Time IS on Your Side: Personal Time Management Strategies for Crunch

[Music] so I am Amanda Gardner and this is time is on your side personal time management strategies for crunch and Beyond I'll tell you a little bit about myself so I am the co-founder of the deep end games with my husband Bill Gardner who worked on the Bioshock series in 2017 we launched perception on all major platforms we made that game in our basement which was pretty cool and I'm also a yoga teacher a meditation teacher I have four kids and I'm also a fantasy writer so the reason why I'm here and speaking on this particular subject is I let poor time management and sort of poor self-care get the best of me and I got extremely ill during the production of perception so I'm here to talk about ways that you can sort of make yourself feel better and and and basically get more time out

of out of your day so I'm gonna start but something that seems a little off topic peanut allergies three out of my four children have nut allergies I am the general grievous of EpiPens I have them everywhere at all times and I've become a real expert on cross-contamination keeping my kids safe when we go to restaurants and and and other houses but I'm not an expert on restaurant best practices I don't even know how peanut allergies began and I'm not a medical professional now how does that relate to crunch not crunchy peanut butter it relates because I'm not here to debate about crunch crunch happens and when it's gone I'll stop talking about it but for now I want to be an advocate for people and to help anybody who's either going through a crunch or about to go crunch or just any gamedev ever because game development is about time management anyway so this is for

for everybody so it wasn't just crunch that made me sick I had too much going on I was working several jobs at one point for I had a newborn I had a toddler who was a a year older I had a couple of elementary schoolers and I got mono from all the stress I mean talk about just overload it was really really really bad now how did I get out I I say that I went to minivan University I have to drive my kids all over creation in addition to working so instead of listening to music or podcasts that sort of are fun but don't really have a thesis I listened to over a hundred personal development audiobooks in my car for free mind you so this is a little side note audiobooks don't have to be 25 bucks a pop all you have to do is get the Libbey app li BBY link your library card to it and there are hundreds of free audiobooks it's the best anyway I learned yoga I got heavily meditated lots of

meditation I completely revamped my diet and my my nutrition in general and I adopted a lot of the strategies that I learned from all of these personal development books and those are the ones I'm going to talk about today these are some of the highlights for me so Deepak Chopra has this really great program he does with Oprah Oprah and Chopra power couple they do making every moment matter the powerful engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Lehrer is really really an interesting one the desire map by Daniella Porte is a completely new take on goal-setting Tony Robbins does the massive planning massive planning method sorry rapid planning method and I'm going to be teaching one of the seven Habits of Highly Effective People and lastly lastly the slight edge by Jeff Olson it really was one of the the biggest game changers for me in my life so mrs. Gardner's advice I spent my career before I was game dev as a high school English teacher and for over a

decade my students would come in burnt out I taught honors kids and they would come in on three hours of sleep because they're taking five honors and AP classes they're in every single sport and they're doing every extracurricular and they were coming to me and they were breaking down and finally I just said all right everybody here's what we're doing you guys are planning out your schedule and time management because you're all burning out so I took this jar I found this on Internet I didn't tell them this found this jar and I put a bunch of big rocks in it and I said is there any room in that and they said not really I said this is your life this this jar okay and these big rocks are the things you can't move in your schedule everybody get out a blank paper paper I said to them and write down the things in your schedule that are indelible you cannot change them they wrote a bunch of things down and then I got out a little jar glass beads and I poured it in I said see there was more room there oh I see what you're doing and I said these glass beads are the things that are our shoulds you should do this add that and

then they started to add some things their schedule I said for example instead of cramming one night before a test why don't we break it up in a couple nights and there's in there right in I said you guys are this is a full and they were like yeah that's full then I got sand poured the sand on top and I said okay these are like the optional things okay maybe if you have a little room in your schedule you can put it in you have more time than you think you guys you're just spending it on not things that are terribly important and then they were like now it's full mr. Jay and I was like no and I took out bottle of water and I poured it in I said none of this will get done if you're not hydrated subtract your water so that was sort of my first foray into time management but I still that's still how I plan a lot of my days so we're gonna get into the first real professional strategy and that is the power of full engagement so Tony Schwartz and James Laird did a really interesting thing they went out and they studied professional athletes and took their strategies into the workplace so you think of the way in athlete trains and the way an athlete works and it's

