How to continue to grow in heavy work?

In the Internet culture where overtime culture prevails, many developers feel confused about their personal growth. This article will start from my personal experience and introduce three aspects: how to break the misunderstanding of growth, how to use time efficiently, and persist in precipitation and writing: how to achieve continuous growth in heavy work.

1. Cognition: breaking the misunderstanding of growth

First of all, I want to talk to you about a few cognitions about growth. Including me in the early stage of my career, as well as some colleagues and readers around me, some misunderstandings about growth:

• don't know what to do
• Whatever you do, you are also motivated, and you are constantly improving yourself
• no motivation to do anything
  

Which of the following states do you think you are in?

If you don't know what to do and just repeat your daily work mechanically, you may be in a period of confusion.

If you feel motivated to do everything and go to work and think about getting out of get off work, then you may be in your comfort zone.

Confusion and comfort may both keep us in a state of stagnation, and the best state is between the two, continuously improving ourselves and growing. At this time, some golfers may say that work is really too busy, and there is really no time to take care of personal growth.

Myth 1: Personal growth and work conflict

This is the first misunderstanding I want to talk about. Many golfers feel that personal growth and work conflict with each other. In fact, the opposite is true, because work and growth are inseparable. for example:

• Business ability: An in-depth understanding of the business at work can make you stand out from most colleagues who don't have a deep understanding of the business, and even make you an expert in a certain field. This is the most direct growth.
• Coding ability: Some golfers may deliberately learn some seemingly advanced algorithms to improve their coding ability. In fact, if you think about it carefully, you can refactor your business code to be more clear at work, or design your code structure more reasonably before you start writing business code. This may be a better idea. s Choice.
• Coding skills: Some golfers may want to do some interpretation and analysis of the source code of open source libraries, hoping to get some coding skills from it. In fact, at work, if you can do a good job in the usual Code Review, you may also learn from Many experienced colleagues have gained a lot, and these gains can be directly applied to work.
• Influence: In daily work, the design and review of various technical solutions can also virtually enhance your influence in the team. Of course, the above premise is that you must take it seriously.
  So I always think that a large part of personal growth comes from work. The key is how you view the relationship between growth and work. Don't neglect your usual work for the sake of so-called personal growth. Seeking growth from work is the best choice.

Misunderstanding 2: Doing things you don’t understand is the only way to grow

The second misunderstanding: Many golfers think that they must do things they have never understood before to grow. In fact, in normal work, just passively executing one thing, and doing one thing to the extreme, the final result is completely different. Instead of wasting some time to understand some technologies that may not be used in work in the future , why not choose to do the things you are responsible for now to the extreme?

Myth 3: The more you learn, the faster you grow

The third misunderstanding: Similar to the previous question, does the more you learn, the faster you grow? In fact, it often does the opposite.

A person's brain capacity and memory are limited, so it's no problem to broaden one's horizons and breadth of knowledge, which can make us think more actively when thinking about problems, but the premise of broadening the breadth of knowledge must be that you already have a The direction that the project is very good at, the first 15% will bring you much more benefits than the latter 85%.

So how can we make the most of our limited brain capacity and memory? Choosing the right direction is the most important thing.

From my personal experience, you must choose the direction that you may use in your work, or the direction that can be implemented in your work. **For example, if you want to study performance optimization, and your current job is in the TOB direction, then you must focus on researching performance optimization in PC scenarios. If you want to study TS, you must strive to improve the TS coverage and writing quality of the projects you are working on.

In this way, your personal growth can be better integrated into your work, and your benefits can be maximized. Everyone must understand this, otherwise, no matter how much effort you may put in, it will be in vain.

2. Implementation: How to use time efficiently

Why is it so important to do a good job of "time management", let's take a look at the following scenarios first, have you ever had such thoughts?

