Am I the only one who feels that distraction isn't necessarily a bad thing? I find that even my most productive days aren't distraction-free. And oftentimes my best ideas come when I'm most distracted.
Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
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Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#42Am I the only one who feels that distraction isn't necessarily a bad thing? I find that even my most productive days aren't distraction-free. And oftentimes my best ideas come when I'm most distracted.
I find controlled-distraction -- set times when I let myself be distracted (such as: 'at 2pm I will spend 15 min reading HN) -- is helpful. Otherwise I don't think sporadic, intermittent distraction could be of much use.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#43There are salient points here, but they're masked by the caricature of a maniac who can't go without Facebook for five seconds and a mythical beast that never gives his brain a break from work. Real developers fit into some reasonable amount of both kinds of behavior and it's the balance that is important, and different for every developer.
Be smart and be true to yourself, not a watered down version of someone else's life philosophy.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#44Perhaps the Go language will help the distraction-junkie. Build times of seconds, even for very large projects. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2976630/why-does-go-compi...
This is also a benefit of interpreted languages like Ruby or JavaScript.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#45There are salient points here, but they're masked by the caricature of a maniac who can't go without Facebook for five seconds and a mythical beast that never gives his brain a break from work. Real developers fit into some reasonable amount of both kinds of behavior and it's the balance that is important, and different for every developer. Be smart and be true to yourself, not a watered down version of someone else'…
I agree. I don't like it when some random blogger talks with fake authority on an issue and boils it down to some black-and-white binary comparison.
That being said, one thing I realized last week is that I distract myself way too much while I'm supposed to be working. Starting tomorrow (I don't plan on working today), I'm closing my e-mail, IM, Facebook, Words with Friends and stock charts and hope that increases my overall productivity, which has been extremely, extremely poor over the last 6 weeks.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#46"Divide your time into 60 – 120 minutes blocks of work. Focus 100% percent in these blocks of time. Then take a 20-30 minute break and do something else entirely." This might be usable advice for someone who works at home on his own business, but for those of us who work in office environments, there are sources of distraction that are much more difficult to control than the urge to read news: meetings, your boss wal…
In a larger office, you are usually not paid for being productive. Responding quickly to mails from your boss is probably more effective than focused coding. So don't worry that much. For the occasional productivity burst: schedule yourself a fake meeting, pick a lonesome place and your laptop, disconnect from instant messengers etc.
Bingo. The problem of office interruptions reduces down to priorities and having a boss that understands your work.
Interruptions don't have to be inevitable - there is almost always something you can do to cut yourself off. For me, I could book myself solo into a conference room for 90 minutes, block the time on my calendar, turn off my IM and mail toast, put earphones in and work.
If the concern is that you can't do this - that you'll get in trouble or won't be meeting expectations - either your priorities are out of order relative to what your boss/organization thinks they should be, or your boss/organization isn't convinced that cutting yourself off to do solitary work adds any value. One could argue that a really good boss would understand it already, but we don't always get really good bosses - if your boss isn't already convinced and you don't want to do the work to convince them, I suppose the answer is to either put up with it or leave.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#47That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday The project I was working on a few months ago took 40 minutes to build on an i7 with 8 GB of RAM.
How long for an incremental change to the code? Say, if you touched only one source file?
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#48The last article I read before going to sleep was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity... - feeling disgusted that surely I'm that unfortunate guy, who was not diagnosed early and carried this into my adulthood. But that this article sits on top of HN, makes me feel better - I'm not alone with (speed_of_inspirational_input > speed_of_implemented_idea). My question is be it pomodoro or this big…
I struggle with the boundaries as well. Especially at the end of the day or before lunch. "This will only take me 1 minute" fixes turn into half-hours and ruin the whole schedule.
One thing that might be worth trying is to just stop working whenever your time chunk is done, regardless of what's left. I remember reading an article here on how Hemingway used to stop writing in the middle of a sentence at the end of a creative writing session. The author was suggesting that programmers do the same thing (leaving a half completed function or even line of code, even if it means that the project isn't building).
I tried it after reading the article and I was very surprised with the results. I find it much easier to start in the morning when I have a half completed line of code in front of me. The context comes back almost instantaneously and even when it only takes me a minute to finish what I had started the day before, I feel like I am already in the flow and I will be much quicker when I start the next task. When the first task on my list is to start a feature for example, I often end up browsing the code files aimlessly trying to find the starting point, etc.
Ever since I started using this technique, I find it much easier to just stop at the end of an allocated time chunk. It's only a question a perception obviously, but instead of feeling like I have given up on a task before it was done, I think of it as a way to set myself up for the next time chunk.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#49Perhaps the Go language will help the distraction-junkie. Build times of seconds, even for very large projects. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2976630/why-does-go-compi...
This is also a benefit of interpreted languages like Ruby or JavaScript.
Not necessarily. It can take a long time to load a large project, including any Rails applications. A typical Rails application can take about 30 seconds to load (that's any time you run a Rake task, launch a server, run unit tests, etc) and unit test runs can typically take a few minutes, often times more than 10 minutes for large applications. If you use a test server, such as Spork, the load time largely goes away for running your tests, but there's still a few seconds of startup time. Just because a language doesn't have an explicit "compile" step doesn't mean its void of compiling-related problems.
Re: Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie?
#50"Divide your time into 60 – 120 minutes blocks of work. Focus 100% percent in these blocks of time. Then take a 20-30 minute break and do something else entirely." This might be usable advice for someone who works at home on his own business, but for those of us who work in office environments, there are sources of distraction that are much more difficult to control than the urge to read news: meetings, your boss wal…
I have a specific ritual for getting into the zone and one for getting out of the zone. My ritual for getting into a focused state is something like: Move back from the computer, touch my index fingers to my thumbs, close my eyes, count down from 10, and say out loud (or write) "I am now working on (project)". It takes ~30 seconds and it works pretty well for me.
I go through the mental process of telling myself what I am working on now, but I like the idea of adding a physical ritual to go along with it. I'll try it! Thank you for sharing.
What is your ritual for getting out of the zone, out of curiosity?