Today I’ve been thinking about commutes. When I started work, I stayed with my parents and commuted. The drive was 70 minutes each way. It was a chore getting up early to sit in a car for over an hour so I could get to work and sit all day. After work was done, it felt like my day was only beginning because I was rewarded for my hard work with another 70-minute drive home. I don’t think it’s going to shock you, but I wasn’t a fan of the commute. After a year or so of that I decided I was done with driving so I found a place that was a 5-minute walk from my door to my office and jumped on it. Today I broke down the time gained from that move, check it out in the image below. It’s ridiculous how much time I got back. For anyone considering moving close enough to walk to work I wholeheartedly recommend it. I know that my case may be more extreme than others and there aren’t walkable homes around every workplace, but the extra 520 hours a year is a pretty nice benefit. Without this extra time, I can’t imagine I ever would have started Dev-eryday.

Commute Breakdown

For my reading this week I quickly read through Cal Newport’s [Deep Work][dw]. It’s a great book. It lays out exactly why focus is so important in the modern workplace, especially for knowledge workers, and how we can go about practicing deep work. My biggest takeaway was the concept of developing a ritual around performing deep work and sticking to it. For instance, waking up at 5:30 AM and working until 7:30 AM daily with complete focus on that thing. The ritual around creating daily progress will become a habit and lead to a ton of deep work.

Finished

Pluralsight Course(s): Installing and Configuring IIS Servers

Book(s): [Deep Work][dw]

Currents

Pluralsight Course(s): React 16 - The Complete Guide

Book(s): Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, Functional Programming in C#: How to Write Better C# Code

On the Next…

This week I want to spend some time integrating some of the concepts from [Deep Work][dw] into my routine. Lately I’ve been kind of sporadic with my Dev-eryday and side project practices and I’d like to get some more structure created around them. Beyond working on creating structure, I’ll get my write up about the SignalR React Chat App completed. It’s close, I just need to push it through to completion.