• When there are a lot of things that need to be dealt with in front of us, the first thought of many golfers is to finish the simplest things first

• The chaotic type, lacking the most basic arrangement of time and energy
  Sometimes we are busy all day from morning to night, very tired, but feel that we have not done anything

  Lack of judgment and review on the priority of things will make us lose the sense of accomplishment in our work. We
  haven’t reached DeadLine yet, let’s lie down for a while

• Procrastination, I do know what I want to do, but I just can't get motivated

In fact, if we don't think about time and introduce some methods that suit us, it will be difficult for us to avoid the above problems.

This can be explained by a very important law in our physics, which is the law of entropy increase.

在一个孤立系统里，如果没有外力做功，其总混乱度（即熵）会不断增大。

Because things always develop in the direction of entropy increase, so everything that conforms to entropy increase is very easy and comfortable. For example, we like to do simple things and don't like to arrange things in an orderly manner; we like to procrastinate and don't like self-discipline. However, the law of entropy increase has always been considered to be a law that makes the whole universe desperate, because the continuous increase of entropy will make things decline. This concept is broadened, that is, the earth is bound to perish. Back to our real life, it is that people will definitely decline in the process of entropy increase. So Schrödinger also mentioned it in his famous biological book "What is Life":

People are living against the law of entropy increase.

怎么对抗呢？其实从它的概念里面我们就可以知道，想要避免熵增，光靠自然的变化是很难的，我们必须引入一些外力。

2.1 Common time management methods

Back to time management, what are the external forces? We can first look at a few methodologies.

• GTD time management method: remove all kinds of things in your mind by recording, and then organize and arrange yourself to execute. Its core is to manage time around five points: collection, cleaning, organization, review, and execution:

  Collection: collect all time-consuming things in one place, for example, we saw an article, but we don’t have time to read it now, so we need to collect it first; the boss arranged a temporary thing, but now there are other better things, To record first. It's all a collection process.

  Cleaning: This process is actually cleaning up our collection box, because the collection process is often very hasty without too much thinking. It was difficult for me to pick out the one thing to do now from a large number of collected things before I implemented it. So there must be a regular cleaning process.

  Organization: We need to make more fine-grained arrangements for the items that have been cleaned up. For example, we need to reasonably split larger items. According to the different priorities and importance of things, we have to assign them to different schedules.

  Execution: Just execute according to the specific time and place according to the items we have organized before.

  Review: Review and check regularly, because the plan will definitely not keep up with the changes, and we have to adjust the things we have arranged at any time.

• Three frogs time management method: If there are three frogs, eat the biggest and ugliest one first. That is to say, when you are faced with three important tasks, do the more difficult and important one first. In fact, this is essentially the management of priority.

• Pomodoro Management: Divide the execution time into multiple Pomodoros. A Pomodoro consists of two parts: 25 minutes of work and study and 5 minutes of rest. After every four Pomodoros, you can temporarily stop working and take a longer break, about 15 to 30 minutes. There is a very important point here, that is, a Pomodoro cannot be divided. This rule can help us focus on execution, and at the same time achieve a degree of relaxation.

• ** There are still many methodologies for time management, but everyone must avoid mechanically applying them. **Everyone’s actual situation may be different, and the suitable method is also different. For example, I think GTD is too complicated, so I made some deletions according to my actual situation, and at the same time integrated it into different steps other methods. I divide it into three steps: recording, organizing and executing.

2.2 Records: Reminders

The first step is to record. I will write down all the things I can't do right now, but need to do. You can compare it to the collection phase in GTD, but it's not exactly the same.

I will clearly label this matter when recording, for example :

• In terms of work execution : what kind of work was temporarily arranged by the boss, and a demand was reviewed yesterday;
• Technical writing : just received an email, Chrome has been updated to version 104, and we need to study the policy changes;
• Daily life : The soy sauce is almost finished, next time I go to the supermarket to buy a bottle.

Categorizing by tags allows me to know more clearly when and where I need to complete these things, which will make my subsequent steps easier. Of course, my actual label is a bit more complicated than this, and everyone may need to classify it differently according to their actual situation.

