I came accross this article today, which pretty much perfectly described my working days….
It’s rather comforting to know I’m not the only one like this…It never makes me feel very good when I have a day (or week) in which I find it hard to get motivated, I _like_ my job mostly, I like programming, and most of what I have to work on is stuff I’m interested in and like doing, but it’s still hard to get going sometimes, which for me tends to start a downward spiral…as I’m far less likely to manage to get motivated when I’m not feeling 100%, and having a day in which all I do is browse the web, and maybe, if I’m lucky, poke at a couple of lines of code, just makes me feel worse.
It’s funny, I think the thing that makes me most productive is a well timed support request. Normally I hate having to do support, often it just turns out to be a problem with the user’s understanding, and it can be a frustrating process. It’s even worse when it’s an actual bug, because by now most of the software I have to maintain is well past the point of having obvious bugs, so if it’s a bug, you know you’re going to have to spend a day or so with a debugger trying to track it down, rather than be working on what you want to work on.
However, the result of finaly tracking down and fixing the bug is that at the end of it, I’ve had a productive day. I can go home feeling good about having spent the day doing my job, instead of feeling bad about not doing quite as much as I feel I should have. This usualy means that the next day, I’m far more likely to have a productive day, and probably have a 3 or 4 good days in which I can get quite a lot done.
I’ve found that the best way to improve my chances of being productive is to get plenty of sleep. This helps by making me feel more alert during the day, but also makes me far less succeptable to mood swings resulting from dwelling on personal problems…which are definitely very bad for productivity.
Unfortunately…I don’t really seem to be able to sleep these days, even if I try…..it’ll often take me 3 or even 4 hours before I’ll finally manage it. Reading helps this quite a bit, but it can also work the other way – if I’m reading a particularly good book, I’m just as likely to still be reading it at 2am, which is really counter productive on the getting to sleep front. I guess I just need to be a little more firm with myself about when I’m going to stop ;)
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