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Hello and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Eldebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn a mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Pibytes podcast. My name is Hugh Tipping and I am a PDM coach. I was actually on the Pibytes podcast before episode 91. Today I'll actually be interviewing one of the Pibytes founders, Bob Bilderbost, about his productivity. How are you doing, Bob? Hey, thanks, Hugh. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be on the other side. Yeah, it is interesting to be on this side of things. Thanks for letting me do this. It's going to be fun. So, and I think this podcast comes out of some of the conversations you and I have had. You produce really an impressive amount of content, a lot of written content, video content. You conduct weekly live coding sessions, a new topic each week, or part two of a previous topic that you've done. I've been impressed by how much you churn out and I'm curious as to how you get all this done. So I have a couple of questions for you. First one is to walk me through a typical day for you with pibytes. How do you manage your time to ensure that you can produce content, you can coach people, you can run a business, how do you manage your time day to day? Well, first of all, thanks for bringing this up. I remember we were chatting about this and then having the conversation. So thanks for, yeah, getting on and dig a bit deeper into this because there's definitely some productivity hacks and things I've learned. So the typical day, actually, I'm not that structured at all. So people say don't do email first thing in the morning. I don't do that. But I do like a quick round of slack catch up code review, applause see how the team is doing in the morning before I'm actually getting into the deep work. But then mid morning or still relatively early, I start to produce stuff generally, and that's often writing first. But it also depends the medium because YouTube, for example, I can do at any hour, sometimes till very late. But the thing I do do is I distinguish theres that Graham essay makers, time managers time. So there are parts of the day that Im in focus mode, deep work, Cal Newport and the parts of the day were more in interruptive mode and do more like meeting slack type of work. So I do distinguish those to try to stay focused. I also almost always add in a gym break or some decompression time, and I barely ever work after

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00 p.m. So I have definitely recharged moments in the day. Also take weekends off. So I try to keep a balance to not burn out. Right, right. So you take breaks and you take them at specific times and you sort of segment that time. Yes. I don't have like an alarm, like at

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00 a.m. I need to take a break. It just feels like I'm sitting too long or I get hungry or I need water. So those kind of breaks, but also the more extended one, like in the sense of evening recharge, kids, family weekends, take two days off, come back refreshed on Monday. And that has been very helpful. Okay, so it looks like you set time for specific pieces of work. You set time, you set time for your family, and so you don't let other stuff intrude in those blocks of time when you've decided to do something for that period. Yes, yes. The boundaries are important. Also with small things, like, I don't have slack on my phone. Right. I don't have social apps on my phone, so when I'm on my phone, I cannot get back into the work. So I definitely add boundaries to keep things focused and therefore separated. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. And it seems like you really do stick well to them given the amount of content you do put out there. So that's a segue into my next question is what does your planning process look like for making content? It's a great question. So it does change quite a bit. So I've recently switched to having dedicated days for stuff, but that's very hard because I say Monday is going to be the content and we'll produce all the content. That's not happening. That's Monday. Typically come back from the weekend. You have a lot to catch up on, the coaching and the team and management stuff. But on Monday, two big ones are the five bullet weekly newsletter and ideally the podcast recording. We're recording now on Wednesday, so it's obviously not always Monday, but those are kind of two big wins I want to hit on Monday. Generally, the rest of the week is quite random with the content, right? Yeah. YouTube and writing can happen on any day. It also kind of depends on the inspiration and the other commitments I have in my agenda. But from a planning process, a big tool we use actually is Pivyte's organic content tool. Which is a calendar like interface where we can plan out certain content and have it write it in the tool and have the team review the content as well. So that kind of. Yeah, it's an important planning and content tool we use and that works really well. So it looks like it's also a collaboration tool. So you get, before you, before you put the content out there, you're asking for opinions and people to go over it. Certainly. Yeah, we review all the content and I mean some of the content. Last week I added a feature that you can self approve your content because some, sometimes you just reuse a python tip. You already know it works. It's part of the official book we have. And then I might just post it. But yeah, most of the content, you just want to have a second pair of eyes. You also grow a lot from the feedback you get. So that's a general flow in terms of planning. We don't really plan ahead that much. We have, for example, a GitHub repo for YouTube content production and that then we just lock issues for every video want to do or idea we might have. And then we use the Kanban feature to get up projects to then plan it out for this and the next week. So that brings some structure. But again, it's pretty loose overall, I would say. