81–90 of 116 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>No amount of control of my environment will put me in the zone when I'm working on boring code. adderall
I imagine far more people just get high.
But then it's done. And then you forget all the mass information you absorbed and shat out onto a page.
I haven't been in the zone for months. It's mostly general dissatisfaction with my job, but it's gotten worse of late. On an average day, there will be 4 hours of calls spread an hour or less apart for the first half of the day, with the potential for surprise calls for the rest of the day. The irony is that a lot of these calls are about why things aren't getting done. The surprise calls are the worst. Even if I mig…
Might not help if you're stuck in an authoritarian micro managing matrix but some tactics I've found useful before. 1) Block out 3 hours in the morning and 3 in the afternoon in your calendar as busy, marked private, at slightly different times each day. If asked you can be honest, many times people will not ask and simply avoid booking. 2) Leave your least productive time of day open for 90 minutes of meetings - for…
I get this too, but it's very draining - similar to doing an intensive workout, or given a talk at a conference. The negatives are obvious; less sociable, more easily irritated, wanting to be by yourself. After you've spent a day in the zone, you're not really "party material". The positive (apart from being very productive) is that I use it to get my negative feelings out of the way - anything that is bothering in m…
Speaking of The Zone: I often see programmers on HN talk about building mental castles of their programs, but I feel like I don't really code the same way. Instead, my thinking seems more "functional". For a given problem, I can often make out the faint outline of an optimal solution, but there's a lot of cruft and misplaced bits in the way. Most of my work involves mentally simulating the consequences of different o…
I also don't relate to programmers who write about their mental castles that evaporate with a tap on the shoulder. Frankly it sounds to me like people are doing it wrong. When I have a castle to build, I: * sketch out broad strokes on a whiteboard * write stubs and placeholder in code and see how it all connects * brutally refactor and iterate The last part is key. I may refactor and reorganize my architecture a doze…
The game was simple: there's a silo on the screen with a hot air balloon on the left side. When I get into 'the zone', the balloon goes up and around the silo. This will loop for as long as I can hold it.
It took about two sessions with minor success, then suddenly it clicked. Now I can easily enter that state on demand.
This might sound odd, but the neurotherapy helped eliminate a lot of the negative parts of ADHD without losing the edge that a lot of medications take away. I still have a lot of energy, but I can always sit and focus on the task at hand when I need to.
[1] http://www.swingleclinic.com/about/how-does-neurotherapy-wor...
Getting in the zone is something exhilarating for me - I experience euphoria, though I don't really notice the feeling until after it's over or if I get broken out of it. It was actually something that as of late has started to disturb me: I notice that I live for moments like that, when I get in the zone and the whole world melts away. I feel like a junkie seeking a high, and thinking back on my youth and how destru…
I really do feel like a junky, that has found a pile of whatever it needs and the world encourages me to get better in 'using' and keeps paying me more to get higher and higher.. it's such a strange 'unethical' feeling.. I'm programming for about 8 years now in full throttle, and it keeps feeling stranger.. I'm somehow glad others experience it also...
I'm a Fed engineer and spent a 4 mo. assignment on an integrated team with Pivotal pairing exclusively. It was a long 4 months for me. There was no "zone." I'm not built for pairing.
pair programming is an anti-process. its only purpose is to control employees, limit individual productivity, and drive down wages.
Yeah, because everyone knows that you have to pay less wages when you have two people do the job of one.
Speaking of The Zone: I often see programmers on HN talk about building mental castles of their programs, but I feel like I don't really code the same way. Instead, my thinking seems more "functional". For a given problem, I can often make out the faint outline of an optimal solution, but there's a lot of cruft and misplaced bits in the way. Most of my work involves mentally simulating the consequences of different o…
I relate. > I wish I could get better at building those "mental castles" since it's a huge barrier to working on complex architectures like as games. If you truly wish to do so - go make technically challenging systems like games. From start to end. Solo.
Plus testing is not just running RSpec, you have to play the game, play it a ton, play it in stupid and unpredictable ways, and when something breaks try to figure out where it broke. So you have to hold that code in your mind the entire time you're playing, too, to keep an idea of what methods are triggering at any moment.
Games are an amazing way of forcing you to "see the Matrix" and read the code in your mind as it runs in real time.
a) You have to be interested and eager to get started. If you're not happy with the project, if anything else going on in your life is taking your attention, you will not experience it.
b) When you experience it, you feel like you're a 'real' engineer, like that is your true identity now, your imposter syndrome disappears. So ultimately, if you don't identify as a programmer, as opposed to identifying as someone who programs because it pays well or view it as just a temporary phase of your career until you do management or become a startup CEO or something, you may never experience it.
c) After you experience it, your brain goes "whoaaa" and needs to recover. You won't be able to experience it for at least another 2-3 days, in my experience.
While it may not be my most economically productive part of the day (aka I'm not working on the hard, important problems) there's no doubt that for the 10-15 minutes one of those menial tasks requires, I'm in that special state.
An environmental trigger for me is to play familiar music. It doesn't have to be a special playlist; any album I've listened to >50 times will suffice.
Remaining in the zone requires incremental progress (momentum) which I think is easy to find in a boring, repetitive task that's squarely in your wheelhouse.
The real productivity sweet spot is when you're able to get that momentum going on a valuable project.