How Do You Maintain Your Work Focus?

chowsapal asks: "I've recently switched from another line of work into computer programming, where I work as a contractor. I'm making more money than I need, and more than I'm used to even working 20 or 25 hours a week. I'd like to work more, and rake in even more money, but sometimes it's hard to stay focused for more than 5 or 6 hours at a time. What do other programmers do to motivate themselves? Do you work a specific set of hours? In a specific location? Are there types of breaks that you find really increase productivity? Does diet and/or coffee consumption make or break the deal? Do you end up working late at night for the quiet? I realize that on some level you just need to suck it up and put in the time, or stop worrying about it and enjoy your time off. However, the question stands: How do you work best outside an office environment?"

Comments

Priorities?

[sharkey]

If you are making more than you need, and more than you are used to in a "shorter than normal" work week, perhaps you should go to the pool or something. It sounds like you are working to get money so you can HAVE money, not so that you can attain any other goal in life but to get more money.

Perhaps your motivation problem is that you seem to have no goals outside of the numbers on your bank accounts.

Add a bit of Diversity

[SubliminalVortex]

I'm almost convinced that programmers are afflicted with 'ADD' as a side effect. It's very easy to get bored with a programming task (especially one that is boilerplate) so we go off on a tangent trying to automate the process of writing boilerplate code.

I find that when spending too much time looking at the same code, it starts becoming 'vague' and I feel as if I'm in a fugue. It's akin to the same thing as writing a story or some e-mail and thinking that you've misspelled the words 'it' or 'and'. It may very well be correct, but it looks foreign and you try to fix something that isn't broken. At that point, it's time for a mental break.

I actually tend to take at least three breaks a day for about five to ten minutes each. The first two, I read Slashdot; usually around 10:00am and the other right before lunchtime. I don't eat out often, but I do pick up lunch and then around 4:00pm, I check out the latest 'IT' curiosity posted on The Daily WTF http://www.thedailywtf.com/. I also check Slashdot again right before I leave so I don't miss some of the few gems posted here.

A lot of IT shops have their eye on Web browsing, but they usually won't pay mind to it unless you're not producing or you have a tendency to frequent sites that raise an eyebrow or two (hint: pr0n sites tend to fall in that category). I do like to visit sites geared towards developers, such as GotDotNet http://www.gotdotnet.com/, CodeProject http://www.codeproject.com/, CodeGuru http://www.codeguru.com/ and the latest "up and coming" Krugle http://www.krugle.com/ code search engine. Sometimes visiting those sites will give a tidbit or two that is useful; you may run across some code or solution to a problem that interests you. Also, you may end up learning something that you'll run into in the future. (Coders tend to re-invent the wheel if they don't have the code handy; however, if the code is there, they tend to add spinning rims to it.)

Adding a bit of diversity to the routine helps keep you on the edge and refreshed to approach a problem in a new light.

Follow these steps

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1. Stop reading Slashdot

Step 2. I still haven't gotten past step 1, but when I do, I'll let you know.

Easy answer...

[Anonymous Coward]

127.0.0.1 www.slashdot.org

I don't

[JanneM]

I don't maintain focus for more than an hour at a time. In fact, I can't. And being involved in cognitive science research, I can state that for sustained work, neither can anybody else. Yes, once in a while, if your current problem is intensely interesting, you can zone out and work on it for many hours straight. But most work - however interesting it is - isn't able to grab your focus in that manner. To see it from another perspective, a movie is designed to grab your attention, is created by people devoting their lives to grab your attention as effectively as possible and has about every technical means short of drugs available to grab and hold your attention. And yet, few movies are longer than two hours, because people will not be able to hold their focus for much longer than that.

If you try to force yourself by having only your work available and forcing yourself to sit on front of it, all that will happen is that after an hour or two your thoughts will start to drift, you'll get stuck in a rut reiterating old thought processes, and you may even nod off for short periods due to the imposed lack of stimulus variation. In short, "maintaining focus" is a good way to sink your productivity.

Instead, accept that you can't single-mindedly focus on any one thing for more than about 45 minutes to an hour (there's a good reason class time seems to have converged to about 45 minutes the world over). Do one of these things in combination:

* Get up, stretch and move about a bit. Go look out the window, find someone else on a break and shoot the breeze for a few minutes. Leaf through the morning paper, trade magazine, or that 2001 office supplies catalogue you never seem to get around to throw away. Go over to Accounting and ask about that missing trsvel reimbursement. In short, get yourself exposed to some new stimuli so you canh approach the next hour with a fresh mind.

* Have a secondary task you can switch to whenever you get bored with the main one. Maybe now is a good time to answer a few email, or write some documentation (there's always documentation to write). Really the same thing as above - get some new stimuli - but with more of a work focus.

* Set a goal for the day. And when it's done, quit. Sure there's more work to be done - but there's always more work to be done. You can stay 24/7 and there will still be more. Do what you set out to do, then go home. With a definite short-term goal, pacing yourself is easier, and it's much easier to focus on a comprehensible, digestible chunk of work.

Re:Motivation

[blugu64]

I just ask my self with every action, is what I'm doing good for the company