Comment by lewisjoe
7 years ago
When I do dev stuff with a slight sense of urgency, the probability of my mind wandering somewhere else goes down drastically.
At this mode, my mind uses all available time slots to make the best of them. For example, by the time my program compiles, my brain visualizes possible breakage scenarios and possible solutions, in case the compilation fails.
I could be on confirmation bias here, but this seems to be a neat trick to get more things done.
Yeah, but could it also increase risk of stress, anxiety, burnout?
You can overdo it, but just my personal experience is that focus on work at work, even with urgency, never brings those.
Where anxiety and stress can come in for me is letting unsolvable, abstract-ish things hound me for a long time: "I have made a big mistake in life N years ago", etc.
Where I think urgency is hurting is breadth: I focus only on the easiest solution and long term view goes out the window so I need to intersperse walking or similar to let my mind wander to strange, stupid or potentially good ideas. Just my 2c, YMMV.
True. Too much of anything is bad. I keep this mode on for as long as I don't get mentally tired. Usually, that's a span of 2-3 hours.
Surprisingly, at the end of the day (typically after two/three of these zones) I feel more fresh, satisfied and productive. But that's just me.
Too much multitasking and producing software for years has made me feel this weird thing:
Which is that all accomplishments are meaningless in the end. And we are just getting older. Once a person dies they aren’t experiencing any stuff that came as a result of their effort. They may as well have just messed around and had a family sooner, or traveled, or not. It’s all meaningless anyway.
I can’t shake it. Anyone felt this way all the time? Any advice?
9 replies →
Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro method: focus intentionally for short periods, and then rest intentionally for even shorter breaks. It's a bit like interval training for the brain.
I've been wondering if 20 minutes of coding in 'urgent mode' then a 5 minute break, repeated, with a lunch break, would be more productive than 'average mode' all day, and without the burnout.
Try it and let us know - it's different for many people. I can work weeks at 14 hours a day without more than brief bathroom/food breaks if I'm passionate and not distracted.
1 reply →
I’m that ‘deadline bring me creative juice’ type of person. I’d say it kind of work to certain degree from my experience — good solution popup out of nowhere, maybe because like you said, I am very focused on that work alone, and nothing else.
It obviously doesn’t sustainable though, both your work and health. It get a job done, but I know that it lack finesse quality, also all that stress definitely shorten my lifespan.
Same thing happens to me, but not only on dev stuff. You get into "Flow" state.