Last week I discovered the PrimeTimeagen’s YouTube channel, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite blog reaction series. I heard the phrase “time-box your compulsions” from his reaction video to The Demise of the 10x Dev. Hearing that phrase unlocked a concept I had been trying to both articulate and understand better myself. 

I’ve had a problem for a few weeks now. Sometimes it seems like software team's backlogs and even my own personal todos can become lists where really cool ideas begin to collect dust. Where everything's captured, but nothing get's executed on. 

I had a lightbulb moment a few weekends ago. I’ve been working from home for 3 years now, but my home office is an uninspiring space. No character, no personality, it was a computer and a filing cabinet. I set out to make it personal, creative, and make it more… me. This involved pulling out my vinyl record collection, old artwork, and some old circuit boards that were now dusty decorations. I had every intention of going the whole nine yards to make this space inspire me. But it got off the rails fast… What seemed like a relatively easy Saturday afternoon project became a 48 hour home improvement time-suck.

1. To get the shelf to put my records on, I had to consolidate what used to be on that shelf into other closets and shelves.
2. To complete step 1, I had to downsize and get rid of some stuff on those other shelves.
3. To complete step 2, I had to know what I could meaningfully save VS get rid of. Which meant I had to organize and go through what could be donated or sold.
4. I wish I could say that was the last hurdle, but what ended up happening was a complete reconfiguration of 3 different bedrooms including a plan to move my kids nursery to future proof our space for when he eventually needed a “big kids room”.  I started resembling a frantic, unhinged loose cannon detective as I explained to my spouse that we had to re-configure our entire house for what was ultimately my zoom backdrop.

WOW. Talk about counterproductive. What a waste of time on my part. What could have been a relaxing weekend spent at the park, mountain biking, bonding with family, became a hungry compulsion that ate up everything in its path.

The experience was mostly bad. My home office space and house now look great! But at what expense? 

In spite of the weekend nightmare above, I realized that there were two moments over the last month where distractions set me free.

The first moment went like this. Someone on a different team at work dropped into slack and asked for something. In the heat of the moment I decided “if this takes less than 30 minutes I’m just gonna stop what I’m focusing on and do this right now”. The working ticket associated with the job to be done had been in our backlog for months. I wanted to move it or delete it. It scratched at my brain. What I didn’t realize was that in this moment I was self imposing a time-box on my ADHD compulsions. Sure enough, the task took only a few moments to do, and it was something that could retreat from the nebula of my brain forever (and hopefully helped with relationship building on that other team since we were so responsive).

I asked myself, “why did this take months to do??”. The answer is easy. We had no guarantee it would only take a few minutes. In programming, mimicking life, tasks that often are estimated to take a few moments can end up taking days as complexity builds up. We hadn’t gone through the self-imposed ceremonies to scope and prioritize it. And there was always something more pressing to scope and get started on. But now I thought, “what if we had just ditched the ceremony, told ourselves we’d give ourselves 30 minutes to an hour just to try it out?”. We could have made more decisions faster after exploring and learning more (I.E - Responding to Change).

The second moment was more of the same but with even more dopamine. I was pair programming with a coworker on a problem we had been stuck on for a week. Suddenly, we realized that a solution to the problem could most likely be solved by working on a totally different piece of work that we hadn't started on or talked much about. Again, this ticket had been sitting in our inbox for months. Riding the high of the previous experience, I asked for several hours to let my compulsions run wild and dive down the rabbit-hole. But this time the stakes were even higher. I was pulling someone else into the compulsion alongside me. At the detriment of our goals, planning, maniacally laughing in the face of it all... Once again, we got where we wanted to go.

What I learned is that I can look at similar compulsions and point to many times where they’ve been great, and many times where they’ve totally failed. Everyone wants to avoid long stretches where you’re going nowhere fast, and motivation begins to slip… all for something that may feel ancillary or tertiary to the goal.

And the lesson learned here isn’t a programming or technical lesson. It’s a life lesson. Humans are built for distraction. And those distractions can prove to either be useful or deeply counterproductive. So how do we suss out when the rabbit-hole deserves to be explored? Time-box, Time-box, Time-box. If you can accomplish the extra cool idea in a short amount of time then it’s okay to quickly get off the highway and go enjoy the carnival rides. But if the distraction grows out of control, understand that it’s becoming a danger to accomplishing something worthwhile and probably needs to be its own separate unit of attention. 

As a new initiate to fatherhood, developing a practice around time-boxing everything has become even more important for me. Time is now a currency in ways it wasn’t before parenthood. There are more things than ever before that just aren’t as important to me as wrestling with my 1 year old. My son is the worlds best motivator for closing my laptop.  As afternoons get closer to becoming evening, I can’t afford the time wasted chasing each wild thought, even though I know some of those thoughts could be something cool. My mantra is finding small moments in the day to curtail the ever growing list of todos, by time-boxing something so that it’s never added to the list to begin with, without eating up meaningful amounts of the day. Even though it’s dorky, a physical kitchen timer now sits at my desk, reminding me of what’s important, but still giving my brain the flexibility it needs to wander within sensible limits. I’ve got 20 minutes to figure it out, or it can wait for another day.

If you’re looking for an even more structured version of what I’m describing above, I recommend giving yourself a week of trying the Pomadoro Technique. Structuring focus in short bursts is working wonders for me, but it only works if the timer is the arbiter of when to put things down.