dev rel who sometimes writes the docs, sometimes doesn't. In our case, we wear the technical writer hat. We also are the editor and the deployer and we'll do videos and stuff. But there were some people who work on open API stuff. There were all sorts of across the tool chain. So from that perspective, it was cool ([Time 0:06:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6254f7aa-8f86-4427-a409-ce478cc49cf1)) - **Slow Climb Beats Viral Bursts** - True productivity grows from slow, consistent effort rather than bursts of viral content creation. - Steady output over years builds a more solid audience and impact than chasing virality. Transcript: Speaker 2 I doing with my life right now? Yeah, absolutely. It's a good way to go. So it was. Yeah. So I guess like the first thing you shared was a podcast episode and so I went and listened to that first and I thought that it did have a pretty solid overlap with the content in the book. Speaker 1 I can't remember what the name of the podcast was. Yeah. The podcast was the afford anything podcast, which I think was a good foil to talking to Cal because Paula Pant is like in the fire community. She's a real estate investor and she's very much would self describe herself as a hustler in the best, in the good way of describing that. Like she's got all the time. She's got lots of big things. She's trying to accomplish in her life and you can actually see it in that interview and we'll relink it as well. If you don't have time to listen to the whole book because you can see her struggle a little bit with the idea of not being on Twitter or not being on a social media. And he does make a big case for the fact that's wasting your time. If you really want to do these large tent pole milestones in your life, produce books of great work or whatever, you can get distracted in this small really easily of I need to do 20 different Tweets this week and see which one goes viral. And is that really your audience or is it just spending time? And I saw this with Bootstrap Web to one of the guys over there was talking about how he'll just he's spending every morning now crafting like a bunch of tweets and hoping one of them hits. And I was like, that's half of every day that you're spending on Twitter. And I find myself spending less and less time on Twitter. I don't know that's the best place to put all that energy. Maybe your blog, your newsletter, things like that where you control that makes sense. But ultimately, just like the title of the book, it's going to be a slow climb. Like when you look at Cassidy Williams newsletter subscriptions over time, I guarantee you it's not a hockey stick. ([Time 0:10:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/752f9811-5f0c-4e20-8a27-c9e2a7fa55b6)) - **Quality Over Quantity in Startups** - High output quantity often compromises quality and true impact in startup culture. - Focusing on one meaningful, quality project delivers more value than many minor task completions. Transcript: Speaker 2 At a natural pace. Three is obsess over quality. I think part of it that struck me the hardest too was like, it's something I've been struggling with a little bit. I can't remember how much we've talked about this on the show is that we've done a couple of personality type tests at Kraftwerk just to figure out where people are on the team and how they Fit with each other. And one of the results from the tests shows you basically like what you think a good employee should be versus what you actually are or something or like what you think someone should Be doing versus what you think would be like good for you to do. And that mismatch in my head has been becoming more and more obvious that I think a good employee should be hyper engaged on Slack or Discord or email or like all of these places. And your personal SLA should be super, super low and you want to respond to everybody in unblock and make sure that you're not the reason why anything is slowing down and also be checking Off lots of different tasks and committing tons of code and writing like shipping PRs and shipping content and shipping this and shipping that like that's what I've painted in my head Is the picture of what a good employee is. But the reality is oh in order to do good work you've really got to like slow down pick one major project that is actually going to move the needle for the business. Even if that means like ignoring Slack or ignoring other things in lieu of your big project. And yeah so that kind of struck me as okay shoot I want to have really impactful work but I'm not able to do that if I'm spending most of my time being hyper reactive, hyper responsive and Also on the like treadmill of trying to just check off as many tasks as possible per week. And so it's actually better if instead of shipping 20 features a week you ship half of a feature per week but that feature ends up being like a really big important feature or something Like. I think the ([Time 0:13:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cdd8b402-3a8b-4523-a59f-d377fd99eb2a)) - **Hold Office Hours for Focus** - Try scheduling dedicated office hours for support to consolidate interruptions and boost focus. - Use these sessions as informal lightning talks to share knowledge while helping others. Transcript: Speaker 2 It out for themselves which is what we hope there were a couple different tactics that I thought were really interesting one of them is having a docket clearing meeting so you just have A standing meeting once a week or something where you and your team your the people you're collaborating with you run through discuss anything that needs to be discussed hash things Out that need to be hashed out so that everyone can get back to work another one was simulated pole which is yeah just everything goes into some queue and then when you are free from your Like deep work you can break out and then pull the things you need to be pulled and then the other one yeah I was like holding office hours and what I thought was really interesting is that Cal Newport he like his software engineer by training right like he's his computer scientist by training and a