Balance

About this Episode

On this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike hosts a large panel discussion about balance in engineering and why extremes tend to hurt teams. He opens with a cycling story about staying upright on a narrow strip of packed gravel, using it as a metaphor for finding the “middle path” instead of letting the pendulum swing from one extreme to another. The group quickly agrees balance is everywhere in work, from meetings to planning to personal wellness, and the question becomes how to recognize when you have drifted too far.

Meetings become the first concrete example. The panel talks about how remote work made it effortless to invite too many people, schedule too often, and fill calendars until there is no time left to actually build. They debate what “enough” meetings looks like, noting that too few meetings can also be a problem when people lose context, alignment, or a clear understanding of priorities. Ideas include limiting meeting size, setting blackout hours for individual contributors, using short meetings with tight agendas, and treating unclear requirements as a sign to pause work rather than plow ahead.

From there, the conversation shifts into sustainable pace, velocity, and measurement. Will and Dave share stories about burnout, crunch time, and how more hours do not necessarily translate into more output, especially when fatigue just pushes life admin and distraction into work time. Alfred and others extend the metaphor with cadence and “gearing down,” arguing that there is an effective operating range where teams move fast enough to be productive but not so fast they break. The group closes on the importance of self-assessment and metrics, like blocked focus time, screen-time signals, sleep, and other indicators that you are drifting, so you can correct early and keep the long-term trend line healthy.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. I have with me Kyle, for the first time, Alfred. We've got Will Archer. We've got Dave. We've got Sam. For the first time, Thomas, and also, for the first time, James, and Jordan. Those of you listening, you can look in the notes if you want [chuckles] any details.

But we're all here to have a conversation on a topic I've thought about for a long time, and I thought today was a good time to bring it up. And, as usual, I'll introduce it by bringing up something outside of software. I've mentioned this a few times: I've done a lot of cycling in the last few years, a few reasons for that, but I've really enjoyed it.

It definitely leads me to think a lot about balancing [chuckles], and actually, I don't think a lot about it because that's the thing about being on a bike. If you don't have the internalized idea of balancing, you don't stay on the bike. So, very quickly, as you learn to ride a bike, the balancing part becomes so internalized you don't think about it because that's what riding on a bike is, is keeping balance. You don't lean too far in either direction. Bad things happen, or it changes your control, right? It sends you in a direction, and you want to choose to do that, not do it by accident.

I was thinking about this a lot, actually, I've thought about it off and on since a ride I went on earlier this year. I went to a hilly area in northwest Illinois, and it goes up into Wisconsin, and Iowa, and Minnesota. There's a place called the Driftless Area, sometimes it's called The Driftless. And it wasn't glaciated in the last Ice Age, and so it's very hilly, unlike what you normally think of when you think of the Great Plains, because it's not the plains; it's the hills [laughs]. And it's really pretty, really pretty area. In the summer, everything's lush and green, well, pretty anytime.

But I was there right at midsummer and was climbing up a hill where they just...I looked at it on the map [chuckles]. I had not been there. I climbed up this steep, long gravel hill, and they had freshly laid soft gravel on it. That is hard on a bike, I'll have you know [chuckles]. It's hard on probably any vehicle, but especially on a bicycle. And, honestly, I couldn't make it up the soft gravel, except where I followed a tread where a vehicle had been up ahead of me.

But that meant that I had about six inches of room to ride in, and if I went to one side or the other, I was stopped. I was hard stopped. I'd get off the bike, walk to a space that's a little flatter to get back on because you're not going to get back up on the gravel.

And I've thought about that a lot since, you know, following the middle of that line is the right way. And there's lots of things in life, including in business, where we have a tendency to ride a pendulum. We swing to one side, then we swing to the other. We'll even add some moralizing to it, saying, well, if a little of something is good, then more is better, right? So, let's go really far that way. And that pendulum swing is often not very healthy.

There's an alternative approach to seek for the appropriate middle path. There's a long philosophical tradition here. I'm not going to go into it deeply for the podcast. I'll say, many wise thinkers have found that seeking for balance is better than pursuing an extreme. You want to stay in the lane in your car? You want to balance your bike? You want to keep a canoe upright? You want to spend within a budget? You want to walk? You want to eat properly? The need to balance the system is all around us.

So, how does this apply to software engineering? What are some things that we should actively keep in balance rather than going to extremes? I've got a list written down.

KYLE: Meetings.

MIKE: What's that? Meetings. Okay, let's talk about meetings. Please go deeper.

KYLE: When your calendar is meetings all day, you can't get anything done. But a meeting to get onto the same page on a task, I mean, that's really needed. But I feel like, at some point, especially as a company grows, you're in meetings all the time. And rather than using other, you know, communication methods, which for some reason we kind of grow out of those, it kind of feels like, rather than defaulting back to those quick communications either over chat or in person, a lot of the time it's, "Hey, can we have a meeting?" before we even try any of those quicker approaches. Give me an email.

MIKE: So, how do you go about balancing that? How do you find that sweet spot?

WILL: I miss the days when you just kind of got it for free. Because if you had to book a meeting room, there's only five meeting rooms, so you better need the meeting room. You know, like, you couldn't just be like, "Oh, hey," like, I mean, think about right now, I mean, I haven't seen the new Acima office. But I saw the old-new Acima office. And if we needed nine seats to hang out at the old-new Acima office, it would be not impossible, but, like, certainly an ask, you know. But now it's just sort of, like, I could be in two meetings right now. Like, literally virtually occupying, like, two meeting rooms as a headless, you know, muted entity right now [laughs].

