You know, I've been there so many times and in fact, when I in my team, when I hire junior developers, this is the first piece of advice that I give. Don't sit on a bug for like hours together. Just keep it. How much ever crucial it is, just keep it for some time. At least come back to it after a few hours. I'm sure you'll be able to crack it. 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 Baldeboz. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back, everybody, to the Pivots podcast. This is Bob Baldebos, and I'm not with Julian today. I have a very special guest, Sambhavi, Dana Balan. Sambhavi, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm good, thanks, Bob. How are you? Yeah, great. I'm excited to have you on. Long time coming and yeah, for people that don't know you, maybe you can start off with a bit of background. I can always already say that you're currently in a PDM program, but, yeah. Do you want to introduce yourself to the Pibytes podcast audience? Yeah, sure. First of all, thanks for having me. The Pibytes podcast. I'm like, super thrilled. Yeah. So, hello, everyone. I am Sambhavi. I am the technical co founder of a small software company here in India. So as part of my role, I developed multiple solutions, majorly using Python, Django Flask, you know, the entire Python framework. So we identify, you know, pain points for customers in the event management industry and the hospitality industry. So we develop solutions catering to those industries, and we also do services to clients, product development, project development, and all those things majorly. It's all in the Python stack. And prior to my entrepreneurial stint, I used to work for large enterprises like Hewlett, Picard, Merrill lynch, which is now, I think it's bank of America and Cognizant again. I started my career in Java and a lot of different technologies, different domains, different locations. It has been a roller coaster vibe, and I think now it's five years since I started my own thing. That's a brief background about me. Awesome. That's quite a background. And yeah. Happy that you found Python and that you then found Py bytes as well. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to kick off with a win? Do you have a win this week? Yeah, and I'm a proud PDM member. Vin? Yes, I'm towards the end of the PDM program. So, you know, as part of PDM I developed two apps. One I've already open sourced, which is a huge win for me because I've been wanting to do that for quite long. So I've made it an open source and, you know, I've started to get requests as well. People are showing interest, which is a very exciting thing. And yeah, the second app is also taking good shape. You know, I'm running in full speed and in fact I'm building that in public. So huge wins for me, I would say. Yeah, those are quite some significant wins. Like two apps and then building in public, that also takes courage, right? Yeah, yeah, it keeps me accountable and, you know, it helps build my personal brand. And sharing my learning is another important thing to me. I think it's my way of giving back to the community, to the tech community, my success as well as my failures. At least people don't repeat the mistakes. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. And you're embracing the full PDM message, right? Like, it's not only building, but also getting your work out there. Start to build your brand, giving back. So seeing all these things with you. So I'm really, really proud and happy to see what you have achieved coming to the end. Thank you. Cool. So today I got you on though for a slightly different, although related topic. You wrote a really cool article. 29 May, 11 minute read the two important piece for today's software developer. And so you broke it down in two topics. One is more around planning and the other is more around practical tips. Right. For productivity. So yeah, I think we can just go through the table of content. We'll of course link the article below and have you talked towards about these points? And then I will just chime in if I have any questions or additional things, maybe differing opinions, whatever, I will just. Yeah, I just invite you to have a little discussion about this article, which is a really useful article for developers to become more productive overall. So to start it off. Yeah. Why did you write this article? Why did you think it was relevant? Was it related to your own workflow? Tell me a bit about the background. Yeah, that's a, that's a good question, actually. See, basically I've always been a multitasker. You know, it's not that I tend to work on just one thing, I just do development. It has never been like that for me. And especially after I started my own thing and ours was a bootstrap company. So right from visualizing the solution and deciding on the technology and, you know, doing research as to what will be required, hiring people, writing, marketing stuff and just everything. So my day will always be a bag of multiple things, which means that I have to be really productive. And, you know, I also have this, you know, time constraint that I can work only from this time to this