This column marks the 30th I’ve written for Leveling Up, in a row, and the 31st overall article I’ve written for PHP Architect. Each month, I’m supposed to send my completed article over to Oscar for editing. Usually, the due date is the 15th of the month which allows time for Oscar and team to edit all the articles, lay them out and generally publish. Many months I have been able to meet this date. Other months, like this one, have been more difficult.

How Procrastination Affects Me

I’m sitting here, right now after 10 PM on May 23rd, trying to write a column that I should have turned in 8 days ago. However, after 30 previous articles, coming up with a topic to write 3,000 words about is not always easy. Typically if Oscar or I come up with a good topic shortly after the previous article is turned in, it’s usually not too difficult to write. The words flow, the topic feels (to me at least) coherent, and everything is good. In other months where the topic isn’t decided until a day or two until the article is due, it can feel like pulling teeth the get it out.

And that’s where we are now. There’s a particularly polarizing sandwich shop that has a number of signs hung up all over the walls with various quotes. One of these is a quote by John C. Maxwell: “If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.” It’s a very easy quote to say and it’s an easy quote to understand, but it’s not always an easy thing to do. I suffer from “Yes”-itis, or possibly FOMO (fear of missing out). So chances are if someone asks me to do something for them or with them, I’ll say yes. What this means is that my time and energy are stretched every thinner as I continue this behavior.

The Front Range PHP User Group

Back in 2009, I took over running a PHP user group, the Front Range PHP User Group. It had been running for a year and elections were held. There had been some problems with how things worked that I felt I could address, and I ended up winning the election. I found out about the group (I think through this magazine) in June or July of 2009. Elections were in September and I ended up running the group, essentially solo until 2014. When I started, I didn’t have what I felt were a huge number of drains on my time, and so for quite some time, I would host, manage, arrange speakers and sponsors, food and drink, and often present one or two talks, per meetup, two times every month. Once was in Colorado Springs, which was an 180-mile round-trip, and once in Denver, two weeks later. After a few months of this and noticing that the majority of the people attending the Colorado Springs meetup were being driven to the meetup by me, in my car, I decided that maybe we should cut back to once per month and only in Denver. This freed up a little time which I filled with various projects for other people, the vast majority of which were done for free.

Eventually, the projects increased, and the stress of running the group, posting videos, recording podcasts, arranging for food and drinks and RSVPs and all the rest got to be too much of a strain and I stepped back, handing off the reins to another organizer. He ran the group for a few months before he moved out of the country and he passed it on to the third. I became involved again in the organization of the group but to a much lesser extent. This lasted a bit longer, but it wasn’t too long before his job role changed and PHP was no longer his focus. He looked for someone to take over, and I have to say I really considered it. The problem though is that I’d taken on a lot of other tasks and responsibilities in the time after giving up running the group and taking it back didn’t seem like a good move.

And so, a few months ago, the Front Range PHP User Group held its last meeting while I was presenting at ZendCon.

Conference Talks and Procrastination

Quite a few of the conference speakers I know suffer from procrastination. There are certainly those that don’t and in many ways, I envy them. Over the past six or seven years, I’ve attended and presented at a handful of conferences each year. While it’s not anywhere near the numbers from a lot of the people in the community that I’ve met and consider friends, it’s still a non-trivial amount of time that’s required to come up with a topic, summarize what I want to talk about in a paragraph or three for submission in call-for-papers. Assuming it gets accepted, there’s still many dozens of hours of creating the outline, putting together the slide deck, practicing and other prep. In the last few talks I’ve built, this also included the taking of thousands of custom photographs to use as the backgrounds for these slides.

Despite any preparation I’ve put in, I still typically end up in a situation where I make changes to my slides the night before I give the talk. In one case I added nearly 90 slides to a talk less than an hour before I ended up delivering it. For workshops or tutorials, the preparation work can be intense. For a few that I’ve done, I created custom VMs with code and scenarios ready for attendees to use and copied these onto dozens of thumb drives. Just copying the drives takes a couple of hours and yet, in a couple of cases, I’ve made changes to my VM in the last few days before giving the workshop which necessitated re-copying everything.

Procrastination and Stress

All of these pulls on my time lead to various ways of deflecting tasks that I need to be focusing on and instead of doing things that don’t matter or matter very little. I don’t know why my brain does this, but it does, and it is frustrating. I know as I stay up playing silly games on my phone until 3 or 4am that it’s not healthy and I need to get sleep and yet, almost the instant I quit out of one game, the next one shows up in its place, somehow, magically, just so I can ensure I don’t miss out on some daily bonus or some other nefarious way of making sure I at least open the stupid game every day.

Last week I ran into three games that were taking up a lot of my time. You may be familiar with them. You click on a button a few times, earn some virtual currency and then use it to upgrade your button, eventually buying new buttons that earn more virtual currency, using that to hire “managers” who can click the buttons for you so you can buy new buttons to click and upgrade. In short, they are pointless time wasters and I was doing really well in three of them at the same time. And in my mind, I knew they are a waste of time, yet they, or rather my, inability to break away from them caused a number of nights with little sleep and many mornings showing up late to work. All of this lead to more stress and more retreating into the stupid games. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-games at all. But for me this type of game can be a bit like crack, but probably less healthy.

This cycle of procrastination leads to an increase in stress, often quite significant. When I’m coming up on deadlines for projects that I still need to work on, it’s not uncommon to feel a bit of panic. Unfortunately, none of this actually helps me complete anything, and more often than not more procrastination happens. It’s an ugly, terrible cycle and I need to find a way to break it.

