I've been working mostly on trouble tickets with the job I'm at now. I don't like this. I don't get to move on and do better things. Because of this, I'm focusing my energy on killing tickets so I can move on.
This means some changes. For the next little while I'll have to IRC much less, and read journals less often. I think this will be good for me.
So my question is, how do you maintain productivity?
keep it interesting
wickline on 2002-07-02T14:45:22
I have the least trouble maintaining productivity when I'm
interested in my task. For me, that generally means that I'm
either solving an interesting problem, or I'm interacting with
someone.
If I've got some less interesting task, I'll find my mind is
more eager to wander and I'll be working slower.
To get around this, I'll try to make my task more interesting.
Since problem solving is interesting for me, I might take some
specific less-interesting problem, and try to develop a more
general solution to a class of problems. Sometimes this is as
simple as "document and publish the solution rather than just
emailing it to one user". That may not be any more 'fun' than
emailing a solution to a user, but it holds my interest a bit
more because I have to write things for a wider audience and
be more precise in my language.
Sometimes it means writing a fun script rather than doing some
boring task manually.
Sometimes my imagination fails me and I can't make the dull
task interesting. In those cases, I end up taking breaks. For
example, here I am now :)
The above commentary is based on what keeps *me* focused. Maybe
you could observe what's different when *you* are focused versus
unfocused and craft your own strategies from those observations.
what are you working on when you're [un]focused
how are you working on it
what sort of working environment do you have
what sort of deadline do you have
what time of day are you working on it
what else is pending in your todo queue
(keep brainstorming questions here)
-matt
