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How Do You Get Work Done?
canuck asks: "I am currently a university student and have a major problem: being able to simply sit down and get work done. I can set aside a day to work, whether it is homework or contract work, and I will be lucky to have an hour done before dinner time. The only time I can actually get solid work done seems to be after midnight under a lot of pressure (ie. a deadline the next day). This has led to too many 5 a.m. nights and turning down too many invitations to go out only to stay in and accomplish nothing. I have stopped playing games, stopped watching TV, tried reading the Seven Habits book, and am currently seeing what classical music does for me. I don't think I have ADHD, and I am not sure what else to try. If it is computer work, the web is always a click away, and I can always escape to my imagination. I know many of you will have had the same problem. Can anyone please give advice on how to overcome this problem, be it a little trick, medication, or anything else?"
canuck-
I'm a university student as well and as you can see (I'm sitting on slashdot) I have some of the same issues. However there have been some shining examples of good behavior on my part, and here are what I think are some of the apparent factors/causes:
a. social proof, i.e. studying with a bunch of people
b. meaning, a meaningful purpose
c. distractions, lack thereof, i.e. lack of other things to think about
Examples with causes:
-studying in the basement of the library (a, c)
-studying for imminent test or other grade-altering material (b, and possibly a)
-studying for something that will be applicable to some upcoming event i.e. work (b, and possibly a)
-studying for something that is less dreadful than what I should *really* be studying (b, c)
-studying at a coffeehouse, with ambient-type music like classical or trance (a, c)
*****
Other notes:
Speaking of coffee, I highly recommend coffee for the few hours that I seem to get out of it, really studying.
Something else I've found useful to keep my mind focused is to bring a notepad which I designate as a "worry pad." When I think of something, like, gee, I should do laundry or pay bills, I just write it on the pad so that I can focus on studying.
I find it helpful to like what I am studying. If I currently don't like it, I try to find a way to like it. If I can't find a way to like it, I begin to consider studying something else....
Or maybe this problem of not being able to study is not a problem as a gift. Perhaps studying as much as some others at your school is not your idea of fun and you can try pursuing something that seems more fun to you (without studying).
I use rewards for my self, as stupid as it sounds.
Like today, I have to write some thankyou cards, and fill out some rebate forms. So, I promised my self that after I do that, I'm gonna go to walmart and spend 20$ on something fun and/or stupid!
I saw my school psychiatrist about the same sort of behavior, thinking I had ADD, and the guy told me I was probably just depressed.
This was a shock to me, because I had never thought that I could be "depressed", but the more I thought about what he said the more it made sense.
Imagine that we have a certain threshold of happiness, emotional comfort, whatever, that we try to maintain. Any time that we engage in some behavior that isn't rewarding, we (as simple dumb animals) quickly go back to more rewarding behavior. This is the problem. When you're borderline depressed, you're just barely
staying happy, and you do whatever you can in a very short-term-thinking kind of way to maintain that happiness.
After I started with the meds, I found it easier to get into doing things that were frustrating or boring long enough to finish them. Finishing those things became a reward.
So, Canuck may need meds that will allow him to feel comfortable experimenting with new behavioral patterns long enough to find ones that will work better for him.
- if you're struggling within yourself, you're lost. Learn to recognise this mental state (of internal struggle) and drop it immediately.
- instead, look with detachment at the 'lazy' half of the struggle. The more clearly you see it, the less power it will have.
- once the laziness is clearly seen, visualise yourself beginning the task, in detail. You can do this lying in bed or anywhere, but the important thing is to get over the initial hump, and sort out a clear picture of the first steps you need to take.
It's this startup-barrier that's the real problem, but reducing it to a manageable size is just a question of thinking it out clearly (not sweating, exercising, or promising rewards or threats).
Heavily agree with above posts.