just not like work they spend 80% of their time preparing for the 20% that they're executing they are working out stretching eating right sleeping right athletes do 80% prep for 20% engagement that that engagement is called peak flow and Angela Duckworth talks about it in her book grit which I highly recommend anyway breath I mean is that how game devs work like what if we spent our 80 percent of our like what we could do that you actually can so what they found is if you sit down at the beginning of your work day and you spend time getting in the zone getting ready to execute you can put yourself in that peak flow state where you will get so much more done and you will get so much better quality it's astounding so I actually tried this it does anybody know what NaNoWriMo is so it's National Novel Writing Month and essentially in a month you write an entire book now I've

got four kids a job teaching gigs and whatnot I wrote a giant fantasy novel in 30 days by using this method what I did was every morning I go to the gym it's a non-negotiable for me but what I did was when I got on the treadmill I put in a playlist for my book in my head and as I worked out I was planning what I was going to write and then as soon as the workout was done I grabbed my laptop every my laptop to the gym and I burned three 3,000 words a day in an hour okay and I managed to write a big fat book so if you plan enough you can get in peak flow and get so much more done it's actually really incredible another thing these two researchers found out is that this is disappointing to me willpower is a finite resource I wish I could say that like you can do it power through it scientists in 1998 did a groundbreaking experiment with hot chocolate chip cookies and math problems and they've pretty much found that by the end of all

of all of these math problems wasted these people's self-restraint to the point where they they had to have the cookies and that's when they sort of cheated on the experiment was when they just did too much of the math and they couldn't take it anymore and that's why statistically most people cheat on their diets and their spouses after work make a little sense so so the more mental space that's getting crowded in your brain is draining your actual willpower and too-perfect to people who are very famous who took advantage of this or Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and they did it with their clothing Steve Jobs had a uniform he wore a black turtleneck and black but that was that was like what he wore so that it was never on his plate he never had to think about what he was wearing Barack Obama when he was in office never picked out a single suit somebody did it for him took it off his plate so one of the strategies were going to talk about is automating things in your life getting them off your plate so it takes none of your headspace and that's why they talk about the power of rituals

in this book so they say that 95% of what we do occurs automatically or as a response to anxiety okay so if we can automate the good things in our life it takes it out of our mental space so willpower is a drain on you but a ritual something that you sort of craft and do time and again takes 20 days to form a habit 40 days to make it like a lifelong permanent habit those are things that you can do to take things off your plate brushing your teeth for example that's a pull you hate the way it feels when you don't brush your teeth right but you don't think about it it's not it's not a question like am I gonna brush my teeth today your co-workers won't appreciate if you're asking yourself that question by the way so we're gonna move on to the next strategy which is which is a habit 3 I'm not gonna teach you all 7 Habits of Highly Effective People we're just going to talk about habit 3 so Stephen Covey pretty much wrote the primer on personal development we rewrote the 7

Habits of Highly Effective People what habit 3 is about is being able to identify where a task falls in priority of importance ok so when you go into work look at what you have to do mentally put it in a different category now most people would say especially in games quadrant 1 is the most important right because it's urgent and important Covey disagrees Covey thinks that the most important quadrant is quadrant 2 that is where you're getting prepped for peak flow we talked about that before quadrant 2 is planning quadrant 2 is relationship building quadrant 2 is getting ready to get ready to get ready okay quadrant one is fighting fires and listen in game development we are fighting fires all the time you know a game breaking bugs something comes down the pipeline and ends up at you that you didn't plan on however if you spend enough time in quadrant two doing that

nice prep you will have the tools and sort the attitude to fight those fires fight them efficiently move on and not have to do as many of the quadrant one things let's talk for a moment about quadrant three which I call delegate he calls it describe destruction if something is urgent that means it has to be done now but if it's not important and it doesn't align with your goals do you really need to do it outsource if you can I say if you're looking at your list and you've got a lot of quadrant threes I'm gonna say see who you can outsource them to or just say no no is a complete sentence I don't necessarily mean that always in the job sense but if somebody's coming to you be like hey can you be on this you know PTO thing like I'm sorry you know I just have to say no I would say quadrant three delegate or or try to shift around a little quadrant four I'm just gonna call it social media don't do it close your taps okay I do take one thing here that I disagree

