upbeat.it

by Cesare Rocchi

The slacker beast

by Cesare Rocchi

Tags: productivity

A new framework is out. A new cool library has been released. You see it mentioned everywhere. You check it out quickly, it really seems cool. You are tempted to jump in. “Jump in” here might mean:

  • I am going to include it in my next project
  • I am going to convince my team to use it
  • I am gonna build a demo project and talk about it at my local meet up
  • I am gonna take sometime off to play with it

I call this the slacker beast. That burning desire of learning something new that looks promising and looks like it’s gonna solve most of the problems you have.

I lived this situation recently when I discovered the Phoenix framework. It’s cool, it’s promising, it has the kind of hype that Rails had back in the day. If I were twenty I’d have jumped in already. I truly believe that learning to use new tools is important. But I also learned the value of letting something sink a bit. This led me to adopt the following strategy.

I collect bookmarks during the week and set a weekly appointment to make the slacker beast happy. For me it’s usually Friday morning. I sift through some of the bookmarks I collected, pick one lib/tool, play with it and see how it goes. It’s just exploration, I don’t necessarily look for something useful right away. So far I have been able to calm down that beast in me.