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it's loose, but you do track it. You do keep a list of things that you're interested in and so do you look at this list and then just pick something and then run with it? Yeah, oftentimes it's pretty random like that. Or it's something that comes up from feedback from a client or somebody in the community. Or you start to see trends, like everybody struggles with imports and packaging. So you might prioritize that because you know that's going to hit with people, right? Because they have those common struggles. So the advantage of not being too strict with your planning is that as feedback comes up, you're always very keen on getting feedback and tailoring our content towards that feedback. That way we can quickly iterate, I would say. Okay, so a lot of the ideas for what to produce comes from the community, comes from people as part of the PDM or PDI program, right? Correct? Yeah, yeah. And that's also the most fun content, right. Stuff that happens on the coaching calls or in the coaching sessions. As you're working so closely one on one with people, you see the real struggles. Right. And ideally we want to be our content very practical towards those common issues. Given the reactions you get from people on, on LinkedIn and Twitter and other places you publish it. Definitely. From my perspective, I found a lot of the tips relevant. So I like the fact that you're producing stuff that people have actually asked for, you know, that they actually want. That keeps it relevant, I think. Yeah, yeah. For example, last week we did a video on the dictionary dispatch pattern and that got quite some traction in terms of traffic likes comments. That was also because it was refactoring, so we picked up on that and now we're starting a whole series of refactoring videos. So we definitely try to be kind of strategic about it as well. Yeah. So now talk to me a little bit about the tools that you use or any kind of software you rely on for managing this list of ideas or tasks and what tools you use to actually create the content. Yeah, so I mentioned GitHub issues. That works pretty well. We also use Google sheets for just brainstorming and keeping track of ideas for podcasts, for example. Of course we have our own slack as well. The organic content tool is massive for again, writing, submitting and reviewing, actually adding an idea wall as well. To first have the team add ideas before we materialize those in content pieces for podcasting. We're not that advanced. We are currently recording on Zoom and we found that good enough. I use camtasia for the video editing, which works pretty well. Yeah, pretty happy with that. Chat GPT for ideas and also fine tuning of content I've already written. Sometimes you can already do that first review through chat GPT. It's just wonderful what it suggests and how it makes it better. And we built our own iron scribe, which you also discussed here in the podcast for transcription. So I can upload a video and it gives me captions. And we can also make video clippings or snippets. We can then post to social media as well. So those are some of the tools. And feel free to dive deeper because I might forget a couple of them actually. Well, yeah, I want to talk to you a little bit about ironscribe. It seems like you found a need for automation and just built something that you needed. Talk to me about that. Yeah, it was a tool we built two years ago and it seemed that there was a need for transcriptions, so we wanted to build another tool like we did with CMS, like we did with organic platform, the coding platform. So yeah, let's do it was a nice challenge. So again, Django Celery and all the stack and AssemblyAI for their API to send in the mp3 file and get the transcriptions back, which are pretty good quality, although now you also have whisper, so I wonder how that would potentially work. But yeah, so we also did a lot of JavaScript and made it a really nice frontend. So it was kind of a learning project slash potential new SaaS business idea. Honestly, it never really came from the ground business wise, but we still use it as a tool for ourselves. And although we know uploading the transcriptions to the videos as a matter of priorities and other things, fact we do, we still use the tool just to get the transcript for ourselves because for example, I upload the video, get the transcript, put it into GPT and say can you make a summary of this? And does a great job, which we could even automate in that tool if you use the OpenAI API. As I mentioned, the video clippings are super cool as