In addition, to get your circadian cycle in sync (which gives you more energy) you can do these things:
1. It's more important to wake up at the same time. You can't always force yourself to sleep, but your body will entrain if you force yourself to get up at the same time each morning. That means NO sleeping in on weekends.
2. Expose yourself to light first thing in the morning. Preferably, I would suggest going outside but you can also get specific lights that simulate sunlight.
3. When you excerise, the best time to do that is several hours before going to bed.
Programmers tend to have delayed-phase sleep syndrome (which means we like to stay up late).
People who are delayed-phase, tend to migrate toward those jobs they can do at late hours and don't have to wake up at a specific time to do them.
I don't think the problem here is lack of energy, but rather procrastination. People procrastinate for various reasons. Whether you absolutely hate what you have to do, or whether you are sure that whatever you come up with will not be acceptable in quality, at which point you blow it off til 1AM the night before, and blame subpar results on not giving it much effort in the first place.
A better approach would be trying to analyze why exactly the author of this Ask Slashdot is pushing work off til the last possible moment.
This book might help him get a firmer grip on understanding the exact reason. It has a chapter on procrastination and seems to address exactly what he described.
Good luck.
hth
'yields false when preceded by its quotation' yields false when preceded by its quotation.
No offense Paradox but I'm reading lots of platitudes - "Quick learner", "less training", "practice learning." Not sure this translates into anything solid given my 20 years of coding in various ways.
I had a recent experience that I found amusing (kind of). I kept reading how employers were looking at "soft skills" now a lot more than the past and how "pure tech" wasn't going to cut it. Recently I wound up hooking up with some head hunter whose client insisted that any potential candidate take exams on Brainbench.com. Fine. I went along. I took an exam they set me up with. I scored 79% on the C++ exam. Not bad since it had been YEARS since I had actively coded in C++ (real stuff like class design, not simple subclasses to handle GUI events).
In my day I would keep up with the ANSI committee and enjoy reading what Scott Meyers et al had to say. (Aside: I just dumped my entire collection of "C++ Report" into the recycle bin)
That was then, this is now.
Turns out, the head hunter's client (who I might work for) had REALLY wanted me to take the Visual C++ Brainbench exam. I thought to myself, "Wow, so much for soft skills if all they are interested in is a number on some exam." Despite having Microsoft on my resume and having a capacity of "Lead Architect" in my last employer it seemed they were looking for some "magic number". I told the head hunter "No thanks" (much to his chagrin) and sent a polite letter to the HR person who sent me the URL for taking the test stating that I didn't think it was a "fit."
Truth is, today I WOULD in fact like to leverage my soft skills more than in the past. These people were looking for a grunt coder. Plain and simple. Been there, done that.
Fed up with the idiotic HR people and the dearth of anything interesting, today I'm selling cars by choice. Hondas specifically.
Let me make things clear, my biggest frustration in tech is the idiotic HR people in various organizations that are the gate keepers. Next come the moronic head hunters. But it's just the nature of the business and a necessary evil, particulary with the limited opportunities nowadays.
When I look at all I've done and what I know... then to have to deal with people who haven't the slightest clue and are simply matching buzzwords, well, it's all quite frustrating, really. Never mind that I transitioned from my last employer in a major way from Windows to the LINUX platform, never mind that I worked at Microsoft and have shrink wrapped software to my credit, never mind that I worked on a source level debugger at one point in time for Motorola... HR people don't understand any of the latter. Nothing.
To all tech people let me just say this, something I am passing along from a high level manager I once heard - "I know you love all that technical minutiae but don't forget about the soft skills." More importantly, since we're in a down time, if you go try something utterly non-tech it may spark surprising changes in how you view the world and yourself.
To give you some food for thought, how many CEOs do you know that were prime time developers? Yeah, Bill Gates might have coded in his day but I can assure you he hasn't done shyt for the last 15+ years. He was a businessman first and that's what succeeds in our society (the social element of the equation). Always has, always will.
Something I've had to learn the hard way...