If there is a clear time for this matter to be completed, be sure to hang up the DeadLine time reminder . Note that this is not the time to execute this, but the deadline for the completion of this matter, which can make it easier for us to determine subsequent priorities.

Note: The execution time needs to be comprehensively judged based on our current arrangements and the urgency of this matter, and the deadline is often very clear.

What are the tools used to record this step? In fact, our needs are very clear:

• There is a TODO List function

• Tags can be classified for each TODO

• Can have time reminder function

• It can be cross-platform, and can be operated synchronously on PC and App
  . I also tried many Apps before. Finally, I found that Apple’s reminders are tailor-made for me and can meet all the requirements I mentioned above. The functions are very simple, only the few functions I want.

In addition to this, I also use memo. Organize and classify according to different types, and then put the weekly things in a memo, and the priority will be recorded in the form of TODO, and you can check it directly to indicate completion. At the same time, some important things, such as questions from golfers, I will make a backup here.

OK, now that we've documented everything that needs to be done, where and when are we going to get it done? Zhang Yiming, the boss of ByteDance, once said this in one of his interviews, and I was very impressed:

Greater efficiency comes from doing the important things well, not from doing everything well.

Things can never be done, but the time is constant and limited. We will record more and more items in the reminders. The most important thing below is how to finish the most important things in the limited time. in order to obtain the maximum benefit.

2.3 Organize: Prioritize & Plan

The next step is to organize, that is, to arrange the items I recorded into a specific execution plan according to the priority and importance. This step is actually my amalgamation of the cleaning and organizing steps in GTD.

A very important rule is used here, which is the four-quadrant rule. We divide things into four categories according to the importance and urgency of things:

• Important and urgent things : If I don't have other important and urgent things right now, I usually choose to do them right away. If I don't have time right now, then I'll schedule it to the nearest time.

• Important but not urgent : Since something is important, we must do it well. If the matter is relatively large, we can split it into some small tasks and arrange them in the schedule in a planned way. I may use two tools here. The first one is a demand management tool, which can help me better split tasks, teamwork, follow up progress, etc. In this step, I actually complete The conversion from item to demand management, I believe that every company has its own demand management tool, and you can also choose it yourself; the second is the schedule management tool, which can arrange in a more fine-grained manner what time we execute and what to avoid Too many times, I don’t know what to do. For example, most of Byte’s students should use Feishu’s schedule management. It should not be just a dating job. It is recommended that everyone record their own affairs and plans.

• Unimportant but urgent things : We can leave this kind of thing to others. It may not be important to you, but it may be an opportunity for others, so I actually want to say here, not necessarily all You have to do everything by yourself, and other people may not be worse than you. In other words, on the premise that you have other things in parallel, it is very important to make the right "choice".

• Things that are not important or urgent : Don’t even plan for this kind of thing. When the first three things are gone, take it out and look at these things. In addition, it is not recommended to put them in the original position of the to-do list, because this accumulation will make your records difficult to organize over time. It is recommended to put them in one or more filing areas separately, and take them out for a look next time when sorting out, because things that are not urgent may become urgent as time goes by.

However, plans can never keep up with changes. You may have arranged your day's plan, but suddenly received other things. This is very normal. This kind of scene basically happens in my daily life and work. I believe everyone All the same.

The result is actually only two, to do or not to do. If so, do it now or later. We can also use the four-quadrant rule to think:

if it is not important or urgent, just say No to the other party right now; if it is important but not urgent, you can still say NO to the other party now, but you can tell the other party Clear DeadLine, and then record it in the to-do list.

I have seen many golfers who are not very good at refusing, and they may do it immediately when they encounter temporary things. In fact, there may be no difference between what you do now and what you will do in the future. The other party may not be in a hurry, but just needs you to arrange period, but this may cause a delay in your current high priority. It could also be the reason why you run around putting out fires and then feel like you've done nothing at the end of the day.

If it is an important and urgent matter, it needs to be compared with what you are doing now. If it is indeed higher priority than the current matter, just face the adjustment of the plan optimistically. You have to understand that this is still just what you are doing. Repeat your "tidying up" process.