well because it can make those 2030 2nd video fragments with transcriptions, which are nice to kind of like a sneak peek of a video or something like that. So it was a tool. Long story short, it was a tool scratch our own itch. We learned a bunch of new technologies as well. And yeah, it's still pretty useful, even though it's just for ourselves. Yeah, I think that's a great inspiration to the listeners on the podcast, that if you need to do something, you need to automate it. There's nothing really out there or there's a lot of expensive stuff. Sit down, learn the python to do it, and then just go, yeah, that's how you will best learn. Learn by doing. Yeah, jet learning. Hey, this is Bob and a quick break from our episode. We're right back because we want to give you the opportunity to learn about our Pibytes practical productivity pack. Yep, this is a pack that is designed to help you be more productive. It's not as simple as that, because there are so many pieces to productivity, there's mindset, and there's a heck of a lot of best practices to put into play here to really help you get there. And that's exactly what this course is designed to do. So what's inside the pack? All right, to start, there are seven modules, and we start off with module one, as you'd expect, which is all about a time audit. We move into goal setting, planning habits, deep work motivation, and end on perfectionism. These are really important pieces to help you break the habits you have, build good habits, and really start getting your productivity boosted. And all this in less than 4 hours of concise video content. Check out more information about the course@pibytesproductivity.com. Dot jit learning yes, talk briefly about this concept of jet learning. So it stands for just in time learning. And yeah, I think we all at pibytes fully adopted and if you build a tool like ironscribe you come up across a lot of hurdles. For example, you need to do something async with celery or there was a real challenge with uploading one gig video files. If you do that just through backend code then your session will time out. It doesn't work. We had to go some JavaScript async route. That was hard. I got stuck a lot and I could sit there and consume tutorials about that for hours. And then after 8 hours of tutorials being stuck at the same place and not having any software, right? So a lot of it was just diving in, trying to solve the problem, getting stuck and then just persist your way through it and that's where you really learn. Right? So that said, just in time learning. Like don't consume complete resources, just consume the information we need at that exact moment, which can be stack overflow point, can be short snippets from the documentation. And these days of course jet GPT as well. So let me shift the conversation a little bit. As I mentioned, you produce content prolifically. You put a lot of stuff out there. You're kind of like a machine to me and I'm impressed with what you put out there. But how, how do you ensure the quality of the stuff that you're putting out? Since you put so much out, how do you know when something is good enough to put out there or publish? That's a great question and it's hard to answer. I think in the old days I was definitely perfectionistic about all this and very hesitant to put anything out there. So I would say it's kind of a mindset shift of accepting that good is good enough, accepting that what you put out there is not necessarily final. You can always make edits iterate even if you got something wrong. And the fact that people command and you can then have a conversation in the comments is a good thing as well, might be a good thing because it's engagement. So a lot of it is dropping perfectionism. I think also if you do it so much you just grow used to it. For example, the code clinics, you will remember the first, when we started years ago, I would shy away from live coding because I was afraid of making mistakes. And then I shifted, then I got feedback like well actually when you make mistakes that's the best part of the session. So can you do more of that? And I was like, oh, so you basically give me the right to mess up on a live demo session? Yeah, yeah, please do. So I found it valuable to watch you sort of, if you're learning something new, you sort of fumble around a little bit, you figure it out or you get an error, you're not sure. I found it valuable watching to see the debugging process, to see you figuring it out. And I think it teaches us all how to debug properly in Python. It also teaches us that you're not going to get it right the first time. And even python experts such as yourself still have a ramp up period with anything thats new. And its okay to not be right immediately and to refactor it to make it better, as youve shown. So ive found that valuable myself. And in fact, I think I was one of the people who gave you the feedback. Yes, keep making mistakes, please. It helps me. Yeah, thanks for that. Im still grateful for that because from that point onward, I made 180 degree shift to make those cleanings more raw and get stuck, you know, following along with the documentation that we probably all can do. Right. But when you get stuck, and that's often what happens, what is the coach going to do? Well, he's going to debug. Right. And you get all these, these