UCSF Library Educational Technology

• Team Supports, Hosts, and Develops Moodle, Kaltura and Ilios

• I named this talk after this book
• It gave me the vocabulary to talk about something I'd been messing with for years
• I remember it being a good book, and I'm not going to summarize it here, other than this quote you probably shouldn't think of anything I'm saying as being from this book

What I discovered was that I could accomplish huge amounts of work between 8pm and 2am. I've always been more productive at night, so I initially thought that was all that was going on. As I moved departments and teams and projects I kept to this schedule, stacking up work and pushing out huge amounts of code or content on Tuesday nights. At first I tended to hide this, but with success came more confidence, this was a proven method for me and I became more open with my team about what I was doing

Meetings aren't inherently bad, neither is email, slack, twitter, etc... but when you spread them out exactly right (as I tended to do) 3-4 hours of meetings in a day ends up taking the entire day

Meetings aren't inherently bad, neither is email, slack, twitter, etc... but when you spread them out exactly right (as I tended to do) 3-4 hours of meetings in a day ends up taking the entire day

By blocking off huge chunks of my calendar (Monday morning, all day Wednesday and Friday, Thursday afternoon) I was able to guarantee time to focus.

Not only did focus time become more productive, but squashing all my meetings into specific slots made it easier to focus on those meetings. I didn't need to by halfway present, I could be all-in because I knew I'd have time to finish my work.

Inbox zero was possible for the first time (like dishes I didn't need to worry about the next email coming in, I'd get to it)

Stacking work like this allowed by time to plan what work I would stack. Instead of reacting to the idea de jour I was able to work on what was most important and know I could finish really big projects.

For example we replaced our entire authorization system incrementally and securely with no interruption to users over an entire year of small focused projects

Block off at least 20 hours a week for deep work Establish, and socialize, a communication policy

Work When you're ready to work

• I used to get so stressed on Sunday, felt like I couldn't relax. Now I work on Sunday afternoon and take Wednesday morning off
• I used to come in really early to get focus time in, but I was regularly told the leaving early didn't seem fair to the team
  • Perceptions mater a lot, COVID has made this much easier to play around with

• It's a weird thing to say, but you can be too productive.
• An organization can only absorb so much change.
• Because we've maximized our time it has allowed us to focus on other UCSF mission areas to advance health worldwide including:
  • building small tools for data extraction and pandemic communication,
  • contributing to open source maintenance of Moodle, it's plugins, and many other libraries we depend on.

Hard To Prioritize Yourself When Our Mission is So Critical

If you have as much trouble as I do throwing off your capitalist conditioning

Remember:

• You're an incredibly expensive and difficult to replace asset and it's your job to take care of you
• Keep track of your hours and accomplishments. You'll find UC is getting its fair share.
• I solved a long standing performance issue while walking my dogs on the beach, taking care of yourself takes care of UC

Four Day Week

• Lots of studies show no productivity loss
• Tons of gain in personal happiness

  4th Friday

• Communication Holiday
• One Person On Call
• Work on whatever you want
• Especially Yourself