lot of these things are things that tech companies do right like the docket Clearing meeting to me is let's have a stand up a weekly stand up where we're going to run through and do like ticket triage and see like where's the tickets and then the poll based simulated Poll is okay all the tickets go into linear or jira or whatever and you don't assign them to anybody until the there's like free time for them to like actually do it the office hours is something That the support team at Stripe used to do where it was like to avoid getting hit up all the time by account managers or product teams or whatever they would hold office hours so that on A weekly basis folks could show up for that one hour and ask any questions they want and get direct help on the things that they need help for and I think that really streamlined a lot for Speaker 1 Them did people use those ([Time 0:17:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b0c00fd4-15f9-4ee8-80c0-95f7d01818ad)) - **Manage Communication Respectfully** - Manage communication anxiety by respecting response times and schedule messages thoughtfully. - Use public channels, emails, or scheduled messages to minimize disruptions and protect focus. Transcript: Speaker 1 Maybe i should turn off the red dot i don't know like then i won't know unless i go check it and it's not telling me it's time to check it whenever there's a dot there yeah one of the one of the Speaker 2 Things that also like became obvious to was the anxiety around response times and i think part of this is working remote because you can't just go over to someone's office and if you see The doors open you go over and poke your head in and have a conversation in real time and there is this again going back to the what is a good employee right are they always going to be responsive And reactive right yes and so you start to build up this certain anxiety around your own personal SLA oh since i'm remote and most of the team is not remote if someone pings me on slack then And i don't get back to them within five minutes or whatever then are they going to think that i'm just like not out chilling on a beach yeah exactly or not working or whatever and so you Start to build up that anxiety and that also ties directly to those like little tasks right oh yeah you're shipping PR ship and PR ship and PR but really if you have something that's big That you're working on that's massive you could continue pushing branches or whatever that show differences but that doesn't necessarily reflect okay i'm thinking super deeply About this for three days and like in between meetings it's a lot of like brainstorming and design type work and how is that reflected relative to squash and bugs or i'm like responding Immediately to someone's pings on slack with questions or whatever if the other side of this is it did also shine a light on my own behavior and ways that i could change the way that i interact With people just being a little bit more thoughtful about when i dm somebody or pings somebody on slack is this something that can be an e-mail or should this be a linear ticket or should This be posted in a general channel instead of or in a public channel instead of a dm so that maybe someone else who has context can jump into it should this be a scheduled slack message Like maybe it's 7 p.m my time and i'm wrapping something up and i don't need to ping the whole team and at 7 and said i could schedule it for 9 a.m the next day to just be respectful of their Time yeah and yeah it's about respect but it's also about like productivity right like you don't want to interrupt their flow so i don't know yeah i wish discord had the ability to schedule Speaker 1 Messages ([Time 0:23:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ae6d1a1-562c-4c10-b88f-4bb4d11526cd)) - **Unload Mental Task Burden** - Carrying uncompleted tasks mentally causes significant stress and anxiety. - Writing down or ticketing tasks frees mental load and reduces emotional burden. Transcript: Speaker 2 All right are you able to pull it up to pull up asana i'm just curious how many tasks i have assigned to myself in linear i have 69 to-dos triage and 204 in the back look oh wait no that's not Speaker 1 Yeah i was gonna say we do a pretty good job of not assigning things to someone until it's theirs like cal Newport recommends so in asana i have five which is very small there is a list i can Go look at that is the dev rel in box and they're way more than five but i also in our public repo there are 50 open prs so those have been open since 2022 some of them so they're still gonna Be open but those are things i think about and i just need to schedule like an hour a week to go at least make a dent in them versus even thinking about them and carrying them around there's That i don't think it comes up in the book at all but there's this idea of carrying things around in a backpack and a lot of stress and anxiety is stuff that you carry around with you that You don't need to like write it down schedule it whatever it is it's like that appointment that you're like oh i need i know i need to do this and you keep writing it down for days and you don't Do it like just do it and you can put that thing down and you don't have to carry it around and so those prs are something that weigh on me but they're they're not gonna go anywhere so i don't Have to carry them around with me when i was trying to get out of my irs debt that i paid like years ago it's funny because the box is actually sitting right next to me i physically carried The irs letters with me which is the most unhealthy thing you could possibly think man yeah so now i have a box of them that i need to go have a bonfire with because they're here to be shredded But i think fire is going to be a faster way of dealing with those and more entertaining and probably more cathartic in a way right yeah so don't carry things around ([Time 0:27:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c36cb700-b543-491b-bd10-cbedb3b07a66)) - **Build Custom MVP Tools** - Build custom tools when commercial solutions are too costly or inflexible. - Prioritize simple MVP features