valuable skills that are often not, you often don't pick up from the tutorials. So yeah, just to get back to the original question and like dropping that perfectionism comes with time, comes with doing it a lot. Again with YouTube, if people start out, they might take 8 hours to do video because they edit it. Even with the podcast, we were making so many edits every um and ah. And you get to a point like it's not manageable, I cannot scale this. And actually the ums and ahs make it more human. Right. We are more. So you find that balance. And now I make YouTube videos pretty quickly. I don't think I take more than an hour for produced production of a 1015 minutes video and editing and maybe the rest, maybe a bit more with the description and all that. But that's a factor of four that you have become more productive by dropping that perfectionism and just good is good enough. Right, right. And also in terms of quality, I already mentioned it, the organic tool we have is a great help. Right. Having that second pair of eyes, proofreading it, getting feedback. Yeah. You're just more certain of yourself that you then posted. If somebody else has proofread it. Well, I've seen your videos evolve over time, and I think that as you practice it, you get more confident with it. The Ums and the Oz just seem to go away if you don't worry about it too much. They just seem to go away because you get a lot more confident in yourself. You don't think about being perfect. So that's what I noticed watching it. Yeah, that's a good point. I think a lot of the ums and AHS is also at the start when you're not really certain. And, yeah, again, if you do it a lot, then that confidence, your confidence will grow. And with that, the fluency as well. Yeah. So let me talk about, again, more of the human side of this. I started off asking you about your time management, and we talked a lot about setting boundaries and taking breaks. But with all of this content creation that you do, there's a lot of creative effort. It's a lot of your time. It can tire you out. Most people can get tired of having to just be creative all day long or produce all day long, especially since you're also teaching and running the business. What are the things that you do to keep those creative juices flowing? How do you avoid burning out in this? Yeah, I got a long list here. I mentioned a couple of things already. So we'll try to stick to five things. But I think the most important thing is to take breaks, switch off, have on and off time. Content is so much fun, and it's so gratifying that you can do this 70 hours a week. And the early piew series were definitely like 60, 70 hours weeks because we were also building the platform and there was just a lot of work. Right. To get that foundation, but that can definitely burn you out. Right. So we're probably not designed wired to work 70 hours a week. It's not maintainable. It's also where then your creative. Yeah, your creativity goes down. Right. It needs. It's like a muscle. Right. It needs. It grows. When you rest, you train hard, but also rest hard, eat properly and stuff. So that switch off time is important. It's also like mind for numbers. Right. The diffused mind. Right. If you're constantly on, then stuff doesn't come spontaneously. Right. So when you switch off, you go for a walk, you decompress, then the ideas can actually have a chance to settle somewhere. And the setting boundaries is also related with this. Right. So no social apps on phone. I already mentioned that. And learn to say no. We often say yes to too many things. And that could then really, I mean, I can be on slack and email and stuff all day. Right. But then the content doesn't get done. So you need to be very deliberate. Saying no to that, even temporarily, to create your space. Saying no can be hard. When you, when you see something you're excited about, you want to do it, but you have 20 other things to do. You kind of need to limit it. You need to. I find it hard to say no sometimes, especially something that, that's interesting or I want to learn or shiny new object as well. Right. Shiny new objects. Those are the things. And I found often that it's. Sometimes it's good to just either defer something if you don't feel like saying no, or just sit on it for a while to see if it might make it easier to say no later if you see, oh, I've got shiny new object syndrome. Yeah, exactly. Well, the multitasking is also a big thing, but I already mentioned that. So really, if you're not good at carving out deep work, then read Carl Newport's book. That's a big help. That's a great book. Yeah. Because for this content creation business, you really need solid blocks of time. Now, regarding our dears and stuff, always be reading, learning, and stay curious. You need ideas, you need. Well, we're lucky we're coaching and we're working with people. So we see a lot of things in the Python developer space, which gives a lot of ideas. But sometimes I'm reading something this morning, for example, I was reading in the mindset book from Carol Dweck and was a nice quote. And then the Kindle app, I would just send a quote picture to myself on WhatsApp. So my own WhatsApp, kind of a log of ideas. And you can use anything, right? A lot of people use obsidian or Google notes or Google Doc, but have a place where you capture that stuff, because