Again, things are endless, but time is limited. We only need to record, organize and execute things according to our standards, whether it is a previously planned thing or a temporary new thing, according to our The method can be arranged into a specific plan in the end. Strictly implement our established standards and face plan adjustments optimistically.

For example, now I will give priority to dealing with the questions of my golf friends, and the questions of WeChat friends will be put later.

2.4 Execution: Relaxed Focus

Finally, comes the execution phase. For me, the Pomodoro time management method is still very good, but I may adjust the time of a Pomodoro appropriately, I will adjust the time of a Pomodoro a little longer, this varies from person to person, you can Experiment a lot and find a time that is more comfortable for you.

For short breaks, there are many ways. For example, looking far away and relaxing your eyes is a rest, standing up and moving your spine is a rest, and replying to some messages is also a rest. If you just sit in your seat and check your phone, this break may not be very meaningful. After a long break, I will choose to deal with some temporary plug-ins, including re-recording, scheduling steps, or answering some questions, doing some CodeReview, etc.

A very important feature of the Pomodoro is that you must stay focused when executing it. If it is not something particularly important or urgent, you must not interrupt this kind of clock. Try to reach the rest time before dealing with other things. If you develop such a habit, even if With very little time, the efficiency of executing one thing will be very high.

There are many tools on the market that use the Pomodoro time management method. They are all fancy, and the choice of use varies from person to person. If you have poor self-control, you can choose an app that automatically locks the screen and blocks other applications for you. But I prefer something more concise, just a countdown reminder with Pomodoro and rest time and a simple statistics function.

The above is my time management method. In fact, it can be regarded as a simplified version of GTD. I have combined the cleaning, organization and review in GTD. At the same time, some other methods are incorporated into each step according to my personal situation. Everyone can also work out their own set of methods according to their actual situation.

Now that there is a method, how to implement this method and achieve the unity of knowledge and action is very important. Here I also have some tips that I have summed up to share with you.

2.5 Technique: find the intersection of things

We will pile up a lot of things that need to be done during the recording stage. Although we remember one by one, there is no need to execute them one by one. As long as we better find the intersection of these things in the finishing stage, we can use the limited time more efficiently.

For example, we recorded in the writing tag that we will output a technical article recently, and in the working tag, we recorded that the system stability is very poor and needs to be optimized. Then the intersection of the two can be: research and implement system stability solutions, and organize practical experience into a technical article.

2.6 Skills: Efficient Communication

In the current work, communicating with others will take up a large part of my time. We need to evaluate needs, track progress, push special projects, answer questions, etc. If all these things are done by typing, the efficiency is very low. Generally speaking**, face-to-face communication is more efficient than voice communication, and voice communication is more efficient than typing. **

Because when we are typing, no matter how many expressions and modal particles we add, it is difficult to clearly feel the tone, attitude, and mood of the other party, and it is even more difficult to explore some deep thoughts. Ineffective communication during typing A lot of time will be wasted. Therefore, when I want to communicate a slightly more complicated matter, if the person who needs to communicate is very close to me, I will definitely choose face-to-face communication; if I am not in the same position, I will try to communicate by voice; If you cannot communicate by voice, choose to communicate by typing.

Of course, this is only for some more complex content communication. If the content you need to communicate has a clear conclusion, such as: yes, no, right, wrong, such an answer, it will be easier to type.

2.7 Technique: Fragmented Time

The last one is fragmented time. This also varies from person to person. In my daily life, there are two very fixed pieces of time. Because I live far away from the company, my daily commute is very long. It takes about an hour to get to work and 40 minutes to get off work. But these two periods of time are very important to me.

