I seem to persistently waffle on my career. Yesterday it all felt so clear. A path from Individual Contributor to Tech Lead to Engineering Manager. Do it with Rails and JS. Be there in the next five years. I already have 8 years in the industry, this isn’t unreasonable.

Why does it feel so impossible and like the wrong track for me today? I had a lot of trouble focusing yesterday and that’s the likely culprit for my hesitation today. If I feel like I’m being productive, then I feel like I’m succeeding and getting somewhere. But by who’s definition of success and productivity?

For me, success in the day-to-day looks like flow. I’m feeling most productive and successful when I get a flow going. But that’s near impossible to come by with programming because of all the stopping and thinking and logic involved.

I need to recouch what success means here, without flow. Is it acquiring knowledge? Is it gaining understanding and facility with the language or framework? I think that may be a key. If that’s the key to getting good and being productive, by my personal standard, then how do I acquire that? How do I fit in that work along with everything else on my plate?

More importantly, how do I do so consistently and with joy?

I was thinking about my phone today. Eventually it will need replacing, but with what? Do I want to stay with the iOS ecosystem? Is there some better option out there?

I went through a little thought experiment where maybe I would purchase a basic, non-smart phone and get an iPod Touch for the stuff I use my current phone for. Getting away from iTunes (which I only use for organizing my music library) is a massive challenge and I’ve got quite a few games I’m pretty attached to.

In the end what I realized is that I needed to declutter my phone, make sure the notifications I get are minimal, and find a better option for a bedside clock.

I dumped most of the games I kept on there “just in case” I wanted to play them (I game a fair bit on my iPad, those games will be there instead). I moved my social media apps (Twitter and Mastodon, I don’t have a Facebook account) deep into a folder. I like the option of posting to them as needed, but burying them makes me less likely to read the feeds on there.

Everything on the homepage is daily use. Apps on the middle page are stuff I use pretty often but not daily, and utilities it would be a pain to have to download (the retail apps particularly) the few times a year I need them. The games I’ve left on their I use daily for brain breaks and I like variety in them.

All in all, I’m glad I went through this process. I feel like my phone is more of a tool again and will help me keep my daily practices more consistent and distract me just a bit less.