time. Then I'll have to take care of my family, my children and all that. So I always want to be productive. And over all these years, from my experience, you know, I've learned a lot of things that I need to do. This works better, you know, this doesn't work and things like that. And after joining PDM, I learned a few more things in addition to whatever I already knew. And I felt it was really making a lot of difference in the way I work. And I thought it would be a good idea to share it, you know, to a bigger crowd because I'm sure a lot of people will be able to relate my scenario because in today's software world, I think everybody want to do a lot of things. So I thought, why not share what I know and what I've learned recently? That's the whole idea of me writing this. Awesome. All right, let's dive into it. And the p for planning. And they have three bullets there. Create a weekly planner. Tell me about it. Yeah, yeah, this one is the best, actually. You know, I would give kudos to my coach, Robin, because he taught me this. So now what I do is I create a weekly planner. I just use a very simple tool like a Google calendar. And at a hourly level, I make sure I list down all the things that I need to work. That gives me a lot of visibility to what I'm supposed to work. What is more important and kind of reprioritize my day, because I am a morning person in general, so I tend to be fresh in the first half of the day. So I kind of move all the difficult and complex things in the first half and keep kind of, you know, a bit dull things in the afternoon and then I take a break. So this whole creating a planner helps me give a big picture as well as make sure that I don't miss out on anything. And I strongly, I don't know, it's, in my opinion, don't waste time on finding a very sophisticated tool and all that. A simple calendar, Google calendar is sufficient because in the past I used to, you know, spend unnecessary time on finding the best tool and all that, but actually it is not necessary yeah, that's also. Yeah. Calendar we already use for everything. Right. So you have it right embedded. And the important one here I think is really to be very deliberate about your schedule because if you don't set it up upfront with the planning, then inevitably you're going to have distractions slip in and then the deep work, the more important, goal focused stuff is not going to get done. Right. And then I guess related to that is, number two, use GitHub. GitLab project. So what's the beauty of that tool? Yeah, most of us use GitHub or GitLab. I think the whole GitHub project or the GitLab project embedded with it makes our life very easy as a developer. It is a lot easier to just create issues, assign it to milestones and give proper labels and give it proper status. And you know, these tools are very simple. At the same time they are very effective. I would say be it the boards that you have in GitHub, the Kanban board, the roadmap view, there are different views. So you, it kind of slices and dices your work from different angles and it, at any point of time it clearly shows where you are and whether you're lagging or whether you're on track or, you know, you have more time. You can add more to your bag. Since it is embedded with your actual code, I think it makes a lot of sense rather than having a separate tool for tracking and, you know, coming back to your source control. So I thought it'll be a good thing to use and I'm not sure whether a lot of people already use this, but if not, it's definitely worth a try. You might have to spend an hour or so depending on your project, but it's definitely worth it, I would say. Yeah. And again, it goes back to using existing tools. Right. You're already using GitHub for the code, so you might as well use the project. But that does presuppose that you use issues, right. So you track tasks through issues and then you would drag the issues on a kanban from one state to the other, right? Correct. In fact, it's all automated as well. So you don't have to do anything manually. You just assign the right labels, right status and everything is just ready for you. Yeah, nice. Keep it simple too, right? Yeah, yeah, nice. Again, gives you that overview as well. Yeah. So then number three, review your planned work. Can you speak to that? Yeah, this, in fact, this is my favorite of the three, I would say I'm someone who believes a lot in reflecting on what you do, both professionally as well as personally, you have to definitely sit back and think whether you're on the right track, whether you're doing meaningful work, whether your work is bringing joy or, you know, this is more from a personal level, but again, yeah, from a professional level. Also, there are a lot of things that you need to sit back and review. Okay, I planned ten tasks for the day, but when I sit and look at my calendar, I'm able to complete only six. And I'm, you know, every single day of the week I'm able to complete only six. Then probably then it means there is something wrong. Either I'm overestimating my capability or I'm underestimating the volume of work. So that review becomes super important. If you have someone to