I usually do this step of "organizing" during my commute to work, customizing my plan for the day. If things pile up a lot that day, I will make appropriate adjustments during the evening commute and add it to the plan for the next day. The rest of the time is for reading, and most of my reading time during the week comes from these two commutes. The reading here will not only include some technical articles and books, but also some documents that will be involved in the work of the day. This not only allows me to quickly adjust to work, but also allows me to keep receiving new things. Therefore, in my previous work experience, I have always been very tolerant of commuting distances. I even moved to a place very close to the company for a period of time, which made me very uncomfortable.

I believe that everyone will have such fragmented time more or less in normal times, because it is impossible for you to spend all your time in intense work. After all, human energy is limited, and it is impossible to stay focused all the time. So how to arrange these fragments of time may become a magic weapon for you to stand out.

2.8 Persist in precipitation and writing

There are so many sharings about time, let's talk about precipitation and writing. I think it's the secret to our continued growth.

Technical writing is not necessarily an article published externally. I personally divide writing into two categories:

• Personal precipitation: it can be daily work records, some knowledge fragments, your personal knowledge system, etc.;
• External sharing: including technical solutions in work, technical articles published externally, etc.
  Both have their own advantages. I suggest that you implement both types of writing. We can start with the simplest personal precipitation.

2.9 Personal Precipitation

• what is the benefit?
  What are the benefits of being a personal precipitation? First of all, it can help us consolidate our memory. Regarding memory, I believe that everyone has learned a theory when they were in school. If we memorize a knowledge point, after a month, your memory of it may only have 20% left. Of course, if it is a genius, we will not talk about it. I believe that most people, including me, are the same.
  

For example, sometimes when we complete a job, we may have a strong sense of accomplishment at the time, but if you don’t summarize and settle it, after a while you will find that there is nothing left in your mind about it, and you may reach a certain level. After time, it doesn't seem to make any difference whether you did it or not. So many students have been working for a long time, but they don't understand what they have done. Although they seem to have more work experience, what is the difference between them and the students who just graduated? On the contrary, if you carry out proper precipitation and summary every time you complete a piece of work, the result may be completely different. After a period of time, you will clearly know what you have learned, what you have left behind, and even the pain points left in your work and future plans will be very clear.

Another very important point is that we can integrate the work summaries and knowledge fragments accumulated in our work into our knowledge system. I think a set of own knowledge system is an integral part of everyone's growth process . It has a great effect. First of all, it can make us understand ourselves more clearly. For example: How much content do I know, what am I best at, what abilities do I lack, and which of these lacking abilities are needed for work?

In fact, many students can't explain these simple points clearly. In addition, it can also be used as our knowledge index, as mentioned above: even if we precipitate and summarize in time, it is impossible to retain 100% of the memory, but when we use this knowledge, there is a place where we can A quick index helps us find them, which saves us a lot of time.

2.10 Build a personal knowledge system

So let's take a look at how to build our personal knowledge system by bottoming out and summarizing. A basic personal knowledge system needs to meet the following three points:

• Convenient management: We don't want to design the whole process too complicated or too long, otherwise it will be difficult to continue. I used to be obsessed with the migration of all kinds of fancy note-taking software. Later, I found that many functions were unusable, and the complicated process was difficult to stick to. In fact, as long as it can meet our most basic requirements for knowledge management, the simplest is the most OK

• Be systematic: For example, we can present your entire knowledge system in the form of a mind map, otherwise if it is just a messy record, there is no systematic arrangement. Then the latter knowledge system will definitely be abolished, which is actually a process of entropy increase. We must go through a systematic arrangement to make knowledge orderly and avoid system collapse. In addition, a systematic organization will allow us to see that our knowledge system is constantly expanding, which will give you a great sense of accomplishment. At the same time, in the process of improving the knowledge system, you can also clearly see your strengths and weaknesses, which allows us to have a clearer understanding of ourselves and allows us to formulate targeted learning plans.

• Easy extraction: If the acquisition path of knowledge is very deep, even if it is recorded, it may be dusty in the future, so the ability to quickly index is still very important.

Just like the time management above, knowledge management also varies from person to person. Everyone needs to choose a method that suits them according to their own personal situation. Let me talk about how I do knowledge management.