with Covey pleasant activities I think those are two I think there are two because you need to feel rewarded and happy on a personal level so let's put fun in quadrant one I think that's I'm sorry quadrant two I wanted to rhyme it just didn't work so the next one is Deepak Chopra so I love Deepak Chopra if you saw my GDC talk last year he does this amazing amazing amazing talk no I did a talk on his amazing app called Ananda for meditation and I know that this seems maybe a little bit more esoteric but bear with me Deepak says that time sickness is the epidemic of our generation we always feel like time is running out and time is the enemy more importantly so that most people deal with this in an external approach time acts on us and we must defeat it right Deepak offers an internal approach which is a little bit different he basically says stop measuring your day by the

clock altogether now when you're in crunch you're going to be scratching hide being like ah interesting theory no but if you can change your belief that time is running short and live in the present moment things change and that is because time is psychological we colored let's take an hour for example an hour an hour catching up with a lot with a friend right we've done a lot of that here in the green right it passes like this take that same hour put yourself in a dentist's chair and the anesthesia is not working that is interminable right so an hour time is kind of wibbly-wobbly people you know you know I feel that time is a flat circle so I feel like you can sort of get into that peak flow when you get into peak flow time disappears how many of you like can agree with that like when you're really getting the zone Wow you don't know if ten minutes or you know five hours have

passed that's the good stuff that's the sweet spot time doesn't matter because you are getting after it and I love getting into peak flow do Park also advocates for meditation to help you sort of expand your brain space last year I talked about how eighty percent of the time we're either in the past in our heads or in the future in our heads and we're only in the present moment for 20% of our day meditation could help you widen that okay let's move on our p.m. by Tony Robbins so I know a lot of you are familiar with Tony Robbins is like isn't that big goofy guy watch on Netflix I am NOT your guru and you would love the man he's incredible but he's really a world-class time management speaker and he has this rpm method which stands for results oriented Purpose Driven and it sounds so corporate massive action plan but it's amazing because traditional to-do lists are hot garbage they are a race to the bottom and there is no bottom because when you get to like the end of that to-do list

and then you wake up the next morning he got another one and stuff always keeps getting bumped and most of the stuff you do on your to-do list doesn't go toward your actual goals it's just minutia right so with rpm he basically felt as you focused on outcomes okay and I did a sample one for something I did on perception so in perception I really thought that nailing chapter 2 was critical from an emotional standpoint ok why did I think that that was important because I wanted the players they had to like Betty they had to buy into Betty story to really get the full impact so I was thinking about my why simon Sinek does a great talk about why and i think that everybody should look that up at some point and then my massive action was I did a beat sheet so if anybody is a writer and has never read Blake Snyder save the cat do it now it basically can outline any chapter any full story arc so I did out the beats and then I went

through and I thought about how the player would feel during that beat and then I filled it in and actually wrote it the last thing I did was I paid special minds to my wording because it was taking place in the 1940s and I wanted it to sound authentic so that's a sample rpm very goal-oriented when I came out of it I had a chapter two script that was engaging sample rpm for life because this is life work balance is it not results I want to feel fit rested and energetic why cuz I need to take as much off my plate as I can people if I am feeling tired sore or hangry it's gonna take me out of the zone it's gonna take me out of peak flow I want to get as much off my plate as I can and that's why it is critical for me to do meal prep take an hour on a Sunday lineup five mason jars put in some chia seeds oats plant milk and berries put them in the fridge you have breakfast every single day without having to blink an eye you have to heat coffee dude you