MIKE: Why stop at two? [laughter]

DAVE: Yeah, there's only three numbers in computer science, and you have reached many [laughter].

MIKE: Yeah, it is hard to control. It's something that the pandemic threw all of us into, and we're still swimming in it [chuckles].

WILL: I don't know. I mean, you know, this is just dreaming or whatever. But, I mean, I feel like...I'll make a little pie in the sky, like, dream. Like, what if based on your level, right? Like, the organizer of the meeting can only invite so many people, right? So, if you're, like, you know, like maybe, like, let's say, like, an individual contributor, you know, senior and below, you're going to have a four-person meeting. If you want between four and eight, you need to get your manager. If you want, like, 10, you're going to have to get a director or whatever equivalent, you know what I mean? But, like, you can't just have meetings like that. Like, if somebody wants 20 people in a room, they may need to have a certain level of seniority to make that kind of demand on that many people's time.

MIKE: Something [crosstalk 06:46] to that.

WILL: And if you needed that many people in a meeting but you don't necessarily have the seniority to, like, command it, you probably should write it down anyway [laughs].

MIKE: There's the pizza rule that people have talked about, you know, as many people as can eat a couple of large pizzas is the maximum you're allowed to have in a meeting, some of those rules of thumb. But if we're not all meeting, and this is true...even in offices where most people are in person, you're going to have that contractor, right? Or you're going to have the person...I was in a meeting today with somebody who is laying in bed with serious back pain, [laughs] and technology lets them be in the meeting. Otherwise, they would not be in the meeting. They would just be in bed.

So, you know, it's great, but you have to recognize that there's going to be people who are going to be there virtually. And so, it makes it really easy, like, oh, I can throw 100 people in here. It's really easy to throw people in. And I think that that's a muscle that we need to start flexing [chuckles] more than we have.

WILL: I mean, if I'm being totally honest with you, like, I think individual contributors should have blackout hours, you know, like, blackout hours. I know a lot of people...I've been in many offices where they're, like, "We're not having meetings on Friday." I don't love that one because I'm still, you know, it's like you're sort of, like, waving the white flag on an entire day, and I got stuff to do, man. But, like, company-wide, like, individual contributors, like, two-hour block, where it's like, no, no meetings. No meetings during these two hours. You have to get some work done sometime, don't you [laughs]?

MIKE: Well, and we've implemented something very close to that at Acima. Afternoons, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we have designated for our team leaders and our delivery managers to do planning, and individual contributors get to just do work. I think that has been fantastic [laughs]. There are six hours a week where you know you have dedicated time. And I think that's one of the better things we've done.

KYLE: Is that under the engineering umbrella?

MIKE: It is.

KYLE: Okay.

MIKE: Yeah, if you look at the calendars for Tuesday through Thursday [laughs], from 1 to 3 Mountain Time, it's blocked out.

DAVE: Just don't join that meeting, please. [laughter]

MIKE: There's a placeholder, and there's a spot to see if somebody's going to join the placeholder meeting [laughs].

KYLE: Nice.

MIKE: [laughs] [inaudible 09:36]

DAVE: I've got a question related to that.

MIKE: Yes.

DAVE: So, we all hate having too many meetings. But we're talking about moderation here, and zero is another extreme.

MIKE: It is.

DAVE: How do you know when you're not having enough, (And I hate myself for saying this.) when you're not having enough meetings?

WILL: I think I'm actually in this...I'm in this point, like, right now. So, like, what I'm doing, more or less, you know, at a high level right now is I'm just sort of fire jumping into, like, whatever project is not going well. And so, I don't have, like, a real clear chain of command, and I have to go out, and, like, you know, find the stuff, right?

And so, if you don't know what you're working on, what your next sort of, like, task is, and where it fits into the broader context of, like, the company's, you know, short to medium-term goals, right? Like, if you don't know where you are and where you're going, you're not in enough meetings. If you're not fully engaged, you know, at the level that you're supposed to be at, then you're not in enough meetings. And then you need to go out and, you know, integrate yourself.

So, I think I need...I think I wrapped the last one, and so now I need to figure out where the smell of smoke is coming from now. And so, I just need to go and, like, rattle people's cages to be like, all right, I know that smoke has come back...I hear the alarms. They're coming from somewhere. What's going on now [laughs]?

KYLE: So, let's say you're not having enough meetings. And let's say, between that and work, there's no bandwidth for more meetings that are needed. What kind of balance would you try to strike there? Because then you have to sacrifice quality somewhere if that is the constraint, so...

WILL: So, paint that picture more clearly.

KYLE: Sure.

WILL: You're saying, like, you're overwhelmed by work. But you're also not in enough meetings, like, so you don't have context? Is that what you're talking about?

KYLE: Sure. So, let's say your team has touch points across six other teams that form upstream dependencies for you. Let's say your team happens to be the largest team in an organization, and just getting through the administrative process of making sure they're on track is enough work. They have a lot to do. And we're still not meeting enough with all of our cross-team collaborators or getting the right business requirements in perfect alignment because it is so vast. Let's call it resource-constrained from a person's standpoint.

And then, add to that, we're not meeting enough to really stay in lockstep enough because of the fluidity of certain roadmaps. And so, I was just curious. That's not the biggest wrench I could throw into that. But if you were at odds with, I don't have enough meetings; I need more, but time is a constraint, what strategies do you think you might employ to mitigate something like that?

MIKE: I might push a little bit on that and say, if you haven't defined the requirements for a project, it shouldn't be getting worked on.

KYLE: Oh, totally fair.

MIKE: So, if you have a scenario where people are getting out ahead of the planning, I think that that is...you've got too many people on the team. Somewhere there's a constraint, right [laughs]? There's a challenge where you've not organized the team effectively. And I would suggest that...and, actually, we have kind of a policy like this, that if you don't have a description, you know, a clear description of what the work is, a clear definition of work within the story, you should not start it.

Now, what you're saying is that I might have some people sitting around, well, that's...And I happen to know about some unique situations you may be talking about that have happened in the past. I think that we should maybe think about that as a different problem, that that is distinct from a problem of meeting necessarily, because that's a problem of work organization rather than meetings per se. And you can always have people collaborating on getting definitions, you know, working very closely with the product team, for example, and structure so you're cranking out a bunch of plans as needed.

WILL: I don't know whether I characterize what you're describing as a balance problem so much as a volume problem. I mean, like, this is just sort of, like, you know, planning, leadership, organization bandwidth is being exceeded, right? So, like, you're over-constrained. I mean, it's not fundamentally different than, like, oh, if I'm a developer and I have more tickets than I can clear in a sprint being assigned to me, it's like, well, you need more help.

And, like, the solution isn't as directly applicable, you know, when it's like, you can't just...you know, just like you can't just add developers, you can't just add managers to do your managing for your management. Like, you can't just wave a magic wand to do that. But I see it as a capacity issue, not a balance issue, you know what I mean? Like, you just run at 150% capacity, and that isn't sustainable. And, like, there's no balancing your way out of that.

MIKE: You mentioned sustainable, which is interesting because that does imply balance, though [laughs]. You're running too hot. That's not going to last. You're going to have to pull back somehow.

WILL: Well, I mean, it's interesting. Like, I remember your analogy when you were talking about the bike, and you're talking about balance. And, you know, and I think that's an interesting subject because it's not really how I think about it necessarily.

How I think about balance at work is maybe more akin to, like, sort of, like, personal wellness and well-being and mental health, which is not...Ideally, I'd say, like, personally, like, my ideal for mental health is, like, you know, like, steady improvement. Like, I want to be a better person this year than I was last year.

But within the context of every day, and every month, and every year, I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to have a good day; I'm going to have a bad day. And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to fall off the wagon, and I'm going to get back up. And, hopefully, the trend line is going up. But within the context of any given day, I'm doing everything I can to win the day. But I, you know what I mean, I expect to have bad days. I expect to make mistakes. I expect to, like, ooh, not doing great and then kind of bring it back up.

And the reason I say that is because, like, you know, having been an engineer for a long time, there's always going to be crunch, and there's always going to be deadlines. And there's always going to be Black Friday disasters. And then there's going to be times where, like, you know, you wrap the last project, and you're ramping up on the middle project. And, like, maybe you're not, you know, maybe you're not as efficient as you could be. But you're sort of resting and recovering and, like, learning, God help you, you know. Like, maybe that's when you have an opportunity to tool up.

But it's just more chaotic, and I plan for the chaos and ups and downs and, like, just weird stuff happening that I have to deal with. And I'm never going to achieve perfect equilibrium. I'm just sort of going to try and do better and better and better and better within the context of just how the business is. It's like, yeah, okay, I might have to put some overtime in this week because I got to make my deadline. And I've never made a deadline clean in my life, you know [chuckles]? I make them, but it's a little messy every time, you know?

THOMAS: What you brought up, Mike, the comparison of, like, cycling, right? I also think balance kind of takes into...I know that pendulum, right? I don't think there's a set time of when we can swing from side to side. And, for example, you brought up with cycling on a hill, right, a hill that was very hilly, and the ground was uneven and everything, to where you had to lean to certain sides and everything to navigate that.

So, you're essentially, you know, maybe leaning into that extremity, but making sure you have that discipline to recenter back to balance. Like you're saying, if you don't have that balance and you don't want to, you accidentally lean to the side and you fall, you're lacking that discipline. So, I think balance also plays a lot into the idea of disciplining and maintaining when you are entering that extremity to return back to a centralized spot.

MIKE: I love that idea. You're saying that you're going to have to lean to one side sometimes, and you need to have the discipline not to stay there.

KYLE: I would almost say the discipline would come in in knowing how to lean and how far, so that as well as, you know, going in or coming out of it, like, there's a...yeah, I like that thought of leaning into the pressure, so to speak.

ALFRED: One point I want to just, like, bring up, you know, it would be interesting to think about that. Now, giving this biking example, the slower you move, the less likely you will be keeping the balance. The faster you do, well, obviously, if you run too fast, you know, you'll run into an accident. But if you, like, keep the right speed, right, and it should be fast enough, then you keep a good balance, right?

You know, a similar scenario, because I do woodworking, you know, I do a lot of, like, [SP] lathe type of work, you know, woodturning. And then if you want to, like, turn a really nice pen, you have to keep your speed at, like, you know, somewhere 2,000 RPM or above. The slower you go, you mess things up. So, the balance, does it anything to do with a faster speed or a slower speed?

MIKE: You're right. If you're going really slow on a bike, you're probably going to fall down [chuckles]. That's when you tend to fall down. So, you get that momentum going, it helps you go in the right trajectory. So, are we saying that on new things where we're still getting our feet under us we tend to lurch too far in the wrong direction?

ALFRED: No, I'm trying to say is, in fact, you know, keeping, like, a high velocity helps a lot with balancing. But if you don't have that kind of velocity, then the balance, you know, it's not even in motion.

