Productivity Over Panic

Key Takeaways

[Music] what's going on guys so obviously we have a very unique situation with this virus and global pandemic going on but I wanted to do a video kind of talking about some things you can do as a programmer as as someone that is interested in technology and in business things that you can do to be more productive and what really prompted me to do this is a tweet that I read yesterday from someone saying you know I don't know how anyone can tweet or even think about JavaScript when there's a global pandemic going on and and I really didn't like that tweet because it just all it does is put panic and out there and make people anxious and that's definitely not helping so why wouldn't you continue to to better your skills and be productive you know whether it's learning something or building something and I'll talk about you know different things you can do in a minute but I think that just sitting home watching the news and and being anxious about it is is not helping anybody especially yourself you know you're just getting yourself worked up this isn't going to wipe out the world and I'm not minimizing it it is a very serious thing but it's not the the end of humanity so I wish people would stop thinking like that and I know a lot of us are software developers that can work from home and if you if you can then consider yourself very fortunate because a lot of people are struggling right now that that you know can't work remotely especially if they run a small business where they have some kind of storefront or something like that people are really really hurting people that I know personally but anyways you know some things you could do obviously you can learn more so you can work on skills that you already have you can improve upon your skills or maybe there's a programming language or a framework or something that you've been wanting to learn for a while but you just haven't had the time and again even if you are working from home all day I'm sure you have extra time where you're not going to gyms and malls and whatever it is that that you do so take take that time and make the best of it you know so you can learn maybe you want to learn something completely new graphic design machine learning something like that and obviously as long as you have an internet connection you have access to all the resources in the world ebooks videos I know money is tight for a lot of people right now but there's a lot of cheap courses cheap subscriptions to websites with a ton of courses YouTube so there's no shortage of content or resources to learn from so the next one is side projects so this would be a good time to start a side project it could be something serious and long-term where you plan to make money with or it could be just something for your portfolio just something where maybe you want to pick up all this pick up some skills and build something cool that you can add to your portfolio something that you can use yourself maybe some kind of tool that you can use to to be more productive in your work anything at all just anything that that you can think of that you'd be interested in so a really good time to start side projects another thing you can do is create content so this could be any kind of content you could create posts for your blog if you have a blog you could create a blog if you don't have one you could create posts for medium or free code camp or dev - or any any site where they let you post articles you could do fit YouTube videos so even if you've never done it before maybe this is the time to experiment with it I mean you don't need much you probably have already have what you need which pretty much is just a microphone and even some of the built-in laptop microphones are just fine and you could use something like OBS to record your screen and you could create tutorials or you could do you know faced face cam videos if you have a decent camera so that could be something to think about maybe you'll find that you're an awesome content creator and you know you never knew that you could do that stuff so definitely something to think about you could create social media content you could start a podcast or at least start planning this stuff I know some of this it takes a while but who knows is how long things are gonna go on like this hopefully not that long but you know nobody knows so creating content is a good idea networking online obviously you can't go out to meetups and conferences are all canceled and stuff like that but you can still network with people online I mean everybody is on the internet it's you probably notice your connection is is slow because it's just so congested but yeah you can meet people online and discord and slack and what else you have like LinkedIn and Facebook groups maybe even create your own community and try to get people to join and start something up you know so definitely look into networking online and then the next one is not geared specifically toward programming and technology but work on yourself mentally because this is going to help you in all areas of life and what I mean is self-help stuff so podcasts videos ebooks YouTube I would stick to to the free stuff because there are there's a lot of scammers in this area in the self-help world so yeah I would definitely try to stick to the free content seems to be better anyway in my opinion but yeah so work on yourself maybe meditation yoga exercising I mean at least in my area all the gyms are closed but you can still exercise from home you can go for walks another thing is going out into nature you know you don't want to go anywhere where it's where there's a lot of people but go out to a lake or something or to some path or I mean everybody whatever is around where you live that can really help you out as well and just kind of ease your mind from this crap that's going on but yeah so those are some things that you can do to just kind of better yourself and be productive if you're just panicking all day watching the news you're just making yourself more anxious and even when this is over you'll be the more anxious person and worried about it all the time worried about just you know getting sick and if you're just sitting on the couch watching Netflix all day and you're it's gonna be much harder to get back to work when when that time comes or get back to school whatever it is you do so just try to keep your mind active and like I said I know a lot of us are working from home so we have no choice but to keep our mind active but you know if you are if you're in the house and you don't have I mean if you have kids you probably probably have your hands full but any extra time you have just just be productive and don't don't panic and stress out that's really my main point of this video but that's it I hope all you guys stay safe and I will see you next time