just pull this out of the fridge and just sit there and start to wake up it takes it off your plate I mean not like a literal plate it's exists your plate mentally I always do yoga or meditate before work I always keep my desk stocked with things that keep me in the zone keep me happy I use um like peppermint oil and wild orange oil to sort of wakey-wakey lots of supplements just just be ready if you're prepared if you take time to just have a work environment that's easy and natural and lets you get into the flow that's critical next Tony Robbins talks about chunking which is basically saying that if we get overwhelmed by our lives oh my god that is so much do you have this is this Tony Robbins says that if you can sort of mentally come up with a chest of drawers and you know that everything in your life goes into one of those drawers you feel a little bit better like oh okay that's just something I got to do for the kids put it away in that drawer so this is just my my set of drawers everybody has their own but if you can sort of categorize

the problems in your life it makes things much easier not problems but you know things to do the desire map by Danielle Laporte it's a whole book but it's really just one question how do you how do you want to feel that's it how do you want to feel so it's it's a revolutionary approach to goal-setting okay Danielle Laporte if somebody said okay my goal is to have three ship titles by 30 Danielle Laporte would ask you okay well how would that make you feel if you had three ship titles by 30 okay would it make you feel prolific would it make you feel like a professional would it make you feel accomplished would it make you feel like an adult now reverse engineer some goals do you really need three ship titles by 30 you know it sort of makes it seem kind of arbitrary so when you think about how you want to feel and then reverse engineer some goals from that you can really free up a lot of time in your life like wow I actually I don't need to do that to feel fulfilled isn't that funny and you kind of change a lot for you moving on to the slight

edge this book changed everything for me it's the fact that every life decision you make can make your life go up or down there's a Japanese word for it Kaizen it is the aggregation of marginal gains we all know how exponential growth looks right we've all seen that curve essentially everything you do matters and that's kind of intimidating right but if you can sort of automate yourself to know that you're making a decision that's going you they're going to go up or down it makes a lot of sense let me show you the next slide that has a little bit of a chart okay so for a long time it stays stable matching in your 20s you might be making some poor food choices you might be making some poor money choices the kind of doesn't really affect you until oh my god you knew it forty I'm hitting 40 this year and hopefully I'm going up not down but you know what I mean it doesn't necessarily mean forty but what it says here on the slide I'm not sure if you can see it is what's uncomfortable early

becomes comfortable later think about going to the gym everyday if that first week you're like oh my god why am I doing this and then two months in you're like I can't imagine not doing this same goes for the bottom that says what's uncomfortable what's comfortable early becomes it becomes uncomfortable later like yeah that's fine midnight snacks no worry and all of a sudden you just don't feel good anymore so I love this idea slight changes equal big eventual payoff the payoff does not happen in a week I I've seen in me about that it's like I started a diet today how many pounds did I lose that kind of thing this is a long game okay and these are the kind of choices that Jeff Olson suggests you think about on a daily basis these are the kind of things that if you intuitively know that you're making a good choice or an uptick you're good you kind of also know when you're making a downtick choice okay and like I said it's the long game so if you make a few down ticks no worry but it's a trend and

it's eventually going to have a giant payoff I actually for my payoff I don't I don't have caffeine anymore I have four kids several jobs and I don't I don't need caffeine I've changed so much about my health nutrition awareness and sleep that my body is like a battery itself I don't need that artificial caffeine because I've made so many choices but it took a long time you know it took about two years and now I'm like whew I'm good but anyway the last piece of advice has to do with my juicer kind of a weird thing but that's my that's a beautiful williams-sonoma citrus juicer I use tons and tons and tons of lemons so I'll give you a little background I used to watch the show called good eats on Food Network with Alton Brown so good he used to say never buy a uni-tasker for your kitchen and that's something that only does one thing like a garlic press you will never need to do anything with that except for pressed garlic but

I had opted that sort of for my entire lifestyle I was like I'm gonna multitask everything I'm the mom who can do it all and no you shouldn't multitask because it's been proven time and again that the results of what you produce when you're multitasking are so much worse than if you just sat down and did it and did it right you spend more time correcting yourself after multitasking then you would have if you just sat down and did it out with nothing else and so the juicer comes into play here because like I didn't want to buy a uni-tasker I was squeezing my own lemons and then finally I just loved the design of this it was so pretty I'm like I'm just gonna do it I bought it I squeezed my lemon nose like oh my god ten times the juice came out that was so worth it and it's kind of a metaphor for time management like if you really get it down you'll get ten times the juice right it's such a good thing next one is growth as a human need one of the things that Tony Robbins talks about is that from a personal level if we're not growing it makes us

