You'll be more productive if your computer announces the time

http://blog.upskilled.edu.au/5-productivity-hacks-that-you-probably-havent-heard-of-yet/

by gorachel007 • 11 years ago

10 5 11 years ago

blog.upskilled.edu.au

tyw433• 11 years ago

I hope somebody could help me out here. Throwaway account.

I've recently graduated and since May I've been working remotely for a company. I've always loved programming, but now it's become work, and I'm only doing it for the money.

And I have the opposite problem. I keep looking at the clock counting down hours to lunch, counting down hours to the end of the day. I'm just restless.

I'm being a very good and productive programmer, but it's not through joy from work anymore, but through willpower. I just go through my day forcing myself to do it.

Anybody else going through the same thing? Maybe this is specific to remote programmers?

Animats• 11 years ago

That's a holdover from school. You may get over it.

reitanqild• 11 years ago

I have had a few jobs that could be really boring: showeling goat manure manually is one of them.

Here is "one weird trick" that works for me sometimes: make everything a competition against yourself, how many wheelbarrows can i empty into that trailer during the next 15 minutes? Can I finish this side before lunch?

Of course this wasn't programming but the general principle applies, -boring stuff is less boring when it goes really really fast.

In programming that also buys you time to study a bit and still finish the same amount of work. And since you are working remotely anyway I guess nobody will notice except that you are continously improving.

manibatra• 11 years ago

I won't give you a short term hack because I have tried many and nothing seems to stick. Instead the long term approach that has greatly improved my productivity as a freelancer and also in other areas of life is reading the book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". If you read one book in your life I would suggest it should be this one.

When your values ( loosely translated as why you do the things you do ) and your goals align you will become very productive. Has helped me a lot. I would suggest give it a shot :)

ondrasej• 11 years ago

First, be very careful about burning out. It can happen faster than you think if you have to force yourself to do the work every day.

Second, maybe you should find a different job - or at least change something about your current job. Remote work is not the best option for everyone - and it can be even worse if you work from home. Or maybe there's something wrong with your project, the technologies you use or the people you work with. Changing any of these might improve your situation. Start experimenting - you don't necessarily have to quit your job right now. Try working from different places (coworking space, university library, coffee shop, your friend's couch, ...). Speak with your manager about other projects, learning and growth opportunities and other things you might do that you would enjoy. And if this is something you can't bring up with your current manager, start looking for a new manager.

I was in a similar situation several years ago. I worked remotely (from home) for a small startup-like* company and in the end, I had to use the pomodoro technique and similar tricks every day just to make myself spend time really working. Even though I liked my team as people and we had a great CTO, it wasn't that great on the engineering side. Using ASP.net WebForms and Visual Studio 2008 (no management support for an upgrade) didn't help either. Neither did the fact that there was no product or customers to care about and relate with.

In the end, I felt really burned out and kept trying things just to keep working - working from the company office helped a bit, but it was really noisy there. Similar for my university lab (I was a student at that time), but it wasn't a long term solution. In the end, I got an internship at a research team at Google and started enjoying work again almost immediately. I even stayed there as a full-timer and I've never looked back. Even after four years I still look forward to going to work every single day because of the awesome people I work with and all the exciting projects we work on. There are annoying things like open-space offices, but the people and the projects more than compensate for it.

I've changed a lot of things at once to be 100% sure what made the biggest difference for me, but my bet is still on the people on the team and projects (no more asp.net and business plans changing every week). But I believe that even the change of work environment played its role.

* When I joined, the company existed for at least five years. But otherwise, it was very much like a startup - we had a product in development, but there were almost no customers and even the vision changed a lot - during one fruitful week, we went from an app generator to a social network for some demographic group, a government information system and back to apps. I guess it changed with the article the CEO read during lunch on a particular day. Interestingly, the management always convinced our investor to give us more money - maybe they held a child of the investor hostage or something like that.

You'll be more productive if your computer announces the time

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