WILL: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know [laughter]. I don't think about it that way. You know, I suppose, like, how I think about it, and, like, this is something that I've used a lot in engineering, is, like, sort of, like, so you got, like, an engine or a bicycle, anything, right? Like, your feet turn over at a particular speed, right? Like, you turn your feet at a particular speed. That's how fast they turn when they're working efficiently, right? Same with the car motor, right? Like, the engine works efficiently at a particular RPM.

And so, you have gears, right, that allow you to adapt to the terrain, that allow you to adapt to, you know, a hill. I'm going up a hill, right, I'm going to use one gear. If I'm going down a hill, I'm going to use a different gear. Because, fundamentally, the engine, like, my legs, my body, my brain, it works at a particular speed.

And one of the things that I've gotten good at over the years, like, sort of, like, doing engineering stuff, is I've gotten really, really good, or I've practiced at least, being able to gear down when I'm faced with something really tough and slow my progress. Like, when you get, like, just some problem that's just giving me fits, right? It's ruining my life. I can't figure it out. I can't figure it out. I can't figure it out. Well, I'll gear down, and I'll start working on smaller chunks, smaller pieces. I'll abstract things away. I'll work on simpler problems and try and, like, construct a solution for that.

And so, the way I look at it, speaking just for me, like, I find I've got a rhythm, and I've got a cadence. And if I can keep my engine turning at the cadence that I work most efficiently at, whether I've got a giant hill to climb and I'm just going to have to go as fast as I can go, or it's downhill and I can just speed through things that are easy for me, and I'll just hit a lot of ground really quickly, like, as long as I can maintain that steady rhythm, that steady pace, like, mentally, then I find that I'm really effective and really efficient, you know? Like, uphill or downhill, my brain can output what it can output, you know?

MIKE: You talk about that optimal range, you know, Alfred, you talk about too slow on a bicycle, but too fast isn't good either. The people who set records, they have to ride behind a vehicle that blocks them from the wind. Because you get going fast enough, you turn a little bit, and the way the crosswinds will affect you, they'll throw you out of balance, and you'll go down. The bicycle is only designed to work within a certain range, and too slow is bad. Too fast is also bad. There's a range in which that works.

ALFRED: Exactly.

MIKE: And thinking about what Will is saying about uphill and downhill, you know, your engine, I think your heart rate is the same. I got a smart watch a couple of years ago. I watch my heart rate [laughs]. I think about that. And I know if I'm going to get near my peak heart rate, I can feel it. I can also look. I can usually know without even looking at the watch. I can say, yeah, I'm near my peak here. I can't go much faster than this. Because I know that's the range in which I work effectively. You know, I'm going to have to either go into a lower gear or if the hill is steep enough [chuckles], just pull it down as much as I can pull --

WILL: [inaudible 23:17] and walk.

MIKE: Yeah, exactly. And that might happen, right, because it's outside of the workable parameters. So, there is that acceptable range. It's not like greater velocity infinitely, you know, you can't keep going up in velocity and expect it to stabilize. There's actually that range. And if you don't stay in that range, again, avoiding the extremes, it's not going to work.

WILL: It's true. It's true. I mean, I think it's one of the things about sort of, like, I think, modern knowledge work that I think it's a little bit weird. And I don't love it in that, like, people have this sort of, like, you know, like, 9 to 5, 40-hour week, you know, in their heads, which, you know, originally, it was designed by Henry Ford because that was peak efficiency for people who were assembling Model Ts, right, that was it, right? Like, your physical body has constraints, and you'll start being sloppy, making mistakes. Like, you'll get injured, like, bad things will start happening.

It's like, okay, cap them out at 40 and then get them off the line because, like, it's no longer efficient for me to keep employing you, right? Like, I mean, that was the genesis of the 40-hour workweek. And I don't know whether people have 40 hours of programming in them. I don't think they do. I think most people don't sustainably, you know? And a lot of times, when you start factoring in meetings and stuff like that, like, I've seen 50 more often than I haven't. And, like, people just don't work effectively that way.

DAVE: There's a really interesting book that came out, like, in 1990 or so. It's really old. It's called Peopleware. It's an unfortunate name because some very famous software is out there now called Peopleware, and they're not related. The book Peopleware is by Tom DeMarco and Lister. DeMarco and Lister is what you're looking for.

But they talk about all the human factors that go into, like, efficiency and productivity. And one of the things that they noticed is that if you add, like, if you're a video game shop and you go around and you tell all your employees, "I need 50-hour weeks out of you from now on," what you're going to see is 10 hours a week of programmers sitting at their desk, shopping online, balancing their checkbook. This was back when people had checkbooks.

Basically, all of the soft time costs that you had in your personal life that you needed to be free and focused to do work, that just gets absorbed by your work time. And you don't get a single line of code extra out of it. Now you're in business of babysitting somebody taking care of their other needs.

WILL: This is something that happened to me years ago, right? I ran a software company, right? And, like, I wasn't, like, a contractor. I was, like, making my own stuff for myself, right? I had a big release, and I worked just insane hours. It was like, 80, 100, I don't know. Like, I just went home to sleep if I slept, but I got it out, right? And that's why I'm like, oh, balance, you know, whatever [laughter]. So, I got my release out. It's out, released the software, all good, but it's still my shop, right? So, like, there's no such thing as PTO, right, because I still have to be there.