review your work, then I would say you're very lucky. Otherwise, you yourself should definitely take the time, sit back, see whether you are on the right track, whether any changes are needed. At least once a week, you should do that. Otherwise, I personally feel that we'll just get caught in a vicious circle, you know, just doing whatever comes our way. And when you look back after three months or six months, we might feel really bad. Oh my God, what have I been doing? Yeah. Yeah. And for that, I guess you would also need the reconciliation of planned versus realized, right? So how do you track off, for example, you plan to do Django deployment, Docker, whatever, Friday, 2 hours. Now how do you know that that was, do you keep track on the same calendar that that was done or, or not? So how do you reconcile the plan versus the actual for your review? How do you do that? What I do is if I say as I assume that I have this task of Django deployment and as planned, I start working on it and I've completed half of it, then there is, you know, other half probably the static things needs to be set up, the CDN needs to be set up and all that. What I do is I go to my calendar, change the color. Initially I think it will be blue in color. In Google calendar, I'll change it to yellow to show that, you know, it's work in progress. And then if I'm towards the end, I just go and do a right click, change it to a lighter green. If I complete it, I change it to green. So at any point of time my calendar will be really colorful. And if I miss a task, I change it to red. So I go to my calendar and I see that colorful view, immediately I will know. Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. So you have a whole state machine going on there. We have something similar with the organic content creation tool. We did a video as well here on YouTube. Yeah. Like, content pieces have different colors and it means, like, are they in draft or in review or done? And it's nice to see that on a calendar. You have that high level overview, right? Yeah, that sounds really useful tip that people could adopt. All right, thanks. That's awesome. So the second p for productivity overall, right. So you have. Is it. Yeah, p for productivity, right? Yeah, yeah, it is productivity. Okay, so you have a tips, right? Quite a lot of tips, I guess. Yeah. Well, we can go through them pretty quickly. Right. So I'll just mention them one on one. And you just give us the nuggets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The number one deep focus time. Yeah. This is very important. As I said, you should be knowing whether you are, you know, which part. Which part of the day are you at your best? You need to definitely know that. Again, this might not be applicable to people who work on a regular nine to five, but if you are on your own, this is a definitely useful thing. So make sure that you identify when you are best at and keep aside all your complex tasks during that time. Make sure that you have no distractions, no phone calls, no slack, no twitter, no Facebook, Instagram, whatever. No social media. In short, just focus on your work for three to 4 hours. I think beyond that, I don't think we, at least personally, I won't be able to handle it beyond 3 hours of continuous work, but it'll show results, massive results. If you keep doing that for a week or two weeks, you'll definitely see that, especially with coding related tasks. Right, where you really need to focus and all your mental capacity. I like two things here. Yeah. That you urge people to kind of identify. First, where are you? Where's your peak performance, right. Because for a lot of people, it's the morning. I'm a morning person, but it's not always the case. Right. I was a night person before. So some people do their best coding work or writing or deep work in the evening. Right. So it's good to kind of identify it and then relentlessly set that up like that. I think you mentioned even like airplane mode on, on your phone. Yeah, that's a great tip. And keep all these other apps, just, just close them, right. Just. Just don't get in that. It's like, you know when you're on a diet and don't even get the chocolates into your house to start. Right. That's probably the best. Yeah. Way to succeed. So similarly, just keep those apps closed and you're not even tempted to look. Yeah, that's the best, actually. Yeah. So, no, that's all in that article. So that, that was really insightful. Right. Number two, Pomodoro technique. What is Pomodoro technique? How do you use it? Yeah, it's that 25 minutes of focus work. Again, you are kind of deep diving into point one. How do you implement point one is using, .2 again, posture in the long run. I've been in this industry for quite long now. So my shoulders and my back, unless my posture is right, you know, I will have all those problems. So this 25 minutes, I use a timer called homo focus. I set it for 25 minutes. 