2.11 How to do a good job in knowledge management

The reminders at the bottom and the Feishu schedule are actually part of our time management above, so my time management and knowledge management also overlap. The most direct is the record of external input, I divide them into three categories:

• I will record the things that need to be executed in the reminders: I will sort out the records in the reminders and convert them into schedules and plans in the Feishu calendar. After execution, I will review and review the completed things Reflect, organize into articles, and improve into the knowledge base.

• I will record some inspirations, ideas, and some fragmented knowledge through Yuque Xiaoji: The knowledge fragments in Yuque Xiaoji will also be improved into the knowledge base through regular filing and summarization.

• Some good articles I usually see, I will save them in Cubox: I will record the records and thoughts generated in the reading in the small notes, and if there is a complete summary and precipitation, I will directly record them in the knowledge base .

The content in the knowledge base has been classified and systematically summarized, and I will improve the newly added content into the knowledge network. In fact, the knowledge network is the organization of categories and directories in the knowledge base. After a long period of precipitation and sorting out, my knowledge network and knowledge base have become very complex, so I have a very clear understanding of myself. I know what skills and knowledge I have mastered, and I can extract them anytime and anywhere when I use them. At the same time, I also know which branches I have are relatively weak. If I am more interested in these branches, or if they are related to my future There may be intersections between my work, so I will learn them in a targeted manner.

3. External sharing

3.1 What are the benefits

Next, let’s talk about external sharing. Being able to export your own writing content to the outside world is actually even more beneficial. Here I will say three points.

First of all, in terms of personal understanding of knowledge, sometimes it is relatively easy to understand a knowledge by yourself. Maybe after reading a related article, you will feel that you have understood it. **But when you try to explain the knowledge you understand to others, you will find that it may not be as simple as you think. **You may need several times the depth of understanding to explain a piece of knowledge to others. Of course, in addition to bringing you personal improvement, external sharing will also bring benefits to your workplace, such as improving your personal influence, driving the overall technical atmosphere of the team, and so on. Let me tell you about some of my writing experiences.

#写作技术: Branch first, leaf later
Personal precipitation is ultimately for us to see, so no matter how messy the writing is, as long as we can understand it, it will be fine. However, if the article is to be shared externally, it must have a clear organization and structure. It is best to first branch and then leaf, first list the overall structure and outline of the article, and then fill in and improve it. There are many rules in the structure that everyone can apply. The simplest rule is the 2W1H rule, that is: what, why, and how. For example, my recent article explaining Early Hints is dismantled like this:

• Why: Why do you need Early Hints? Performance issues with resource loading
• What: What exactly are Early Hints? HTTP 103 status code, what kind of website is suitable for Early Hints
• How: How to enable Early Hints

Having a good structure and outline will not only make your writing easier but also make your readers more comfortable.

3.2 Writing skills: make good use of pictures

The second point is to make good use of pictures. Sometimes it may take a lot of text descriptions to explain the clear content, and a picture can do it.
For example: we want to explain in the article how to understand the concept of load balancing?

We can find in the picture: there are many service windows in front, and there are many users who need services below. We need a tool or strategy to help us allocate so many users to each window to achieve full utilization of resources and less queuing time.

We have three testing strategies to choose from:

• The first is the default polling strategy, that is, polling all client requests is assigned to the server.

• The second is to prioritize requests to less stressed servers.

• The third is a limited selection of servers with the fastest response times.
  You can take a look, is it possible to add a few pictures to surpass a large number of text descriptions?

3.3 Writing Skills: Thinking From the Reader's Perspective

The last thing I want to say is to think more from the perspective of readers. Because the first purpose of our external articles is for readers to read, and readers do not necessarily have the same knowledge background as us. Try to think about it, if you are a reader without relevant knowledge background and want to acquire relevant knowledge, what kind of article do you want to see? Of course, it’s not a screen full of technical terms, or disorganized notes, or even no handling at all. I believe that if everyone can do this, the articles they write will not be too bad.