When we had that proposal and we looked at our goals, it was pretty clear that we had to focus on other things, more important things, for our goals. And that made it ultimately relatively easy to say no to that proposal. So if you don't have clear goals, I would say start there, because otherwise, it's very easy to fill your week with busy work. And if you have a clear focus on where you want to get, then becomes easier to just focus on the two, three things. Yep. And, you know, you can see by not taking on the work, there's the stress levels dropping. Hello, and welcome to the PY Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. 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. All right. Welcome to another pie Bytes podcast episode. I am Julian, and I'm here with my bestest buddy, Bob. What's going on? Hey, man, I'm glad to be back. Very excited for this new week. As we always say, new week, new opportunities. Right? Monday, favorite day of the week. So today, what were we going to talk about, man? This week wanted to talk about how we deal with stress, the inevitable stress we all get to deal with. And, yeah, we list out a couple of things that help us. I'm really happy that we're talking about this one. This is a topic that is just so prevalent with everyone these days. You think about the stress that we all cop. There's stress from work, whether we're performing or not, stress from getting critical feedback from people like our bosses, stress from the kids, stress from just wanting to get stuff done at home. What other sort of stress do you see people dealing with? Well, if you're talking about home quarantine, that's a stress to it as well, right? Yeah, health, you know, being in shape, or what about, you know, performing on the job as well? There's that constant expectation thing. Yeah. The constant pressure of having to, you know, do your day job. Are you doing as much as everyone else? Are you feeling like you're outperforming everyone else? Do you want a promotion? Is it stressing you out that you haven't got it? There's so many different sources of stress these days, and I also feel like a lot of it comes from. As it might sound a bit cliched, but I think a lot of it comes from being switched on all the time, because not only is, do we have these stresses from the day that we've had, but because we're not sufficiently switching off, we're not able to reset, to be able to deal with the stress the next day. So, you know, there's a couple of things we want to talk about. But the first tip that I want to talk about is actually from the seven habits of highly effective people. And now I know there's a lot of critique, criticism of that book. And some people hate it, some people love it. I love it. Sue me, that's fine. But, you know, the tip that I learned from that book to deal with stress was one of the concepts of taking a step back to remove yourself from the situation. And if I recall correctly, it's been a while since I read the book. But the exercise that he says to try is to step out of your body, use your mind's eye, put your mind's eye in the top corner of the room and look down on yourself. And that ability is one of the unique things of being human, he says in the book, which I thought was pretty profound. I really liked that idea. But the point here is that by being able to step out of yourself, you're able to objectively look at your situation. You know, you're not going to, you're going to leave all that emotion behind. You're going to leave all of the opinions and thoughts and everything there with your body, and you're going to look at yourself from the outside and you're going to then make some more logical choices here on how you react and how you deal with the situation. So taking that into consideration, what I like to do is when I find myself in a stressful situation, I like to just pause for a second and I like to take that step back, analyze a situation. Am I being emotional? Am I reacting emotionally? Am I doing the right thing? What response am I going to give to this situation? And just by taking that step back, I immediately notice a drop in my body temperature. You know, you start to sweat and everything when you're stressed. And I always find that it helps and it allows me to make what I hope is the better choice in the situation. Yeah. A quick tip, like, don't reply to email if you're angry or write up the response, but save it in drafts and get back to it the next day. And then you probably will edit that quite a lot. That's a great tip, you know, to step back and detach yourself from it. Right? Yeah. Hey, actually, on that email thing, don't even write it in your email client because you might accidentally hit send. So do it in a notepad file. Oh, that's. That's much better. Yeah, thanks. I'm not speaking from experience there. Yeah, just throwing that out there. All right, go on. What's your, uh, what's your tip, Bob? All right, so we all get negative feedback or criticism from time to time. And, um, it's very easy to jump on that again. Goes back to the first, uh, point about being emotional and responding when you're emotional. But, yeah, I think you just kind of have to distinguish. Is this feedback constructive? Yes, respond. If not, maybe just ignore it. Right? Because just some people, you know, we have the keyboard warriors out there, and maybe you shouldn't even pay attention. But if you do, then just the tip, really here is use gratefulness. So just say thanks. You're right. Thanks. That's useful. Thanks for pointing that out. And you closed that loop. And use gratefulness, basically. Okay, so let's say that you were getting your code reviewed. Let's take this back to coding, right? And you would get critiqued by whoever it is that was looking at your code. What would be your response? If you're going to use gratefulness here as an example? Let's say I said that entire bit of your code there could be wrapped in a class to make it reusable, whatever. How would you respond to that using gratefulness? So it depends a bit, the feedback. And, you know, if. If you want to adopt that, but, you know, usually you do. So that would be, thanks for pointing that out, and I will take action. ABC. And if I don't agree, I still say, thanks for pointing it out, but this and that. Yeah. Okay. The natural reaction, though, from people when they receive feedback is to get defensive, right? Because it feels like they. That person is attacking them. It's a human nature