z.ky's Anti-Procrastination During Programming Tips
- Read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder (or any kind of philosophy 101), it will fill you with philosophical insight and help you think clearly. I spent all weekend holed up in my room reading up to Hellenism (yes, I'm very exciting), and enjoyed an extremely productive day today.
- Make sure you know what you have to achieve, and how to go about it. Sometimes when I find myself completely stuck, it's because I don't actually realise what my next task is, or how to do it. The next point follows on from this!
- Try planning on paper: dissect the architecture of your program, write down problems to fix/what to implement next, optimizations that could be made...don't spend too long poring over a notebook though, set a time limit so you can return to the screen without coming to a complete standstill while planning.
- Surround yourself with other hardworking (I think everyone from the lab will laugh at this...) people for motivation.
- If you work well under pressure (like me), remind yourself of all the people who believed in you and your work, and helped you get to this point - don't disappoint them! Think of deadlines which seem very far away...if you procrastinate more, they won't remain so far!
- DON'T KEEP A BROWSER OPEN! Once you get on any sort of social networking/media site, the temptation to keep refreshing and waiting for updates (to procrastinate on) is immense. I was working so hard today that I forgot to check Twitter :P
- If you're working with nice people, ask them to keep you on point by reminding you to get back to work. Sometimes it works better than telling yourself.
Remember: many minor (coding) breakthoughs lead to a big breakthrough! As long as you keep working hard, things will only get better (:
I just realised that I really hate my vocabulary and 'blogging persona' here...hopefully that will change next time.
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