30 Minutes, first thing in the morning
I used to have the habit of coming into work, and as the first thing make some coffee and grab something to eat in the kitchen. I would hang out there, chatting with whoever was available, for a varying amount of time. I started noticing that, when doing this, it became harder and harder for me to convince me to do some work, and remarkably hard to snap out of this mode for the whole day.
I think the problem there was that my body and mind got into “day off mode”. When I have a day off, I lazyly go about making breakfast, check news, read my blogs, all those “lazy day off things”. Which is perfectly ok, when I DO have the day off, and it is fine to go into that mode. At work, this is a problem, and my emotional state quickly makes friends with all the guilt feelings of not getting anything done, or dramatically less. In this mode I am also much more prone to procrastination and goofing off.
So fairly recently I am doing this: I come into work, grab a water, and do 30 minutes of work as soon as my computer is started up. I look at my lists of tests to write, or I have left a failing test from yesterday, or even a not-compiling one, and I start to work. Two factors are important: Quickly find a point to pick up from yesterday, and timebox it to 30 minutes, so your mind can not really convince you that you will be working forever without even grabbing a coffee.
After this little routine I grab some breakfast, some coffee, and chat with people, but usually the coding part of my mind has started up sufficiently, and I can’t wait to get back to the problem at hand. Remarkably, it is equally hard to snap out of THIS mode the whole day.
April 6th, 2006 at 5:51
Over the last few months, I’ve found that working in a small, tightly knit team resolves these problems almost transparently. I’m sad to say I haven’t procrastinated for months :); it’s even taken a holiday for me to finally post on your blog!
So, during a working day:
1) Either I have a sense of what to do next on my own, so I just do it. (Usually this happens when there’s something nice and testable on my plate.)
2) If I’m not sure what to do, or how to do it, I’ll talk to my team-mates/customers to get a better idea of the problem. Then I ponder it alone for a while and go back to 1).
3) If that doesn’t help, then I’m burnt out so I just go home or take a day off… (Though, to my surprise, 1) and 2) are very motivating so this doesn’t happen much!)
Maybe you need a small team to work in?