unhappy as humans so if you can sort of make sure that your schedule builds in time for you to be passionate and if your jobs not doing it just carve out like a half hour a day to read up or to take up a hobby because if we don't feel like we're growing we're dying act as if is a common thing is if you feel like you're in crunch and you're not handling things if you start to act like you're handling things it's been shown that you actually start to be able to do it so I know I I don't have enough time to do an entire session on that but I feel like my next talk is gonna be about act as if it's actually really fascinating lastly close your tabs at work and in life I really feel like too often we are so scattered we're on our phones we're walking across the street on our phones and talking to people if you take more time to do what you really want and to feel better and to do what you're at work to do then things are gonna be a

lot easier for you so I am going to I'm right at about five minutes left which is great so let me just give you my my contact information so Amanda at the deep-end Gamescom if you have any ideas of what's worked for you I would love to hear it if you implement any of these ideas or read any of these books I would love love love to hear that or if you need a crunch coach hit me up I'm a girl I'm also on Twitter at Amanda s gardener and yeah I can take questions I've got five minutes see I managed the time questions or things that have worked for you I'm happy to hear from from some of you so anybody have anything to say yes shout it and I will reiterate I

would say put yourself above everything except for your immediate family if I when I got sick I put my hello I'm so sorry he said what do you put first if you have to prioritize and I say your own health because if you like I said it takes everything off your plate if you're not achy tired and hungry and have a million things physically going on I used to have chronic anxiety disorder I don't want any anxiety anymore because I've planned everything I've done a lot of meditation and I've read a lot I've gone to therapy like it you have to it's like when the airbag in the plane comes down you put it on before you put it on anybody else okay and I know that that's a cheesy metaphor but if you're not well you're not taking care of your job you're not taking care of your family you're not taking care of anything you have to put yourself first and I'm super adamant about that yes yes

I love that idea so she asked about how do you implement this with your team so my situation is I make games in my basement with my husband which is very different and also it's getting loud and also slightly contentious so I have actually sort of changed his diet and as well and I've changed a lot of the things for our household but we use contractors in our studio because we're we're super indie but I think that I cut a lot of the fat I keep things really tight and not in a terse way but in a very this is what's happening kind of way we don't have like a water cooler at work I mean we have we have when we go off to soccer and the minivan kind of thing we I try to keep everything as distinct as I can and I do like to share

my strategies with my husband and if my contractor you know the contractors ever want some of the stuff I'm happy to give it but we have a remote office situation so I I wish I had more to say about that so sorry yes yes okay I'm so glad she asked that she said how do you actually stick to these habits commit to 20 days 20 days write that down 20 days will be a habit for anything so if you can sort of put it in your calendar make yourself do these things just for 20 days because anybody can do anything for 20 days by then it will become automated and integrated in your day and using you mentioned the end of your day I don't know if your a night night owl or like a lark they call them larks when you love to wake up early maybe wake up a little bit earlier maybe start to do stuff at the beginning of the day I don't know I mean everybody knows their own body but I also have to say listen to your body

because if it's telling you to go to sleep there's a reason and I'm I'm huge into that whole take what you need if it's sleep if it's medication if it's meditation take whatever your body needs and your mind needs so if you're if you go home at night and you need to crash that's good that's that's you listening to your body so other than that 20 days by something different if you want any other questions we have no time for one more yes eight hours I make that a non-negotiable I mean like if I have a kid wake up in the middle of the night you know but yeah no I absolutely make certain that I do that because I cannot my husband he doesn't need nearly as much sleep as I do but that's his body this is mine so yeah great question one more cuz we have one minute anybody see time management everything's time management no okay yes I love that

so if you couldn't hear him he said that he will set a timer to draw for 10 minutes I think that doing that is perfect as a writer I love to do like flash fiction if anybody's ever done that it just keeps you sharp you know just take that 10 minutes draw sketch right make a little music do what you got to do but find that time if it's your passion absolutely and we are out of time thank you guys so much for coming this was awesome thank you