thing. Gloves out, claws out. Get your fists up. I'm gonna get in a fight because someone's criticizing me. So how would you use gratefulness, then, to diffuse the emotion? That side of it. Yeah, that's a great description. Right. Because if you get that feedback, like human nature, out of your safety zone, and it kind of feels like you're attacked. So it's kind of important to see that it's nothing personal against you. Right. A business thing, like, that person wants to help you grow or wants to improve the quality of the overall product, so he or she is more thinking about the stakeholder or the bigger goal. So once you. And I think that goes perfectly back to the first point, if you take that personal side out of it and just think about the overall goal, then I think it's just easier to swallow. Yeah, that's a good point, because that other person who's giving the feedback may not even know that they're coming across as abrasive. They might just think, hey, I'm giving blunt feedback. That's what people want. And so I think it is important to separate that and just realize that, heck, this person is just trying to help, you know? But they've taken the time to give me that feedback, so that can take the stress out of it. And if it happens to be a keyboard warrior on the other end, it'll probably annoy them even more if you take it well, instead of firing back. If you take it well and say, hey, thanks for the feedback, random crazy person. I really appreciate it. Because they didn't get to tear you down as they wanted. Exactly. I do have to say we have an episode on code reviewing. I think we said it there about Paris repeating that it is a bit more challenging now it's all being remote because it's all characters on the screen. Right. And it can come off as harsh. While if you would be in the same office and you have to comment, and the next day you see that person and you're drinking coffee and smiling, then that puts it more in perspective. So, yeah, it's just to acknowledge that doing this all on screens and remote is a bit tougher. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point. So, on that note of work, I'll move on to the next point, which is, uh, yeah, we get stressed when we have too much work. Right. So if that happens to us, we tend to just say no. And I say we because Bob and I both do this, obviously. Um, and we have done this recently. Right. If we have too much work, we say no. And it's not easy to say no. It's actually quite hard because our natural reaction is to just take on everything because we aim to please. And we have a whole episode on this. Um, I think it was episode 1213. I can't remember. Um, but the thing I want to bring up here is that, you know, we, you and I, man, we had a pretty decent proposal in front of us that we were kind of excited about for some stuff, and. But it would have involved a lot of work that we just could not commit to right now. And we took that step back, analyzed the situation, realized that it would have caused way more stress than it was worth right now. And we said no. And it was. So for those of you listening, this was a tough decision for us. It took us, I think, a week to sit there, weigh it up, and. And eventually turn it down, and we don't regret it at all. So if you can go back and listen to that episode on saying no, because that will definitely help your stress levels. We had another episode, number four, about goal setting, because saying no becomes so much easier, relatively, if you know your goals, because then you're laser focused. When we had that proposal and we looked at our goals, it was pretty clear that we had to focus on other things, more important things for our goals. And that made it ultimately relatively easy to say no to that proposal. So if you don't have clear goals, I would say start there, because otherwise it's very easy to fill your week with busy work. And if you have a clear focus on where you want to get, then becomes easier to just focus on the two, three things. In our case, that's lately coaching, that's what we focus on most right now. Yep. And, you know, you can see by not taking on the work, there's the stress levels dropping, and we certainly feel less stressed. So that's a positive. Yep. Tip number four, take weekends off or whatever works with your work schedule, because there are folks that work weekends for the kind of job they do, but then take one or two other days off, but you have to rest, you have to recharge. It's how rewired, and you cannot ignore that. And I remember when we worked weekends or partial weekends, I think a lot around the platform. For example, we got stressed, we got burned out, and it clouded our vision. And now that we take the weekends off, like, today's a Monday, and we come back, like, super energized, pumped, we are full of new ideas. We regain focus again, going back to the goals. Like every Monday, we look at our goals first. That didn't even occur to us when we were working weekends. Yeah, because there was no finite end. There was no finite end to every week. So as cliched as it, as it is, weekends are off. It definitely works. And yeah, since we're doing it, we're living much healthier lives, and we achieve even more. So working less relatively and achieving more thanks to that recharge. Well, if you want to make this relative to people in general, I think the general tip here is find that time for you to switch off. And when we say switch off, we mean get off the computer, keep the phone somewhere else, and spend time with people. Read a book, do something that keeps you away from the work and really get your mind off it. Now, on the weekends, if we give some context there, I'm not on the computer. You know, Monday through Friday, I'm on here all the time with. With Bob, working and doing stuff. But on the weekends, I. Because I give myself to the family that whole weekend. I'm not in front of a laptop or a computer, and it feels great, and I do it guilt free. And the stress levels drop because I know I give it my all throughout the week. So just looping it back to that stress concept by switching off and knowing that you can do it guilt free because you have dedicated work time, you're really scheduling that time. It really is a huge stress relief. It's also kind of a reward for the hard work you put in during the week. So it's extra motivating. Yeah. Fridays are that much better for us. All right. And finally, we want to give you another example of something that