What Procrastination Looks Like

Procrastination comes in many forms. It can certainly come in the form of playing games instead of getting ready for work or going to bed, but it can also come in the form of being very busy doing things. Procrastination comes about if we spend time on doing lower priority things instead of the more important tasks. It can be choosing to do things which are more pleasurable over things that aren’t as pleasurable. In terms of development, procrastination can come in the form of “bikeshedding”. Bikeshedding, for anyone not familiar with the term, is wasting time on trivial details while the important decisions and tasks remain undone. It is the idea that debating about the color of a planned bike shed prevents the work of building the shed to protect the bicycles. The time wasted on figuring out the color makes no difference whatsoever in the ability of the shed to protect its contents. On a team, bikeshedding can lead to a form of group procrastination and can lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction and loss of morale. It’s important that the leader of the team quickly recognizes and brings a stop to bikeshedding so the team can stay on task and be productive.

As individuals, bikeshedding can lead to additional procrastination, stress, and lack of task completion. This leads to more tasks piling up, more stress, potentially more bikeshedding and ultimately, more stress, more piled up tasks. It’s a vicious cycle. Another commonly used bit of programming lingo is yak shaving. Yak shaving is the seemingly endless set of tasks that must be completed before the project can move along. While yak shaving may be required, it’s important to keep a vigilant eye to ensure that the yak shaving doesn’t lead to bikeshedding. If the task is unimportant or lower priority then it should be treated as such so that the important tasks can be done.

It’s Not Easy

I’m not going to pretend any of this is easy. For certain people with particular personality types, organizational methods and disciplined scheduling techniques, it’s probably not all that hard. Personally, I find it rather hard, sometimes nearly overwhelmingly so. I’ve noticed it happening a lot more lately too. Perhaps this is a symptom of taking on too much at once, or it may be indicative of some other problem I don’t know I have or don’t want to admit I have. I’m not really sure.

In any case, I’ve decided I need to make a change. I wrote about burnout back in 2015 when I was noticing a change in how I was feeling and my outlook on everything. I’m feeling a lot of the same things I was feeling then again now, and I think procrastination is a symptom of that. As such, I’m making changes in what I’m planning on doing immediately and in the near future. Conference speaking has been something I’ve enjoyed immensely over the last several years, but it’s also a large source of stress. Consequently, I only submitted to a single CFP at the end of last year for conferences this year. When I was accepted, rather than being a source of joy and excitement, I felt more of a sense of dread and anxiety. I don’t think it’s supposed to feel that way. So moving forward, perhaps not forever, but for now, I will not be signing up to speak at conferences. This may change when I get myself in order but it may not. It’s much too early to say.

A few years into running the user group, we started video recording the talks. Many of the presentations were, as previously mentioned, given by me, and when I could edit it (editing video takes a long time, you know?) I’d post it to YouTube. I hosted a weekly PHP Study group over Google Hangouts for a number of months with a group of 2-8 other developers looking to learn and improve their skills with PHP. Those were posted on YouTube as well. People outside the group noticed and I started getting subscribers. When the Advent of Code first came out, I decided it would be cool to make a series of screencasts showing how to solve the puzzles using a TDD methodology with PHPSpec and PHP. I got a lot of great feedback really enjoyed making the videos. I gained more subscribers. After a bit, I was approached by a site that provides online video training for developers to become a video training author and build some courses. This involved purchasing better recording equipment and making an audition video. Editing and producing the video took me more than 14 hours for a ten-minute video. I think it may have killed my interest in creating video content for a number of years. I really did enjoy making those Advent videos and I’m hoping to make some new videos some day.

I’ve started a number of blogs and tutorial sites, each with loftier goals than should probably be considered feasible or possible. I built a TDD blog with the intent of blogging about it every day. Within five days of writing 2000-3000 words on it every day, I missed a day and then another and another. As I write this, I’m 1,552 days behind. Another site was to help others learn about Zend Framework. I had the same lofty goals, this time writing a full investigative tutorial about a specific component of the framework. I had planned to publish one per day. These ended up being in the neighborhood of 5-10,000 words each. I think I made it through three. I’m now approximately 2,570 days behind on that site. I hope I’ll make some updates to these sites some day.

I enjoy writing, but as you’re reading this article, some of what you’re reading are my struggles to write it. It’s now May 24th and a bit over 24 hours after starting this article. Parts of writing this have been simple, while other sections have been a real struggle which leads me to my next change. This will be the last edition of this column I’ll be writing for the foreseeable future. I may write more articles in the future, I may even consider having a column, but for now, I need to step back and get my feet back under me and stop feeling like I’m constantly drowning under the weight of everything I’ve agreed to do or want to do.

Final Words

This column started being about procrastination, but as I wrote, especially the last few paragraphs, I realized it’s just as much about burnout, again. We’ve lost members of the community due to burnout and I don’t want to be counted in that number. If you recognize or can relate to these feelings, I urge you to step back and assess whether it’s something you want to continue and make changes before it’s too late. At this point, I still want to program and I still want to be a part of the community, if only from the periphery for a time. I’ve focused on helping others improve their skills as a developer for quite some time (much longer than I’ve been writing this column) but I feel it’s time to focus a bit more inwardly for a time. I need to get my house and my life in order. It’s the same reason they tell you to put your oxygen mask on before helping others - you’re of no use to anyone else if you’re passed out and not breathing.

So, thank you for sticking with me, and if you’ve read all my columns over the last two and a half years, thank you. If you’ve read any of my articles, thank you. I hope they helped. If they didn’t, I’m sorry, but thank you for reading anyway. Thank you for hanging in there with me. I hope I’ll be able to write things for you to read again in the future, but for now, take care of yourself and your loved ones. In the meantime, I’ll be over here trying to sleep more, stress less, and work more towards trying to enjoy life and directing it in a way I want it to go.