25 minutes. I do focus work and then I take a five minute break. I just get up from my desk and I stretch, I walk, do something, take my mind off. It also helps not only in posture, in also bringing back your concentration. Otherwise, you know, you kind of tend to become dull if you just sit in the same place for 1 hour. And it's not good for your health. Also, I thought, I mean, it works terrifically on me. So I thought it's a real good tip for others, too. Yeah. And I like that you bring up the health aspect because it's, as I like to say, insidious. Right. You sit there and you don't notice it till it's too late. Right. When you start having those problems. So, for example, when you say, like a three hour deep work window in one of the previous points, then you actually mean like six or so pomodoros. Right. You will do like, Pomodoro, five minute break, Pomodoro, five minute, etcetera till. Till 3 hours maybe, right? Yeah. In fact, after three five minute break, it gives a 15 minutes break, a longer break. Okay. Yeah, good point. Okay. Yeah. But it seems like for that little time you sacrifice, you actually go much faster because every time you have that mini recharge. Right. So you come back fresh and then. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. Awesome. All right. And kind of related, I guess. Number three, walk for 30 minutes. Yeah. Again, as I said, this is for people who are on their own. Step out of your office or your house or wherever you're working from. You go for a brisk, not even 30 minutes. You don't need 30 minutes. You just need a 15 minutes or a 20 minutes walk in the fresh air or meeting new people. I mean, it does, it is magic. I would say your brain needs to rest. That's what I realized, that you can't just keep throwing in continuously. You need to rest your brain in between. Only then it kind of recharges and works fast. So if people have an option of doing this, they should definitely try this. Yeah. And it's a cheap option. Right. You don't have to pay anything, you don't have to lift heavy weights. It's just start moving. Right, exactly. And yeah, I think the mind is really like a bucket. Right. You can only fill it to a certain extent and then you keep pouring water in it, it just overflows. Right. So you need to get something out before you can. So. But in that sense, if you talk about making it empty, do you listen to podcast or is it really just music or not even anything at all. Just walking without any. Without any distraction. Okay. No podcast, nothing. I mean, I just want nothing allowed. Yeah. To give my brain 100%, 100% rest. Yeah. Awesome. Or maximum. It might be some mindless things, going to a shop, buying something where you don't really don't have to think, you know, that sort of a break. Yeah, take the thinking out. Cool, cool. Number four, spend not more than 30 minutes on a bug issue. Oh, I can relate to that. Oh, yeah. This is purely for developers even. You know, I've been caught in this rabbit hole so many times. Even yesterday I was working on something, trying to write a orm query. I've been doing that for like 2 hours. Then I realized, oh my God, I wrote this on my article and I'm not following it. And I mean, I can guarantee you that it'll never work. You know, maybe sometimes it may work if you continuously keep looking at a bug or an issue. But the best thing is just keep it in the back burner. If you have a choice, come back to it the next day. You will solve that in like, in like two minutes. You'll be really surprised. You'll think, oh my God, why was I spending so much time for this simple thing? How did I overlook this? You know, I've been there so many times and in fact, when I in my team, when I hire junior developers, this is the first piece of advice that I give. Don't sit on a bug for like hours together. Just keep it how much ever crucial it is, just keep it for some time. At least come back to it after a few hours. I'm sure you'll be able to crack it. But this is also such a tough one, right? Like our engineers pride, we have to solve this, right? Our persistence we always, well, I spent 2 hours on this, but it's my persistence. Right. This is a great piece of advice because, yeah, it's almost like your mind gets clouded or you're just hitting the same wall and if you don't get up and do something else, that wall is not going to lift. But if you come back, maybe the diffused mind, as it's called, took over and did something unconsciously and magically. Exactly. You have the right thought when you get back. But yeah, that takes a lot of discipline. But it's also one of the best productivity tips because it can really save you hours and hours of just wasted effort almost. Right. In fact, the team leads or the managers should also encourage this, I feel rather than just asking your team member to finish something, I think this should be done at a higher levels. The culture of the team should be that. Yeah. Dev, team managers, if you're listening, take notice. All right. Another nice developer. One, number five. Well, the whole articles of course, developer biased and that's great. Five, use GitHub copilot if there is an option. Yeah. In fact, five and six, I would say they go hand in hand. Copilot is something that I started to use after I joined PDM. Robin highly recommended that. And I mean, it is, again, sheer magic. It saves you so much of time. The only downside that I see is use it judiciously. I mean, we have to be judicious in whatever we use, especially copilot kind of thing. Use it with caution, especially if you are new to a technology I would advise not to use. But if you're already strong in a technology and you want to automate some repetitive tasks, some boring tasks, you know, writing test cases, okay, for the first time, it will look interesting, but beyond the point. Test case is a test case. So such things you can use copilot and it's enormous. I mean, it's just too good, I would say. But again, another word of caution is not every organization will allow using copilot. So you might want to check that first before using it. But yeah, you can automate lot of things. In fact, you can learn writing good code from copilot. Sometimes I'm just stunned by the comments it gives and the dog strings that it generates. It's so cool. I was so excited when I started to use it. Yeah, it's very smart and we live in fortunate times. Yeah. Thanks also for those downsides or considerations. If you're newer then it might actually backfire in the sense that you might not prompt. I mean, I'm more talking about chat GPT then, right. If you prompt it not so effectively and you get confused. Right. So you definitely need to have the fundamentals down. And then the more experienced you are, the more effective you can use those tools. And then it's really a ten x productivity tool. It's just amazing. I just used it for Pytest Django to help me write the test or what I usually do. Again, if it's code that we can share, of course, because that's always something to keep in mind. But yeah, you can paste the Django view in chat GPT and just ask it, write a test for it, and it does perfectly. Right. But of course you have to interpret and vet and see if it's correct. That's where experience comes in. But if you have that, then it's a game changer. Exactly 200%. Yeah, and copilot is amazing too. I was not really using that that much, but now I upgraded Vim because it would only use a neo vim and now it started working. Coincidentally, when I upgraded Vim, I'm not looking back, like how much time it saves. And as you say, like docstrings commands, it does a great job. Right? So yeah, yeah. So then six, is that closely related? Integrate git in your ide. I'm not sure if I agree, but I'll let you go. Convince me. Convince me. Okay. I use versus code as my ide and I integrated all these git extensions and again, it saves me so much of time. Previously I used to go to my browser, you know, for checking in. I'll check it in git bash and then go to my browser, you know, go here, go there, and I'll have so many windows open. But now after integrating git, it's much faster. I commit it here, I open a pull request here. I look at all the comments here. I do, I resolve merge conflicts, I do everything and just one place. And it does save a lot of time. Even I was not for it before I started using it. You know, I'm quite old fashioned in that sense, but now I don't think I can deny the benefits it gives me. And why? Why wouldn't you use it? Or why wouldn't you like it? No, I am more biased towards the command line. So if you're in vim, then you can push vim to the background and you're right on the terminal. So I'm more like terminal driven, but it makes a lot of sense and it goes back to the calendar, right? Like having it all in one place and using the same tool for as many things, related things as possible. So, yeah, and the other thing I'm a bit cautious with or, and maybe that has improved, but I sometimes heard like in the idea when you start to use git you don't really see what the commands are that it runs. Right. So would it confuse you perhaps on which branch you are on or, you know, but yeah, if that works great, then that's awesome even. Oh no, no, it shows everything. It shows which branch you are. It shows just everything. Yeah. I will give it a try with versus code. Right? Yeah. Nice. You'll definitely thank me. I will, yeah. It's just very hard to leave him. Oh, no pun intended. Seven time box, a few tasks not directly related to work. Yeah, this one is a very interesting thing, you know, time boxing. When I say time boxing, what I mean is you dedicate, you might want to do a lot of things, right. You might want to contribute to open source or you might want to keep your repository as an open source, you might want to write articles. There are a lot of things that we all want to do, but if you want to be really consistent about something, then set aside a particular hour. In fact, I would say a particular day, particular hour, just repeat it for at least three months. Then that becomes a habit in the sense when I started with this, I marked Friday evening, five to six is for open source contributions come what may, Friday, five to six. I'll just sit on looking at some open sources and, you know, do things. So over a period of time, I think it became a habit. So if you want to do one of things, but you want to be consistent about it and it's not directly tied to your work, then I think time boxing does help a lot actually, and you feel good about it, after three months you will be able to see