-M
PS: Oh yeah, I'm the one selling cars that SPAZOID12 up above eludes to.
I have severe ADD and a job that requires me to work independantly and get stuff done. I have been using an egg-timer that I have modified (busted) so that it is too quiet for my coworkers to hear outside of my cube. This keeps the lynch mobs at bay.
I keep a list right next to the timer and when something comes up that needs doing but isn't what is at the top of my list (a distraction), I write it down on the list. Since the egg timer interrupts me every few minutes, I don't find myself pissing away as much time when I do get distrsacted.
Another reason my mind wanders is boredom. I always make sure I switch tasks when the timer rings if I can switch and come back later without losing my place in what I was doing. That way, I am always doing something new and I don't just give up and go read slashdot.
This also helps with procrastination. I find it easier to start on even the most odious tasks if I know that in 10 minutes, I can put it down for a bit and catch up on my email.
Oops.
There's a big difference between ADD (or ADHD or whatever) and a general lack of discipline. I've been having problems for my whole life with it, and have just recently been diagnosed. For a long time I figured I just wasn't trying hard enough, or approaching things from the right direction, but after thinking a lot and talking to people, I realized that my problems were rather unusual compared to others.
When talking about a lack of discipline, the problem is getting work done when you're not interested in it. You have to write a program or do a term paper, then you think of going onto the web or playing a game, and you wander off and do that instead. A lot of my friends described having problems with this in college when I would talk about my difficulties.
What I've been experiencing is a little different than this, though. I just couldn't focus on things in general. I'd avoid watching movies because of the effort it would take to keep track of a story for an hour and a half. I'd try to read an article and trail off halfway into it, realizing a few minutes later that I've been sitting there with a magazine, going through the motions of reading, but not absorbing any of it. Lord knows reading an actual book was incredibly difficult. It wasn't that I found other things to do. It was more like I'd sit there trying to focus and blanking out until I either forgot what I was doing completely or got so frustrated I gave myself a migraine. And when I could do focus on something, if someone were to distract me at all, I'd get so startled I'm jump into the air, and get very angry. Sometimes I'd be able to sit down and write a really good term paper, but get an F for it because I wasn't able to read the one page of text that gave the instructions on how it was to be written.
There were other, less specific problems, too. I couldn't clean my room, practically ever, not because I was lazy, but because when I'd try I couldn't pay attention to any specific item apart from the general mess well enough to figure out how to clean it. I'd literally sit there for five or ten minutes looking around trying to figure out what it was that made my room so messy. I couldn't separate the clothes from the soda bottles or the computer equipment in my mind.
Also, as a kid I was really socially awkward. I just couldn't deal with people at all. I had a couple of friends that I would hang out with pretty comfortably, but when I got into a group I would get completely overwhelmed. Looking back on it, I realized that I couldn't process all the sound of different people talking at once. After a certain point, I'd hear them but not really understand anything they were saying. That would definitely make it hard to make friends at parties.
When I got on Wellbutrin (initially for depression) and, more recently, Adderall (I hate the stuff, but it helps), I started noticing large changes. With the Wellbutrin I still had trouble focusing on specific things, but I noticed my confusion went way down. I could deal easily with people, and could pay attention to what was going on around me. That helps a lot when driving. When I started taking the Adderall, I suddenly found it very easy to pay attention to one thing separate from others. I could remember to get my mail or take out the trash. I could separate my clothes and actually do my laundry. I could organize the tasks involved in getting my dishes washed, rather than not eating because I couldn't find a clean plate. I found myself starting to draw more (which I've always loved but never really practiced) because I could actually visualize in my head what I wanted to draw, rather than scribble around until I either had something or I didn't. I actually even sat down and started reading a few of the many books that I've gathered through the years, meaning to read. It's not particularly easy to sit down and write out an organised essay, design a program, or reorganize all the crap in my room, but I can actually sit and think of how I would go about doing it, and even remember
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