And I knew I was completely obliterated. I was totally scorched earth, burnt out. But I had this software on my laptop called RescueTime, right, and it just tracks what you do: when you log in, when you log out, what do you do. Anything on your laptop, it's all logged there, right? And I just had it running passively for years to just see how I was doing. Because I was interested because it was my shop, right? And I was interested in efficiency. I was interested in maximum productivity, but I could do what I wanted. There was nobody who was going to tell me how to schedule my day, how to do my work.

So, I was like, okay, listen, I know I'm screwed. My brain is pudding. I'm going to go in every day at 10:00, and I'm going to work until I just don't feel like working anymore, and then I'm going to leave. I'm going to do that for a week, and I'm going to grant myself just a little bit of grace to do this thing. And productivity-wise, dead flat even, dead even, dead even, like, in terms of actually getting to work this 80-hour, crazy week because I was burned out before I even started the week. But I was just going to sit in this chair until it was done, no matter what.

And then, like, the week where I'm just like, I'm just going to do whatever, you know what I mean? If I get 30 minutes, if I get an hour, if I get 2, then that's just what it's going to be, you know. No zero days, but I'm not going to be a hero. I already did that, exactly, exactly the same, exactly the same amount of productivity. And I was just like, oh [laughter], that's not how I feel about it. I still don't know how to feel about it, but I did take a lesson [laughs].

DAVE: There's two things I love about that story, Will. The first one is that you actually went and got data, and that's rare. But the even more rare thing, the second thing you did is you listened to the data once you had it.

WILL: [inaudible 28:18]

DAVE: A lot of people don't like their core beliefs challenged, right?

WILL: And not...I didn't listen well [laughter]. Like, me and the long [inaudible 28:26] we're still familiar.

DAVE: Okay, you need to be beaten with the stick a little more.

WILL: [laughs]

DAVE: Okay, that's fair.

WILL: I just keep it in my mind. Like, it's just like Jiminy Cricket shows up on my shoulders, like, you should show up, man.

MIKE: We talked about this in an episode, I don't know, a while ago. I had some burn out a few years ago. And the sort of thing, we're putting in tons of hours, just always going, going, going, going. And we as a team dropped the amount of time that we were spending, and our productivity went up [laughs]. And I felt so much better.

Like, what have I learned from this? And I've made a really conscious effort now for years to draw limits, draw boundaries, don't go too far, because I know it's not actually going to help. And, actually, my career's done better [chuckles] as a result. You know, having those boundaries did not hurt me at all.

DAVE: I would argue you do kind of need both, right? It's like, when we go to the gym, we're not there for moderation, right? We are there to tax the system as hard as...we're there to tax the system so hard it becomes damaged so that it repairs back stronger, right?

And when I hear these stories, and I think about my own war stories of, like, when I had a sleeping bag under my desk at Evans & Sutherland because the graphics drivers were due and had to get done. And was that sustainable? No. Did it change who I was for later? Yeah, kind of.

It made certain stresses just become zero for me. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know how to deal with that. That's...doing an all-nighter tonight. It sucks, but okay. And that sets up a dynamic balance where one day you come in, and you just absolutely sweat blood out of your eyeballs. And then the next day you come in and you just kind of get through. And at the end of the week, you have to look back and say, longitudinally, how did we do?

And I like doing that intermittent thing just to look back and make sure, did I have...if I've got five days where I'm cranking, you know, 2,000 lines of code a day, by Friday, I have to look back and go, I maybe need to talk to my therapist. We might need to adjust my medication. This is not [laughter] a healthy level of sustaining. This is...everyone around me is going to be, Dave is full ADD squirrel this week. Watch out. Or the same thing, you get to Friday, and you look back, and you go, everything stumped me this week. Why was I low on resources? And you can kind of come at it strategically for, like, how will I deal with this at a larger scale.

WILL: And, I mean, that exact reason is why I like the analogy of wellness and mental health, right? Because my wife's a therapist, right? So, I get a lot of lessons from her in terms of, like, people managing their mental health and going through things. And, like, one of the big problems with mental health is, when you're doing everything right, and you're going to sleep, and you're going to the gym, and you're eating well, and you're drinking in moderation. You're just, like, staying off social media. You're doing everything right. You're checking all the boxes. You feel great.

And then you stop because you feel great. And you're like, I've graduated, but you didn't [laughs], you know. It's like, oh, I've been taking my meds every day for six weeks. I've never felt better in my life. That's enough of that. And, similarly, I just accept that I'm going to grind for a release, you know. I'm going to grind, okay? I'm going to grind. This is going to hurt, you know.

And I'm going to go, and I'm going to hurt, and I'm going to, like, crash out. And I'm going to completely suck for the next, you know, it depends, you know, a day to a week, you know, to a month if it was really nasty. And then I'm going to try and balance it out, you know. But I'm not trying to smooth that line out. I don't think that's possible, you know.

MIKE: That goes to Thomas' point. If you're going up that hill, you're going to have to swing those handlebars to one side and back. You're going to be doing some wild swings. But the trend line is what you're trying to keep in control.

KYLE: Something that we're also kind of touching on is I think that we're talking about these environmental factors when this concept of balance seems to be more of an internal concept of how you would apply yourself to those external forces that you can't just level a line across.

WILL: Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's a really interesting, you know, maintaining your equilibrium in a system that may be systemically out of control. That's...I don't know, man. I'll get you guys in trouble [laughter]. I could be done, but you may have to utter some heresies, you know, that are not, you know what, I'm going to mute my mic.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: We've got a hand up. Like, save me from myself.

