The Global WebSphere Community recently sat down with Jason Lengstorf a speaker at the upcoming Future Insights Live conference running in Las Vegas from June 1 to June 4. Lengstorf will be speaking at Future Insights Live in Las Vegas this June holding a workshop on supercharging your front-end workflow and giving a talk on striking the right balance when it comes to the work-life equilibrium. For more information about Future Insights Live visit futureinsightslive.com. If you'd like to listen to our conversation with Lengstorf check out the podcast here.
Global WebSphere Community: Tell me about the workshop you’re running on optimizing your front-end workflow. What might an enterprise developer get out of it?
Jason Lengstorf: The most beneficial thing that anyone is going to take away from that workshop is removing all of the repetitive tasks that you have to go though in a day-to-day workflow. When you are working on any type of project there are going to be things that just need to be done. If you’re using images you have to compress them so that they load faster. If you have CSS you want to check it for syntax errors JavaScript the same kind of thing. You probably want to compress and minify all of your CSS and JavaScript files to make them as small and performant as possible. You can automate all of that using various tools—task runners and things like that—as well as some other things that make it really easy to just do code and not do all the maintenance that comes with writing code.
In addition to that we’re going to look at some shortcuts with things like using Sass instead of plain style sheets to do things more quickly. We’ll be playing with Jade templates and a few other things like that just trying to do some rapid development stuff—trying to do things really quickly and turn around work in a short period of time without sacrificing quality.
GWC: Our audience has a number of back-end developers. What’s transferable and how might they benefit from this workshop?
JL: If you’re working in any kind of code there are ways to use automation. For a back-end developer depending on what type of language you’re using—if you’re using node for example—it’s extremely easy to get a lot out of task runners. Task runners like Grunt and Gulp are built in Node so they’re kind of custom-tailored for that type of work. For somebody who’s using maybe Ruby the concept would be similar to if you were using the Ruby pipeline. And you can apply these types of tasks to anything because they run in parallel and you set them more or less to watch or you can manually trigger these tasks to monitor your files combine things check for syntax errors—there are dozens of plugins. And if you don’t have the plugin you need you can build it.
When I was doing WordPress sites I used to use it to run a PHP server so I could develop locally without having to set up anything on my machine and manage things like versions and deal with a bunch of little back-end things. All of them are simple but they add up and are easy to forget. It’s a great way to remove a lot of those extremely useful but extremely boring tasks that get in the way and lead most of us to cutting corners and putting out slightly lower quality code. Because we are in a hurry we don’t have time to polish all of those corners. By using automation you are able to automatically do the polish and then the finish to make sure the code always comes out the way that it should.
GWC: You’re giving a presentation regarding hitting the right balance between your work and everything else in your life. Can you tell me about that?
The talk is based on the idea of building a healthier workplace from the employee standpoint and from the employer standpoint. A lot of the existing culture out there in the tech world puts badges of honor on the wrong things. There’s honor attached to working crazy hours. Someone says “Oh I only slept three hours last night” or “I worked a 90-hour week.” You go “Yeah you’re dedicated. You’re so passionate about your job.”
It turns out that all of that stuff—working those crazy hours and not getting any sleep—all of that actually makes us worse at our jobs. From an employer standpoint encouraging a culture that peer pressures people into working long hours is actually degrading their ability to do good work. You can’t be sustainably productive for much longer than 40 hours a week. Science has borne that out over and over again but every generation forgets it. We just think we better keep working harder because we’ve got these deadlines but it turns out that if you sustain even a 60 hour week for two months your output is going to drop below what it would have been if you were working a 40-hour week. You get tired you get burned out you’re not as passionate and you don’t have any urgency because you know you’re going to be at work all day. As you get more worn down and tired you make more mistakes.
Your time away from work is shown scientifically to improve your creativity. If you are only working you lose so much of your drive that passion and that ambition to go out and do things. By having varied experiences you bring fresh ideas to the table and you have a little bit of time away from work to remember that you like your job.
These are all lessons that I learned the hard way. I tried very hard to tell myself that I wasn’t the type of person who ever needed to take time off. I was averaging 70- to 90-hour weeks and I did this for years. Then in 2012 I took a Black Friday project for a Fortune 500 company—there was no wiggle room in the deadline whatsoever—and the design phase ran over what was projected and I got a very compressed schedule. So I ended up spending about four days with almost no sleep and all I did was work. By the time I got done the client was very happy with it—the site ended up winning an award so the quality was good—but the quality of my life was terrible.
A few months after that patches of my beard started to fall out. It forced me to wear a moustache and nothing will sober you up and force you to realize that you’re making mistakes like having to wear a moustache.
I started doing research and decided that what I really needed was more balance. I loved my job but I realized that you can love something—but you can’t love it to death. So I started backing off and I only work 40 hours a week now. I want to work more than 40 hours a week most of the time but I restrain myself.
My productivity went up. If you sit in front of a computer for 12 hours you’ll find 12 hours’ worth of stuff to do. But if you tell yourself that you only get six hours you’ll get the things done that you needed to get done within those six hours. Since I’ve done that my beard has grown back full and I’ve lost about 35 pounds. Everything in my life improved and my productivity didn’t suffer for it.
What I’m doing with this talk and what I’m really trying to communicate to people is that it’s not an either-or. You don’t need to choose your career or your happiness or your career or your health. You can have all of it. You can actually increase all of them with proper application of balance.
GWC: Say you’re a developer and you’re in the trenches. What are the first steps to breaking out of that cycle and seeing beyond the next project?
JL: The first step is to try to put yourself in a position where you can be measured on output and not time. The idea of a results-oriented workplace is one where you get rewarded for being fast and if you’re efficient then you can really see the benefits of getting work done and then leaving.
The goal is to reasonably limit your hours. You don’t want to do a bad job but you don’t want to spend your whole life at a desk or at your computer. You can create goals for yourself for the month for the week for the quarter—whatever it needs to be—and if you meet those goals you’re effectively done for the day.
You want to be as effective as possible and work as few hours as possible. The easiest way to do that at least for me is to group by context. What that means is that things that are high attention high engagement like working on code are very different from checking your email or doing research. You can break those into individual buckets so that on one day you’re only working on your code project and you’ve got your notifications off on your phone you don’t have your email open you’ve let everybody know that “Hey I don’t check my emails on Mondays because I only work on high-impact projects.” then you can go to Tuesday and hit those emails and hit those phone calls and all those things you need to do because Tuesday is not your high-impact day it’s your administrative day.
If you’re working on a high-impact project and you’re attempting to focus on your code or what you’re writing and your phone keeps lighting up with notifications and you break your concentration to check your phone you’re going to be extremely slow and you can’t get into that flow state that makes you really effective. The flow state is when you kind of lose track of time and you’re totally in the zone. You kind of come to a few hours later and you realize that you’ve done a ton of work and you’re really proud of it and it’s high quality. You can’t do that if you’re constantly distracted. So if you can somehow box your time even if it’s just for a few hours a day for me it works very well. That’s what I would encourage people to do - focus on results and group your tasks by context to make you more effective.
GWC: In this culture that sometimes puts a premium on overworking how is your message being received?
JL: I haven’t done much beyond writing an initial article about it. I wrote an article called “The Cult of Work you Never Meant to Join” and it talks in more detail about what’s happening—how we fell into this overwork. You get kind of seduced by your own best qualities—you want to be good at your job you like what you do you are very ambitious. And all of those things if you’re not being very conscious about what’s happening can seduce you into this kind of overwork. I wrote an article about that and it hit the front page of Hacker News it ended up on Medium’s Top 10 stories for over a week it got close to 60000 views in the span of a week. All of the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I actually have yet to get anyone who says the ideas are wrong. It’s more people just feeling that they can’t do that for themselves.
And so my goal with this talk and with other things that I’m working on in this vein is coming up with ways to address all of the situations not just mine. Obviously my situation is very different—I work from home I work for myself. For me to make these adjustments is just convincing myself to do it. If you have to convince your boss that’s different. My goal is to work with people who work in office situations and find cultures where this does work.
There are companies out there like New Relic and Buffer who are doing a great job of letting their employees manage their own time and they haven’t seen productivity hits. I want to talk to people who work at those companies and work out ways you can convince your manager or your boss or yourself that you can do this sort of thing and your life won’t fall apart that your clients won’t leave you won’t lose your job your career won’t suffer.
I know from being on the other side of this that all of that is true. But I also know that before I was on the other side of it I firmly believed that if I didn’t look at my email for an entire day my whole world would crash down.
The goal is obviously to try to get a little more word out there to convince people as firmly as possible that this is something that’s possible for everyone. And not only that it’s possible that it’s better for everyone. Companies make more money employees are healthier—it’s just a good way to live and a good way to be and there’s really no downside to it.
To find out more about Jason Lengstorf visit http://lengstorf.com/. For more information about Future Insights Live visit https://futureinsightslive.com.