“Fine, I’m reading the blog post. OK, Gant. What’s the trick?”

Do less

Okay…

Most developers are familiar with burnout. To fix Burnout, requires a plethora of motivation, healing, and support. The Internet is full of motivational, inspirational, and anti-burnout treatments. But the best way to treat a burn, is not to get burnt.

If you’re fighting through mountains of data to find gold, you’re in trouble. Your time is not worthless, so don’t celebrate when you power through. The best solutions seem obvious and effortless, so why celebrate when you’re overworking? Most likely, you value your time enough to do less and let a few nuggets slip, and that’s OK.

Unsubscribe to emails, filter your socials, and set boundaries like a boss.

It sounds simple, but it’s hard. Let’s take a look at adding filters in action.

Filter Input Data

Developers have to update their knowledge to keep up with technology, constantly. Conferences are the pulse of the community. They give you the researched information sources of the experts. Most conferences release their talks online for FREE, but who has 9+ hours a week to dig through conference talks!?

When a conference releases its talks, search for key phrases that affect your work and build a small evaluation playlist. You will NOT watch all of these videos. Start each video and feel free to jump out as soon as the information seems off.

There is a chrome plugin that gives you the ability to speed up ANY YOUTUBE video. This even works for embedded videos.

Every single speaker at every conference is completely understandable at 1.25x their original presentation speed. And some need to be sped up to 1.5x.

If you’re not used to sped-up speech, just slowly adjust to it until you are no longer bothered by the odd timbre of the voice. The benefit is time.

When you’re done, you’ll have digested days of content in a few hours.

I suggest the same method for podcasts or any other rich medium that is recorded. Pick and choose what’s worth your time, but default to cutting bait quickly after reviewing at an inhuman rate.

You’ll know when you need to slow down and really ponder something, but that’s the exception.

Filter Live Events

When events happen with announcements, you can tune in for a limited time, but afterward, you should disconnect. One hack I love is to watch the hashtag stream in Tweetdeck and then delete the stream afterward.

For example, this is how I would read the audience for an Apple announcement while I’m watching the event. I use the #AppleEvent hashtag on Tweetdeck.

Search query #AppleEvent lang:en min_faves:2.

You’ll be able to keep up with the event AND the effect in real-time. This helps you process the information from several dimensions while it has your focus.

Filter Assigned Tasks

Any unfiltered source is a dangerous source. You need to set filters and boundaries, especially with those who are close to you. It sounds disrespectful, but no one respects your time as much as you do. Make sure you’re comfortable applying boundaries with anyone.

Work boundaries

• “Thank you for thinking of me, but I won’t be able to do that.”
• “I don’t have the bandwidth to do that justice right now.”

Personal boundaries:

• “If you keep talking over me, I’m going to end this conversation.”
• “I’m not okay with that.”

Bring your best work to the table in a few categories, and not all of them. If you can’t filter inbound tasks, you’re not the asset you want to be.

Filter Time: Snooze Don’t Lose

Snooze got a bad wrap for a while. Don’t buy the anti-snooze hype. Your best work is when you’re ready. Developers and creatives can embrace snooze.

You can mute channels and unsubscribe. You’re probably not going to miss that amazing deal, contract, tip, advice that was going to set you apart by reading everything. As a matter of fact, you’ll probably miss it because you’re reading everything.

You might have heard of “inbox zero”. Our very own

If you’re like me, you have issues getting to inbox zero because your inbox almost serves as a TODO list of critical tasks. However, just because a task is critical, it doesn’t mean it is imminent. You can snooze and do less.

Snooze tasks with a reminder system. On Slack use a bot to remind you. In Gmail, use the snooze email feature to remind you. Achieve inbox zero and off-load your worry to a reminder system you can depend on.