Building a Coding Habit and Love for Coding Part I: Habit

Coding By Builder

New to code? Don’t do it alone. roadbytes.me

Building a Coding Habit and Coding Love

Part I: Habit
Part II: Flow

What I’m learning is that coding is a labour of love, but loving to code doesn’t necessarily happen to everyone. I started thinking about why I like to code and the next instalment videos are going to be about Habits and Flow

Part I This Video: Habit
Part II Next Video: Flow

The reason I’m sharing this is I didn’t really like coding at first.

I’ve read some where that there are three things that influence a change in habit or lifestyle
[Insert Ding! sounds]
1- Major life events (change in career, marriage, death, Epiphanies)
2- Changes in Environment (moving, new friends, new school)
3- Gradual deliberate change

The first two influences are pretty huge. That’s why I think Bootcamps are so effective. They immediately address two major behaviour influences. Career and Social Connections.

But what if you can’t afford to quit your job?

Play the Long Game
I’d say play the long Game and work on the third influence… Gradual deliberate change.

ie Work on doing something daily over long periods of time

So, Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit shows that Habits tend to be deeply ingrained in our being, but they can be changed gradually over the period of a month. Try to think long term about what your goals are and aim for incremental change.

I started coding just 30 minutes a day for about a month because that’s what I was comfortable with. Even then the task was actually initially really difficult. I wasn’t even as consistent as I wanted to be. Interestingly enough, as I continued to practice this small habit, I started to notice that my reading abilities improved and I could manipulate text more quickly. This felt really good, and I increased my coding time to 1 hour for a month. Now, I’m putting in about 4 hours a day and I don’t even realize. I think it has to do with Flow which I’ll talk about later.

I’d say
Work with where you at because that’s were you’re likely to find the sweet spot, known as Flow.
But focus more on a Daily consistency.

So, that’s it for this Two Minute Tuesday. What are your thoughts on habits? Is coding for you a labour of love or a labour of labour?

Shout out to Jo Mama who shared a open source website in response to my Vlog about open source culture. Check Jomama’s share the link below.

Last week was on Open Source Culture so Jomama shared this site: