Hayden Kibble

Don’t spread yourself too thinly.

If you have too many distractions in your life, too many goals/projects, simplify. Prune. Focus.

Most people don’t succeed in changing their life and achieving their dreams. Not because they are unlucky, not smart enough or too busy. It’s much simpler than that. It all comes down to one simple fact that is 100% within their power to fix.

Most people don’t take action. We spend our days going about our daily business, whilst dreaming and fantasizing about where we would like to be or what we would like to have, but never actually start taking the steps to get to that place. Sure, we intend to; “I’ll start it tomorrow”, “When I’ve finished the garden I’ll do it”, “Once I’ve paid off my debts I’ll start my business”. But as good as our intentions are, unless we make concrete steps towards our goals NOW, they’re never going to become a reality. Ever.

The funny thing is, it’s so easy to take action. It only has to be small actions, done consistently. 30 minutes per week is infinitely better than 10 hours… some day. The most common excuse for not taking action towards reaching a goal is “I’m too busy”. Yet many people spend at least 30 minutes each evening watching TV or browsing Facebook. If you can turn that time towards applying yourself and making your business or project happen, in 1, 2, 5 years time you will have put many hours into building something awesome, rather than what you have the previous few years, which is zero.

So, the time is now. Tonight, you will TAKE ACTION. Every night, or even every week, you will add 30+ minutes to your calendar, and get off your arse and start taking your first baby steps towards your goal. Before you know it, all these baby steps will add up to a mountain of progress. Plan out the first month’s goals first, then you have something to aim for. When you make it to that goal, give yourself a pat on the back for being an action taker! Then proceed to knock ‘em down one month at a time.

After using many PHP/HTML/CSS/JS code editors and IDE’s over the past decade or so (Eclipse, Komodo, Notepad++, Dreamweaver, Netbeans etc etc),
I’m super chuffed that I have finally discovered one which doesn’t drive me round the bend for one reason or another. Sublime text editor is awesome. And I don’t use that word lightly. Here’s 10 reasons why you need to get on it.

1. It’s free
It’s completely free to try for as long as you like. You get a nag popup about once per day, but you can keep trying after that as long as you like. To buy, it’s just $59 per person. You can install it on as many machines as you like.

2. It’s fast
There’s no hanging around with Sublime. It’s fast no navigate between projects and files, fast to search and fast to install addons.

3. It’s light on RAM
I’ve been flicking through projects all morning, I’ve probably edited 50 files so far today and Sublime is using just 70MB of RAM. Netbeans/Eclipse often used to chew up over 500MB.

4. It’s mega extensible
There’s a decent amount of plugins available. I followed a video guide online to install the top addons when I did my initial setup and I found something to do everything I need.

5. It’s easily configurable
Sublime uses two configuration files: Default and User. The Default files holds the current configuration settings in JSON format. To override something, you just copy that setting into the User file, which overrides. The same technique is used for hotkeys, via the ‘key bindings’ configuration files.

6. It’s efficient to navigate
Everything in Sublime can be done from the keyboard, via hotkeys. You can jump between projects, search files, jump to line by number, move screens around, anything. There’s obviously a bit of a learning curve, but within a week you’ll be flipping around like a friggin’ ubergeek using just the tips of your pale fingers.

7. It has plenty of dark themes
I prefer dark themes for coding, they’re much easier on the eye than white once you get used to them. Sublime has loads to choose from.

8. It’s code completion just works
After my frustrations with Netbeans’s's weird code completion shoving triple speech marks around everything, Sublime offers smooth, intuitive code completion.

So if you find your current code editor/IDE to be resource-hungry, bloated or lacking decent features, you simply have to give Sublime a shot. I’ve been using it for about a month now and I’m mega happy with it.