good progress. You would have achieved what you wanted. So I thought, although it's not a direct productivity tip, I somehow wanted to bring that whole concept of time boxing. Yeah. And that might then be related to more things that are easily overlooked or you might just put on the back burner. Right. So it makes sure that these secondary projects also get moved along. Right. For example, as you said, for open source, you have this weekly event and no matter what, you're going to do that particular time box of 2 hours on Friday, right? Yeah. Okay, nice. And the last one, number eight, wind off time. This is very important, you know. After all, you know, we are, we all work so hard and we should take some time off either. You know, make sure your weekends are not worked with work and set aside that you will work for this hour to this hour. After that, you know, you should just close your laptop and give your mind and your body some rest. You know, spend time with your family if you like that. Or you develop some hobbies, you pick up some new hobbies, you know, just go out, do something, but give your brain ample rest. Only then it will recharge and you'll be able to bounce back. Yeah, maybe, maybe the most important one. Right, because. Yeah, yeah. As we said with the Pomodoro technique where you have these micro breaks, you also need like bigger breaks because otherwise that burnout just sneaks in, you know, and then, yeah, when it's delayed, it's delayed, you know. Yeah. If we don't give our body and mind rest over a period of time, it leads to burnout and we tie it to unrelated problems. We think that we're not satisfied with our job or, you know, we try to solve the wrong problem wherein the actual problem is we could have easily avoided that. Right, right. Which is why winding off is super important to me. Yeah. So it's not only the burnout, which is already trouble, but you also then might attribute it to different things and then end up making wrong decisions. Right, correct. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. Okay, cool. Well, that was a whole lot. Thanks for sharing and writing that article and coming on the show and talk about it. I think it's going to help our audience a lot. So any final thing you want to say about that? No. I mean, I would be really happy. If people are able to pick up one or two of these points and see results, then I think I'll be really happy that it made an impact. Awesome. Yeah. And if people, if you do, then, yeah. Please reach out to Sambavi on my blog. Contact details are there, I suppose. Yeah, they are. All right, so to wrap this interview up, what are you reading? What I'm reading now is 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. Again, if you look at the subtitle of the book, it says time management for mortals. But actually it's not a productivity hack or a time management kind of a book. It's quite philosophical, I would say. I mean, it's a real good read. The whole idea of the book is that your time in this earth is limited. I mean, it's not that the author is being sinister or anything, but that's the truth. So don't just try to add things to your bucket list, you know, consciously spend some time and understand whether what is important to you, what is less important, what is not important at all, and kind of revisit your list and do what makes you happy and what is actually important meaningful rather than trying to do everything and trying to find time for everything. You know, the author says that's not the way to go about it and I tried implementing it in my own life and it gave me a lot of peace. In fact, I'm rereading it for the second time. I highly recommend for people who have like 10,000 things on their list and they feel bad that, oh no, I'm not able to, you know, build my side hustle. I'm not. I mean, it's a definite good read for everyone. In fact, I would say nice and to link that as well and kind of in line with the article, right? Productivity in and out. Yeah, inside out. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Samavi, for hopping on today. I hope we see you back in a while to talk about PDM and the changes you're making and all that stuff. So I hope this is not the last encounter. I think there's much more we can discuss, but today we just wanted to focus on the productivity. Richie really nicely gave us all these tips, so thanks for that. And yeah, any fine awards before we we wrap it up? No, nothing. Thanks again for having me on this episode and I was really happy to share my learnings. And yeah, I'm also looking forward to speak to you the next time about PDM and my experience and all that. Yeah, me too. And I pointed people to your blog, but is there any specific channel you prefer people to reach out to you? LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best. Yeah. Okay, then I'll link that as well and yeah, awesome. Well, thanks again and I really enjoyed this interview. And same keep crushing it. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte free. 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 pybytes community, that's pibit Es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.