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Backlog grooming. That is, if you can’t focus, that’s usually (to me) a sign that the “work” available is currently too nebulous to focus on, and you need instead to focus on turning it into more concrete, atomic, actionable items, which you can then focus on doing.
you could prob use 3+ months off if you can afford it.
you can work doing something else in the meantime if you can/need to.
- Disconnect the laptop's charger and work on one charge. I used to have a laptop that had at most 2 hours and it forced me to really focus. The progress I made on some projects on a commute is amazing.
- Disconnect from the internet and work only with what you have on your machine. This means no search, no tabs. No distractions. This is great for proofs of concepts/prototypes where you get something done first, then you refine it later. It taught me to look at the code instead of documentation, and it taught me that as good as a documentation can be, there always are things that are not documented but are still there to use. It also made me more familiar with the dependencies of my projects. I never really used StackOverflow much when online (I instead rely on the code, docs, and issues of the project), so your mileage may vary when it comes to removing internet access.
It's also useful to reduce the "activation energy" for work. One of the ways to do that is to exploit the time you don't feel like working to play or explore. A directory named "musings" can help, where you scratch a few itches with snippets of code. If you're distracted in exploration of a new library or concept, make a new file and play with constructs, patterns, APIs, libraries, etc. Just play for play. It's low pressure. You don't need to ship something. It's not work, but it's fooling around and more often than not, it tricks you into getting in the zone without even realizing. The other benefit is that day in and day out, you're building a "corpus", a set of snippets that very often will come in handy when you actually need to do something "work related". When that time comes, you won't perceive the task to be daunting or be clueless, because it's déjà vu. You already fooled around with that concept/library/problem and you have something in your back pocket. It won't be "How on earth am I going to tackle this" and feeling under pressure and overwhelmed, but "Yup, I already played with that. Heck, I even wrote some code to do that. I'll see if I can use it".
Playing when you don't feel like work is a great way to reduce the activation energy when you actually have to work.
sounds like typical case of burnout. you could prob use 3+ months off if you can afford it. you can work doing something else in the meantime if you can/need to.
Don't diagnose people in 10 sentences. Have you ever tried solo developing? Without the extrinsic motivation, and forced external schedule it's fairly difficult for most people to stay on target with all the distractions we have today.
Ex.
8am - out of bed, make breakfast, no phone usage
9am - start working (and make sure you have specific tasks to work on)
12:30pm - lunch break + go for a walk and listen to podcast
2pm - continue working on specific tasks
5:30pm - leisure time + make dinner
7pm - workout
8:30pm - shower, get ready for bed
9:30pm - sleep
- The War of Art - by Steven Pressfield
Have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what “Resistance” is. - The War of Art - by Steven Pressfield
My silver bullet: always end the day with a task in progress. Makes it much easier to jump in the next morning because you have a clear place to get started.