MIKE: [laughs]

THOMAS: I think a lot of it is also self-assessment, right? Looking at other people perform certain actions, you could think that's an extremity to yourself, but to them, it's not. And that's them maintaining their balance. Kind of back to the gym analogy, you know, you could see someone in the gym benching 300 pounds, and you're thinking, whoa, they're overdoing it. They're overdoing it. But to them, that's normal to them, you know, to you, it might not be, you know, achievable just yet. But you also...yeah, a self-assessment is involved with that balance, and each person has their own extreme level, and each person has their low level, so...

WILL: It's true. I mean, one of my more pathological things is, like, Fridays. I really like [inaudible 33:56] on Fridays. Like, I like to, like...I like to close the week out with, like, a dub. It makes me feel good. I'm happy, you know. But consequently, like, people will look at me, and I'll be, like, 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, and I'm like, I could get this in. I'm going to get this in. I'm going to get it. It's not...you know what I mean? It's not that I'm pathological. It's just, like, I really like to wake up on Saturday morning feeling, like, good, you know? I don't know. Maybe that's unhealthy, and, like, this is a conversation I need to have with my therapist.

DAVE: I disagree. That will save your career, man.

WILL: I just feel really good when I [inaudible 34:30]. And I'm like, yes, you're welcome, world. We got it [laughs].

DAVE: If I could teach a junior programmer one thing, it would be look at your work and take satisfaction in it. That will get you up in the morning. And that will turn this career into an addiction, and that will turn this into a spectacular career because you will be passionate about it. Absolutely. Absolutely.

MIKE: And we've talked about the trend line going up. You can strengthen yourself. And talking about the strengthening yourself, by hitting higher peaks, you can hit some extremes. You might need to take some breaks afterward. Talking about cycling, I can go a lot further today than I could some years back, or I can go the same distance and not destroy myself [laughs] like I could a few years ago. You know, that happened by repeatedly flexing that muscle and then running that trend line up. But that meant I had to take some breaks. You do a really hard day, you might need to take a few days off, and that's fine.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, my bad days, you know, like, I was having, like, a lower output day yesterday. But I actually made a list of, like, all the stuff I did, like, on my, like, not, what, no PR today, like day. And I'm feeling it. I'm like, oh, wow, okay, never mind. That wasn't so bad, you know. That was little bit by little bit.

But I did want to loop back, and I wanted to loop back to Alfred. Can you expand more on what you mean by, like, sort of, like, you've got to keep momentum up? You've got to keep velocity up to stay in balance? Because I think you were going somewhere there, and I didn't clock it the way I wanted to.

ALFRED: It was just something that I was, like, thinking. Now, self is a balance, right? If we are, say, like, emphasizing...how do I put it? So, when you are running, like, you know, too slow, and then when we are talking about, like, you know, say, reduce meeting time or increasing meeting time, probably it doesn't even make any sense. But then if we are running at some kind of, like, optimal speed, then those notions become necessary. So, certain speed is the precondition to balance self.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah.

DAVE: Do you think that speed changes? Do you feel like sometimes it's balance means standing in stillness and other times balance means dancing down a line?

ALFRED: [laughs] I don't know. I was just thinking. You know, I find like...

DAVE: I'm just asking. I legitimately don't know either. Yeah, it's like --

WILL: I don't know. No zero days. I hate a zero day, man. Nothing in life makes me mad, like, worse than a zero day [laughs].

DAVE: By zero day, you mean zero output?

WILL: Yeah, zero output. Standing in stillness? Ooh, not for me. You know, I'll gear down. I'll gear way down. Like, I'll creep up that hill if that's what needs to be done. No zero days.

DAVE: The winch, right? If you get an inch and you don't lose it, that's an inch. Yeah. Winch yourself forward if you can't run yeah.

ALFRED: I guess what I could do is one example I want to make. Let's say you have a...Because we've been experiencing, you know, different places...Oftentimes, when you have a lot to talk about, you can run your meeting fast and then up to the point. You just don't waste any time, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom; everything is done. So, it's very efficient. Everybody can achieve what they want to achieve. And then communication is also there.

But then when we are not doing much, then you start to see, like, you know, very low-energy meetings. And then people are just trying to, you know, for the sake of joining the meeting and join the meeting. So, in that case, it's like, you know, just creating burn, and that burn doesn't yield anything productive. So, having the right agenda and then going to the meeting, quickly gets it resolved.

So, I'm a strong believer of no meeting should be more than 30 minutes, you know, sometime if you can do it in 5, 10, 15, great. And then you get what you need, and you have the time back to the team. They can go back to work. And then they will come back with more, like, up to the point questions during the next meeting. So, to increase our velocity helps with our balancing but not to, like, you know, to the extent where you burn out the team, where everybody is just kind of, you know, hey, I can't even breathe [inaudible 39:19] [laughs]. That's just like, you know, killing the team. So, the balance, you know, it's a very delicate topic, I mean.

MIKE: You're saying that you have to...there's a sufficiency requirement. You need to be going fast enough that if you go below that, you're not getting anything from it.

ALFRED: Right. You will be off balance.

WILL: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it goes all, I mean, like, via velocity, right? Velocity has to be balanced as well, right? Like a car engine, you know, you can run any car engine at, you know, 10,000 RPM for a while, [laughter] you know. But at the same time, like, if it's running at, like, if it's just idling, it's not going anywhere. The car is not moving. There's a sweet spot. If you're in it, then you're moving to the best you can. A big piece of that is just sort of, like, there's a level of acceptance of what you could do, which I think is difficult.

I think it's really hard because people...I mean, maybe I'm just protecting myself, and I should wrap it up quickly. But because it's in your head...like, if you're lifting weights and something's too heavy and you can't lift it, and you can accept that. But if it's in your brain and you just can't maintain focus, it's a lot harder to get your head around.