we're doing, and it comes back to controlling what you can. Now, there's obviously things that stress you out that are out of your control. We acknowledge that. But wherever you can find ways to control what you can, there is always something about a situation that is going to be within your control, whether it be your reaction, the actions that you can take to make it easier on yourself. And the example that we have here is about our exercise in our food, because we definitely found ourselves slipping from our routine, from specifically the food that we were eating. And, Bob, once you fill in the rest. Yeah. So. Well, slipping on multiple dimensions, I think, because the workout routine was also a bit gone lately. So, yeah, we started to track calories. I'm not sure if it's new to you, Julian, but I had done it before, but I had to seriously go back to it. Yeah. Totally new for me. Yeah. So how's it going so far? You like it? You know what? It. I actually don't mind the calorie counting. It feels like budgeting money, except it's budgeting my calories for the day, and it's kind of nice when I aim to have surplus at the end of the day and I might have 400 calories left. It actually feels really good. But this, to me, is a stress relief, because since the baby was born, I feel like I've gone off the rows a bit with my eating because I'm just tired all the time. And when I'm tired, I tend to. I notice that trend. You know, when I'm tired, I just tend to want to eat, and I was eating the wrong things. And so this has given me some control over those natural habit, bad habits that have crept in. There's natural body reactions of just trying to grab the nearest thing and shove that food my mouth, you know? So I actually like this. This is, you know, something that I can control. I have this thought in the back of my head, how many calories do I have left in the day to eat? And it's just, it's a wonderful way of controlling the situation for me. Something that seemed out of my control just a week ago. Dude, I thought long and hard before getting you into that because I know you're a big fan of financial budget, so I knew you want to, you're going to crush it. But also I knew the risk of overdoing it when I happy it's working. And yeah, you will be surprised, like, how much you potentially overeat if you're not really wary of it. And yeah, for fitness goal, it's kind of important just how the body works if you want to hit certain goals. So again, that comes back to the goals, right. If you have a clear goal, then it's so much easier to do. And, yeah, this is something we took on that we feel we have more control over this way and hence reduces the stress that was caused by us slipping off of the routine because we have big health calls. And, yeah, seeing that you're not on track definitely causes stress. Yeah. So this also comes back to that whole concept of what gets measured, gets managed. Right. And that's a great, yeah, it's a great way of reducing your stress because when things are out of your control, you really stress because you don't know where you're at, you don't know what your situation is, you don't know what's happening next and what you can expect in the next few weeks. You feel helpless. Exactly. And so I'm glad you brought up the finance side of it because I do love budgeting, but that to me is another way that I've taking control because my finances. Right. With a family of five, this is a really, we got to keep a tight ship. And so when I don't have a budget in place and we experimented without a budget, I felt so much more stressed because I had no idea what was happening, no idea what was coming. And, uh, yeah, with this control in place, this tracking in place, I feel so much better. That's it, folks. So five tips to relieve stress. Detach yourself the emotion. Treat negative feedback with gratefulness. Say no to busy work, focus on your goals. Take weekends off or any time segment that suits you and see what you can control. And then use mechanisms to stay in control. That's it. Our two cent. Nice. So on that note, one of the things I want you to read between the lines here with these tips that we've given, there's a lot of mindset in there. There's a lot of productivity in there, because if you have the right processes in place for dealing with your schedule, dealing with your day, your goals, all of those sorts of concepts, if you have that in place, then you'll notice your stress will drop significantly because you'll feel you have that control over your situation, your career, your days, your productivity and achieving those goals. To do that, I highly recommend check out our pie bytes productivity course. It's called practical productivity with pie bites. The link is below, so make sure you check that out, because if you enjoyed these tips on dealing with stress, you'll really love the course. There's heaps of stuff in there, and all of it will guide you through getting the most out of your day, out of your week and taking that stress out of succeeding with your job, with your goals, and everything else you set yourself out to do. Awesome. Go check that out. And finally, let's also talk about what you're reading. What am I reading? Okay, so I'm currently reading a book called Contagious. And it's not what you think. It's got nothing to do with COVID It's got everything to do with marketing. So I quite like it. It was given to me by you, man. You gave it to me a couple of years ago at Pycon, I think. Yeah, I handed you the physical coffee. Yeah. Yeah. So now I have read it. Just, there are a couple of chapters I wanted to reread, so I've picked that up again. What about you? What are you reading? I'm rereading the pragmatic programmer, and a second edition came out one or two years ago. So I'm rereading it, and it's always refreshing, the concepts, the, you know, the software design and all those things. I'm also reading Robert Greene's laws of human nature, which is fascinating. Well, human nature and stuff. Nice. I like it, man. All right, well, make sure you give the podcast a thumbs up or stars or five stars, whatever the heck the apps use these days. Whatever the apps use these days. And we'll speak with you all next week. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you any feedback. If you like it, just hit us up and we talk again next week. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte, that is Pibit es France, 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.