One of the by-products of learning a second language (English for me) is that you learn everything by context. But sometimes the context doesn't make sense. In English people tend to tell you that they don't mean to do something right before they're about to do that very thing.

I don't mean to sound like an X, but here's a great example of me being an X.

Or my other favorite. The use of the world literally when people mean figuratively.

My heart was literally pumping out of my chest!

But I admit, my heart was figuratively pumping out of my chest doesn't sound that cool. Sometimes I fall into this trap, specially when giving advice. Just the other week, I was talking to some friends about my social media plan, and they mentioned that they didn't know how I had the time.

The truth is, I don't. Everyone has the same amount of time and when we take on something, we have to give up something else. But it's important to recognize when it's a good time to adjust to the world. Remaining stagnant can leave you behind.

Here's some tips on multitasking:

1. Start small. I wrote this a while back, but you need to start small and make sure that things are working well before you move on.
2. Discover Efficiencies. Before you tackle something else, look for ways that open up time by being more efficient. I don't like to learn new things if they're not going to save me time (examples below).
3. Give and Take. One of the hardest things to learn is to start something new by giving up something old. I probably need to do this more.
4. Failure is an option. Failure is a signal for readjustment. So assume you're going to fail and then adjust. Don't let failure get to your head. If you learn to treat it as an opportunity to re-assess and adjust your plan, you'll see that pain is sometimes your friend.

I was planning on doing a new video each week, but I got a horrible cold the last couple of weeks and lost my voice. Did I fail? Maybe, but I wrote a few articles instead which I'll record as videos when I feel better. I figure they'll help me get ahead when I can record again.

Hacking Bootstrap 5

Here's what I mean by building efficiencies. I'm working on the next version of my Bootstrap Essential Training and I always also make a New Features and Migration course to help people upgrade. To make sure I know what I'm talking about, I've been working on updating my own site: raybo.org.

That gives me a lot of practical experience working in the new version in preparation for my course work. But it also opens up opportunities for content I can build.

One of the more popular features in Bootstrap is the Carousel, but it isn't perfect, so while spending time learning about it. I was going to record videos about the new features. Normally to build a video, we create scripts. But couldn't those be articles as well?

Absolutely, and I've been thinking about that for a while. Why not just leverage so many scripts you write so often into blog posts. I wrote a whole series of articles I'm calling Hacking the Bootstrap 5 Carousel.

I thought this would just be one long video, but there was really three different features, so I could get 3 pieces of content from one script: I did one on Object Fit and CSS Gradients, Building Sidebar Carousels and Automating Features with JavaScript.

The research becomes the scripts for the articles that become the videos that catch me up with my video production that prepare me for the course and doing three articles gives me a buffer of content for the next time I'm sick or just need some extra time to focus on something else. Anytime you can leverage one thing for another, it helps you save time and makes your life easier.

The Links

It's how I approached all the social media activity you see. I used to bookmark things that I enjoyed all the time, so I thought, couldn't those become quick posts? Which then turn into ideas for content for my blog, articles, courses, live streams. Learning to leverage one thing into another is the key.

Here's the most popular stuff I've posted recently:

CSS Layout has a lot of cool patterns you can use for your layouts with the CSS code to implement them. Just grab, copy and paste. People really seem to be digging Free-for.dev, a list of tools for developers that are free. I was really surprised that one of the most popular posts was CSShake, a library for shaking your DOM using CSS. Maybe it's because most people like my friend Morten though it was for tree shaking (Oh Morten!)

My Time Machine

Another one of my tricks is to use a time machine (Scheduler) to do my posts in advance. I'm therefore a few weeks ahead and here's a few things I'll be posting about: Cool Backgrounds has some excellent generators with random backgrounds that you can download the code for. Coolify is an interesting open source, self hostable Heroku and Netlify clone (Is that even possible?). And also check out Intro.js if you want to create a demo of your site when users first visit.

Now you know what's in my head. Let me know what's in yours with you awesome comments.