UGC: How are people managing themselves? (2017-10-23)

Details

• Title: How are people managing themselves? Share tips and tricks, tools etc., how to improve work/life balance
• Date: 2017-10-23
• Location: GitLab Summit, Crete, Greece
• Moderated by: @jmay1
• Recording: https://youtu.be/7r9mo-QwBbM?t=3h55m6s

Notes and actions

• Have a private workspace

  • Leave it when you’re not working
  • When you close the door, focus on your personal life
  • Add a “do not disturb” sign on the door

• Have quiet, stable lunchtimes and leave your workstation

• Block off time

  • Schedule items on your agenda when you’re off and want to make time for friends and family
  • Create meetings for yourself, block slots to Get Things Done™
  • Have a frictionless process for doing that
  • Tool: Fantastical for macOS

• Track the time you spend to understand if you’re spending it wisely

  • Tool: Rescue Time for macOS — puts sites and apps in categories and it gives you a summary how much time you’ve spent doing some things
  • Tool Time Sink for macOS - Similar to Rescue Time, but offline.
  • Tool: Cultivate for Gmail and Slack — tracks the time you spend on communicating with certain people on your team to understand if you’re neglecting someone or spending too much time with another

• Distractions (Slack, email, social media)

  • Monitor them
  • Mute notifications for e.g. 30 minutes
  • Don’t do social media, maybe just 5 minutes during lunch or so

• Achieving goals

  • Set targets for things you want to do
  • Make a task list for the next day
  • Prioritize your life, and work is one of those
  • “Get real with yourself”, look what you’ve habits have become, and do they map your priorities?
  • Book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

• Handling work (There is a never-ending stream of todos/emails/tasks waiting for me. So how do you decide to end the day?)

  • Look at your throughput, if you only get 15 things of the 50 done, prioritize
  • Do the most important things first or the things you don’t want to do first
  • Todos don't work for large quantities, difficult to prioritize
  • When receiving email notifications for todos, automatically label them: e.g. direct mentions — makes it easier to prioritize
  • First do “direct mentions”, then respond if they are quickly to respond, look at emails with a lot of activity on them (a lot of responses)
  • We’re using GitLab for everything. And probably we’re missing features that would make us more productive so we're relying on other tools/tricks
  • Be mindful when mentioning someone
  • Feature request: automatic prioritize things (Todos)
  • Feature request: board view for Todos
  • Feature request: Personal issue boards, with automatic actions moving issues around
  • Feature request: mark todos as follow-up, delegated, etc.
  • Feature request: Make Todos easier to consume
  • Feature request: message a person in Slack about an issue with a quick action /slack @username
  • Tool: Boomerang for Gmail — scheduled sending and email reminders

• Stop working

  • To discipline yourself to stop working at a certain time, schedule things that take you away from your workspace. Sign up for something: gym class, etc.

• Vacations/off time

  • Make sure who’s gonna handle your work when you’re out
  • 2 types: some people don't disconnect from work completely, others need total disconnection to rest
  • Issue: GitLab in DnD

• Idea: GitLab house swapping