first, like room booking and availability, before adding complexity. Transcript: Speaker 1 I'm curious about the calendar stuff because we've been also fighting calendars so yeah so I have not had any time to play with the calwind idea that I had but I went I don't know if I mentioned It last episode but I was like you know what I'm just gonna pay for Robin we're gonna do it and I went to go pay for it and it was more money than I thought it was so it was 1500 is now five thousand Dollars and that number apparently is enough to make me code enough on an airplane while I was on the way to write the docs we now have a react app that is aware of all the events that is happening Today you cannot book it yet but that's going to be the next step is you can tap a button that will book that room for that time if it's available for 30 minutes so there's not any user logins There's no who booked it it's just it's booked or not booked if Kristen or I add events to the calendar if someone messages us and says hey can we get the room for a certain time then we'll Add it to the calendar and it will show up there's some things that like these are all little rough edges that I'm building it in react but I want to wrap it in react native because there's Some fun features that you don't think about when you run an iPad 24 seven for years which is screen burn so Robin has a feature where at nighttime it dims the screen and then undims it in The morning so I'll probably do the same thing with react native and just do that the cool thing is I don't need anything in react native it'll just be the app will be running the react app And then in the background it's just gonna check the time and then if it's a certain time range the fun thing is I don't need to build any admin tools I don't need to make a setting like it's Just gonna be is it nighttime dim it is a daytime don't dim it you don't get to change it unless you change the code so yeah turns out five thousand dollars is the price of which we're just Speaker 2 Gonna build it ourselves so now it's okay five thousand is an actual number that you can work backwards from and be like okay how much is my time actually worse yeah and how long will it Speaker 1 Take and how much am I gonna invest in it and yes that is actually smaller than that number so yeah the MVP for this week has been a piece paper put over all the iPads that just say first come First serve and everyone's getting around using the rooms and we'll see I mean I just keep working on it I do want to add like user logins so that you can we'll pre-book I think that's one People just aren't always in the space when they want to check to see if a room is available but that scope creep and that will go over five thousand dollars it's fine like I'll use yeah Jumpstart rails for that most likely and and do that cool awesome ([Time 0:32:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5fa31e5-60ef-479f-b19e-1480d6fad2ae)) - **Learning Unity Game Development** - Colin is learning Unity for game development, starting with spinning cubes and multiplayer basics. - He finds the environment heavy but appreciates Unity's version management and scripting flexibility. Transcript: Speaker 1 Start to do some multiplayer so that every new person who joins will be a new cube and then we'll see about moving around as the next step but it's like a really weird line of is this a unity Problem or a discord problem moving around as a cube is a unity tutorial not a discord tutorial but getting that communication going back and forth will be a little bit of both okay cool I have no background for unity what's it like relative to like web development it's cool some of the things like it felt pretty heavy like you have to download this like unity hub which Then installs the software felt like adobe but I've downloaded other projects and it's almost root like environment managers it was like hey this was made in a different version of Unity which I like to install the other version of unity and is aware and launches it and stuff which is cool a lot of c-sharp which I do not know so I am I was like this looks like job store And see stopnet stuff yeah picking that up figuring that out there's probably some unity things like a lot of people say doing things the rails way or whatever I don't know if there is Speaker 2 A unity way or what it is but I'm still figuring those things out I feel like when I started learning a little bit of mobile development and just the patterns of okay this is a screen that's Being like pushed onto a stack and then it's being popped off like the navigation contexts and the navigation controllers in mobile was just such a different paradigm from web that It was interesting to try to build my mental model around that and there's just so much in the gaming space that I can't imagine how you'd go about like writing code that uses different Speaker 1 Shaders and different whatever like stuff to display things in 3d what does that even look like yeah these tools definitely have looked at that like with unity to make this shape spin Like you you drop the shape into the scene and you have cameras too right so you not only move yourself but also do you move the camera or is this does moving the keyboard mean the camera Moves or do you move or both and you can write a script so like to spin the cube I wrote a script and then I dragged the script onto the cube and it just started spinning so there's some of that Like magic of the IDE that's going on where you're getting the tools matter here and some of it's okay once I figure this out I also want to figure out play canvas and some of these other Engines and I'm sure they're all going to be a little bit different and so I'm a little bit the same but there's also for what we're doing you need to think about can this run inside the web Like we can build a game in unity and it will not run on the web if you do like crazy shaders and lighting stuff like that so right interesting huh sounds like fun sounds like a lot of good Speaker 2 Stuff to learn so ([Time 0:37:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/30823ac8-1d69-490c-81c0-0ecca3395e22))