Episode 4: Mindfulness and Meditation

by Imran Kasam & Steve Ledwith

Published on 11 June 2020. This is approximately 53 minutes long. This episode is sponsored by Anchor.fm.

Overview

In this episode we talk about mindfulness, meditation and how to use both to improve your work day. We also talk about cognitive approaches to thought, and why convergent and divergent thinking are important for everyone, especially developers.

We had lofty goals to also include Stoicism, Yoga, and philosophy, but we were really engaged in the minfulness topics, and we didn’t get there! We’re already planning a follow-up episode to go further into the philosophy.

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Show Notes & Selected Links

How mindfulness can help engineers - an engaging article from HBR

Meditation

  • It’s not all about sitting in a room chanting.
  • No trips to the wild, or finding a cave required
  • No prescription for how to do it, make it your own
  • One minute meditation!

Tools to help with meditation

5 min: Preparing for your day

The stuff we code is called logic!

Convergent and divergent thinking from HBR

Convergent thinking (Wikipedia) generally means the ability to give the “correct” answer to standard questions that do not require significant creativity

Divergent thinking (Wikipedia) is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing, “non-linear” manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. Many possible solutions are explored in a short amount of time, and unexpected connections are drawn.

Convergent thinking is linear, involving going through a list of steps to get to a single correct answer. In contrast, divergent thinking is exploring different directions from an initial problem statement to generate many possible ideas. In the design process, engineers use divergent thinking when generating ideas, so they can identify a wide range of potential solutions. They use convergent thinking when evaluating ideas to determine the optimal solution. – HBR

MacGyver

  • The original, old school cool MacGyver, of course

Use divergent thinking to generate a list of potentail solutions!

Six Thinking Hats is a literal implementation of “I wear many hats”

9:45 min: Poor man’s white board sharing

  • Whiteboard in your office
  • Google Meet
  • Laptop with a web cam
  • Phone to join the call too, which can focus on the whiteboard

Mind mapping

  • Great tool for getting ideas on paper
  • Don’t get caught in trap of making the map pretty!
  • Focus on the idea generation

Markdown

12 min: Engineers are logical - right?

  • Software Art
  • You’ll notice Steve has a great understanding of “terms of art”!

Low Code requires you to be logical, and artistic at the same time. The front end is the gateway to the database entities.

Homeseekers.com - real estate search site, now owned by CRMLS

17 min: Flow State (Wikipedia) is mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

Make time for solitude in your day

  • HRB Ascend
  • Schedule it in
  • Analyze where your time is best spent
  • Starve your distractions
  • Don’t be too busy to learn how to be less busy
  • Create a “stop doing” list

Take a moment to go read the article which was adapted from another article by Mike Erwin

20 min: Figure how to plan your day and know what you want to get done

Get Things Done by David Allen

  • We usually refer a version of this as “GSD” or Get Shit Done
A word from our sponsor - Anchor.FM

Anchor.fm

** Roughly 25 minutes **

25 min: Mindfulness and recentering help you with context switching

Block off time for yourself, and the things you need to get done, on your calendar. Scheduling time for yourself will help you focus

If I lived in my email inbox, I would die in my inbox – Imran

Can you really do your best work if you try to work in between meetings? Can you build a killer presentation by working on it in six 15 minute sessions over four days? How do you want to represent yourself?

Make your phone work for you

29 min: Context switching and focus

Context Switching

Dedicatice time for reviewing your email

  • Set a consistent schedule
  • Read, reply, or schedule each message
  • If you don’t have to do anything with the message, archive it!
  • Try to stay away from multiple touches

Did you know?

  • If you archive an email conversation, especially in GMail, and another reply is sent, the UI will bring that message back to the top of your your inbox
  • You don’t have to keep them all in your inbox

32 min: Don’t be so busy, you can’t learn to be less busy!

Photo by energepic.com from Pexels

Busy is a choice

My life is my decision

  • No else is responsible for your life, or your decisions

Self care is important

36 min: Yes, you can multi-task, but should you? Are you really giving your best effort to the task at hand?

Make a stop doing list!

38 min: If you find yourself in an email “discussion”, take a moment to center yourself, and call the person on the other end. Don’t go back and forth, fueling the miscommunication. Have a phone call, and work it out. Call them. Solve the problem, answer the question.

Meeting Ettiquite!

  • Make sure you include an agenda for all meetings
  • If you can, specific the goal of the meeting
  • If you know a decision needs to be made, make it clear
  • Help the attendees prepare for the meeting
  • Give context, set expectations, help the invitees make the most of their time

Make the most of your time. You only have this moment once. Memento Mori

Weekly routines

  • End of the day Friday, review the meetings for next week
  • See what others need from you, and make sure you’re prepared
  • For Steve, this is about preparation, and the ability to contribute

A meeting invitive is like an API Endpoint Contract - it’s what you want to talk about and sets the stage for the discussion

45 min: Back to meetings and how to schedule and what information to include

What would it look like if this were easy?

  • Change the way people are thinking about a topic?
  • Interesting article about the topic, and how a musician uses this concept

Safety tip of the day!

  • Use the railing when going up, or down stairs
  • From a project at DuPont, this was a common refrain. Even 15 years later, Steve still holds the railing when using stairs

Wrap up

  • Mindfulness
  • Convergent thinking
  • Divergent thinking
  • Head space, meditation

Are you trying mindfulness? We’d love to hear from you!

Shameless plug for Glow Your Soul who graciously created the awesome t-shirts Steve and Imran are wearing! Please take a moment to check out Glow Your Soul