KYLE: I was sitting here thinking with the number of people...We were discussing that number of people, like, in a meeting. I think there's times when...and meetings are just an example. This could be used in other ways. But there's people that are in a meeting just to be there, to grasp the information. And then there's people that are there to move the meeting along.

So, this is kind of a question for the group. How do we think that these summarization tools or AI tools are going to impact these type of meeting overloads going forward? Because there's several scenarios where there's information from a meeting that I could be privy to, but I don't need to go to an hour meeting. I can just read a 10-minute summary and be caught up, and I'm good to go. And with tools like that, is that going to help with the pendulum? Like, I assume so, but are they going to be allowed and... yeah.

MIKE: You see James talking. He does these in meetings. I love it.

KYLE: This has been --

JAMES: I wish we had a little more automation around it, of course. But I would be completely unable to do my job without the ability to record and receive a transcript of every meeting that I run through an agent that I created.

KYLE: Oh, really?

JAMES: It will accept any Word document, and it first gives an executive summary. It gives me the attendance. It gives me a comprehensive list of what we've talked about. And at the bottom, it provides action items with responsible individuals and due dates. And it seems like the most trivial thing once, like, now that I'm just spitting these documents. Previous to this, I had to manually document in Confluence the goings-on for our stand-up. And while I'm trying to make sure that as I'm onboarding that I'm paying the proper attention to all of these different services and features that we're either connecting to or developing for, it really cuts the difference.

So, now there's times where if there's a word or a term that I missed, it usually comes out in that comprehensive report. And then I can go start pinging other people. And it's helped me better establish the business relationships that I need as well, since it's like, oh, I don't understand this word. It looks like we had to go talk to this individual about X. I'm going to go ahead and ping them about some other information as well. My ramp into Acima has been 100% blessed by having Copilot access.

KYLE: Okay, cool.

DAVE: It's awesome.

JAMES: I use it so much that I think I'm the only person who ever exhausts their allowance for AI credits [laughs].

DAVE: Nope. Nope, you're not the only one, brother [laughter]. I'm actually on the $100 a month plan with Claude because I just destroy his tokens every single day. It's awesome.

JAMES: They've got Haiku, which is, like, the newest version that's out, and it's only charging third credits right now, so yeah [laughs].

DAVE: Nice. So, I was bellying up to the bar behind Kyle. It's a different tangent, which is why I wanted Kyle to go first. But there's some theory written by Carse,- James Carse, "Finite and Infinite", I think, Games. I think he's a game theorist. But he breaks a lot of human interaction collaborations into finite and infinite mindsets. So, finite, you're trying to win. You're trying to get to the score. You're trying to get to 21. You're trying to get to victory, and the game ends. And that's his thing. You think you're trying to win, but what you're actually trying to do is end the game.

Infinite games, you're trying to keep the game going. So, like, hacky sack or, you know, like, bumping the volleyball around, like, that's a game where everyone is involved with trying to keep the game going, right, to keep everybody playing. And so, the person that told this to me was a marriage counselor who literally was saying, I have to teach husbands and wives to play infinite games instead of trying to win because all you're going to win is divorce paperwork, right?

And what I'm realizing is, if you're playing basketball, if you're playing a competitive sport, you want to play a finite thing. And if you're going to a meeting, you probably want to play the finite game. What do I need out of this meeting to get a victory? I've actually got it. I'm just going to go, right? That's for that one.

But when you're dealing with people, you want to deal with balance and with finite. And somebody said something earlier about it's the attitude that you have internally, like how you present yourself to that. That, to me, really, really smacks of, like, I'm playing the infinite game with myself. I'm trying to be sustainable. And sometimes that means you've got to knuckle down and just absolutely finite. Have I just destroyed this metaphor? I feel like...I don't know if it's all muddy, but, like, choosing your times and places, I guess, is, like, choose your strategy of how you're going to deal with this, and choose the right one.

WILL: I don't know. I just love...I love...I read 20 times faster than audio, about that. You know, most people, like, you know, like 10 to 20 times faster than talking. So, if I don't need to collaborate with somebody, you know, like, we've got something that we need to, like, put our heads together...

I was in a two-hour meeting, like, earlier today because it was just me and a couple of the devs. And we were going over, trying...We got our PLPs aren't loading as speedily as we'd like to, and we were just diving into the analytics. And, like, so, like, okay, where are we leaking? Where is this thing? You know, [inaudible 46:22] trying to teach us a lesson.

But, like, generally speaking, I'm like, I just want to read the minutes and get out, like, that's, fine. And also, like, I'm a zealot in terms of, like, cams up, mics up all the time, all the time for everybody. Cams up, mics up, or get out [laughs]. And I say that knowing full well you could see me multitasking because I've got a couple of, like, pots simmering, right [laughs], you know, and I'm in and out, you know. Because I've got, like, you know, 20% capacity, like, tasks that I'm just, like, keeping rolling. You can see me doing it, and I have no shame. But at the same time, like, I'm not, like --

DAVE: That's honest.

WILL: It's not like, what's Will doing? What's Will doing behind the curtains shhhh, you know [laughs]?

DAVE: Right. I love that. I call that clear eyes and respect, where clear eyes is if I see you doing some BS, I'm going to call you on your BS. But the respect is, and then I'm going to keep listening to your BS because you're probably doing what I need a co-worker to do. And if you're honest about it, and I respect it, and I don't call it, you know, I'm not going to give you crap about it, then great. We both understand that that's how we're going to interact. And I like that.