otherwise it just goes away. Also, you never know where inspiration can strike, so you need to also capture those ideas, which I'm not good at. I'm a notorious bad note taker, but at the least, I send stuff to myself on WhatsApp. Well, that seems to keep the note taking easy. So you don't have to go through a whole process. You just, boom, send it. Yeah. Or the same with the YouTube GitHub repo. I have an alias on my command line, so if I type Yti, it opens the issues page of that repo in a new tab, and I just log a quick issue. It takes me 5 seconds. So those are quick hacks to again, to keep that focus. And. Okay, there's a shiny new potential thing. Log it done out of my head. So keep your head clear. It's the basic takeaway. And it sounds like automation plays a big part in this as well. Yeah, yeah, there's the command line. And aliases are great. Talk with other people, right? You can only absorb so much. You have your own ideas, your own biases. Talk with other people. We have an amazing team, we have an amazing community. Communities, plural. We have PDM, we have the general community. A lot of people are sharing a lot of interesting things, right? So network, hang out, get on a call, get other people's views. And a lot of ideas come from there as well. So always seek that feedback. We did, we do the yearly surveys, py bytes, we do a yearly form that we send to the whole friends list. Like, what should we do this year? What should we improve, what should we work on? We get a ton of inputs, so that also steers the direction we take with the content. And maybe lastly, well, two more. Always keep coding. As a python developer, it's obvious. Obvious, yeah, keep that code flowing. You get stuck. You have to look up things you remembered. Of all the beautiful things Python has, constantly. But also new things. Like yesterday, Robert was. Robert Robin was doing a lang chain code clinic. He takes a new technology in libraries and he just experiments with it. That can also be inspiration for new content. Yeah, that was an amazing code clinic. He's learned that tool really well and he's gotten some great ideas from people as they ask questions about it on the clinic. Yeah, the engagement was amazing. Yeah. So he made a chatbot so you could feed it at a YouTube video URL to take the transcript and then used AI to ask smart questions about the content. So super cool. And the code fitted on one page. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, well, Rob is pretty amazing himself, so. Yeah, he just grabs those libraries and learns them. Yeah, but he was struggling through it as well. Right? So it goes to show, like, jet learning again. And lastly, set realistic goals. Right? So sometimes I go in a week and I pretend to make 20 content pieces, which of course never happens. So do something realistic. So we do one podcast every week, one email every week. And there was a time I wanted to do five YouTube videos, but that's not realistic. So do two or three max, right. And even if you have an ambitious goal, but you don't meet it, don't be too hard on yourself. There will be a next like we always say, like, deadlines are arbitrary. I mean, depends, kind of. If you have a boss leaning over your shoulder, that might be different, but often it's just self imposed stuff. So if a YouTube video doesn't get done today or tomorrow, if it goes out next week, that's fine, too. So don't be tired on yourself. But having practiced this as much as you have, you do get in the rhythm of producing things on a regular basis with some flexibility. Yeah. Right. And keeping a list of ideas, you can maybe do a couple of pieces and then just publish them, maybe later over time, and you don't have to be so constrained during the week. Maybe you don't feel like doing content. Well, I've got some stuff lined up. Queued up already. Yeah. Plus there's stuff you can reuse as well. Yeah. So it's pretty flexible. All right. Well, Bob, this has been great. I've been curious to hear more about how you get all this wonderful stuff out, and I appreciate you sharing all of this. Anything else you want to add? No. Thanks for the great questions. I hope it gave you all you need. Is there anything left that you're still curious about? No, I think you've been pretty thorough in everything. And I think wherever you post this, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter, you post this podcast episode. I think people should be encouraged to comment in the post and ask questions, further questions about productivity. And then perhaps you could also talk about a little bit about the productivity mindset and that part of the PDM program. Yeah. And we also have a course. Right. We have the Pirates productivity pack for our course. So that's a good companion. Yeah. All right. Excellent, Bob. Well, thank you so very much, and I look forward to your next YouTube video or blog post or whatever comes out. I'm sure there'll be several before the end of today. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll be back next week. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to bye bytes friends. That is Pibit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show. And to join our thriving slack community of python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's Pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.