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A year or two ago I experimented with quitting caffeine later in the afternoon to improve the quality of my sleep. This experiment was largely successful and now I rarely drink soda and I stop my coffee intake by early afternoon. Usually when I drink coffee I limit myself to two regular cups, if I have a third then it is decaf. This has greatly cut into my podcast consumption as I now typically fall asleep within 15 minutes of hitting the bed.

Since September I have been battling with my cable Internet. About once a week the Internet dies. There is no warning, no error, no malfunction of the lights of the modem, it simply halts. Its death apparent by my modem’s inaccessible status page. A simple reboot brings it back alive.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the hows and whys of implementing automated testing in our workflows, and thought this Mike Bland video was great:

From coding to organizing one of the most frequent ideas I see raised when attempting to solve a vexing challenge is “what if we throw more time at it?” It usually is phrased something more like “what if we do more of X” or “what if we do more of Y” where X or Y is some idea that on its own merits is a good idea. Sadly ideas do not exist in a vacuum and we only have twenty-four hours in a day. So either we find ideas that do not require tons of time or we eliminate them.

What is the most efficient and productive way to get work done? People are inherently single process. The research is clear. Finding focus for the single thing is the subject of many software hacks. Pair programming holds you accountable to focus only on software development. Apps like iA Writer used in full screen mode cause you to tune out the rest of background noise. Now Apple has added do not disturb and notification management features to iOS because they worry the notifications are addictive and negatively impacting their brains. Collectively we recognize this problem and have found solutions for it. Yet we still have so far to go.