I would much rather, like...because if I told you, "Will, it's really pissing me off that you're not paying attention," you can make a judgment call. You're like, "This really isn't that important to me." I'm like, "Well, it is because this." And I am confident that if I could show you why something was important to me, that you'd be like, "Okay, you got me." Or you would convince me that, like, I can't actually convince you that this is important. So, we'll see you at the Q and A.

WILL: Sure. Yeah. All right. It might just be bad behavior on my part though. Like, this could be a filthy habit like picking my nose when the camera's off or something, where it's just like, dude, don't do that. Come on, man --

DAVE: But if it is a bad habit, now we can call you on it, and we can communicate it. If you're hiding, it's a bad habit, and it stays a bad habit, right? So, I love that feedback.

MIKE: I do turn off my camera to blow my nose, or sneeze, or other things that might, briefly, be offensive [laughs].

WILL: It's distracting. It's distracting.

MIKE: Exactly [laughs]. We have ended up spending most of our time starting with meetings because it's such a hot topic around this balance, but it applies to so many other things, right? We've talked about balance all the time. So, while we've talked about it in the context of meetings, this could apply to planning on projects, probably applies to testing, to the scope of a project. We've talked a lot about that in the past, how much you should pay for your tooling. There's a huge list of things, and we could just go on and on and on because it's worth thinking about.

And they had this common theme to check yourself, right? And we've talked about this. So, what are some tools we can use? What are some things we can use to notice we've gone too far? And that matters. You know, I was thinking about meetings for that measurement of how you can go too far. We want to be agile, right? I've got a co-worker who says, well, agile doesn't mean ad hoc. He's right.

WILL: That's a good one.

MIKE: It is a good one, isn't it [laughs]? You still do planning. You just have a tight feedback loop with the customer, right? And you do frequent iterative planning rather than trying to plan everything up front. And I think that if you notice that there's a disconnect between you and your customer, it could be an internal customer, right, between you and whoever's asking for the product, then, one, you probably need a meeting. And if you don't have a disconnect, you've probably talked enough, and you know, that applies there. But finding some metrics. Am I going off in the gravel, right? Am I tipping over? Then it's time to start swinging the other way.

WILL: Man, I miss my RescueTime. Obviously, when you're working for other people with a corporate laptop, that is, like, that's going to give security, like, a brain aneurysm. Like, it's not going to be...Like, I've been off of it for a long time. But, like, your screen time metrics, to the degree that you can collect them, that's a good indicator. You know, it's the screen time on your phone. How are you doing? How are you doing when you get home? How are you doing when you get home?

You get home, like, and you're just, like, you just, like, you walk in the door and, like, you're completely spent. You're exhausted. Like, ooh, that's not good. Sleep patterns, you know, like, how are you sleeping? It's both a virtual cycle and, like, a really big canary in the coal mine. It's both going to affect your performance and indicate, oh, something's not right, you know. There's lots of stuff, lots of stuff going on. Sorry, was that the thing where it's like, how do you [inaudible 51:14]

MIKE: Oh, yeah, no, that's exactly it. You're finding metrics that you can use to gauge where you are, you know, where are the lane lines? So, you can watch them. That's exactly the direction I was going. This balance is critical, but if you don't measure it, you're not going to know. You're going to be off in the weeds somewhere, right? Like, oh wait, how did I end up here? Because you weren't paying attention.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, at work, I think, for me, and I think for a lot of people, you know, you're going to leave, you know, your work is going to be the last thing to suffer. I don't know. I hope most people aren't like this, but I think a lot of people are, where, like, your work is going to be the last thing to really start to, like, break down in your life when, like, you're getting these burn out pieces, you know?

MIKE: Yeah. It's...I know I've been that way before [laughs], and it's not nice to the family, right? Not nice to the people you care about.

WILL: It isn't. It isn't, you know, like, it's just like, oh, it's a bunch of strangers. Everybody is trying to make their quarterly numbers, and it's just like, okay, these guys come first [laughter].

KYLE: Your screen time comment kind of hit close to home, for me, just because there's been a few times where it's been, you know, and work is the last one to suffer. Like you're saying, it's me going, I've not spent very much time on my personal projects. I've not spent time on my hobbies, you know? And at the end of the week, I just kind of left the setting on my phone on. At the end of the week, I get a, you know, a ping that's like, hey, you spent, you know, three hours more on your phone than the previous week. And it's like, oh, okay [laughs], that might do it. It's just kind of that check that, like, it hits you hard.

WILL: Yeah. Like, screen time on your personal phone is a really strong indicator of, like, your mental health, you know. You can't have RescueTime on your work laptop. I mean, maybe you can, but probably you can't [laughs]. Probably that's no good. But, like, that phone is right in your pocket all day, every day. And, yeah, it'll start pinging at you like a smoke detector.

MIKE: Well, I think that's a good place to end here. We've talked about this importance of balance, and we'll end with measure it [chuckles], you know, figure out...keep your eyes open. Have you ever tried looking behind, well, when you're driving a car, you keep your eyes on the road, right? It does not take very long looking away, you know, looking down to grab the food, whatever you got. You look up like, oh, I'm going the wrong way. You feel like you're going forward, but you're probably not. You're probably drifting.

And if you don't have some of those measurements to see whether you're staying in balance, you're probably not. I loved the discussion today [chuckles]. We had a great discussion. It was great. We had a big panel, lots of comments. I hope that you get something out of this, and think about what you can do to measure and get some better balance in your meetings and everywhere on your life.

Until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.