Koumei wrote:The short breaks are good, but make sure those short breaks are spent walking around, readjusting your vision and so on. Don't make a break involve doing anything at all on the Internet, otherwise it's not a short break, it's the end of all work for the day.
Yeah, five minutes of video gaming never happens.
Koumei wrote:Edit: I like how at the bottom of the article it has a link to Procrastination. From there I have opened another eight tabs, and will now be procrastinating most successfully. Just kidding, I'm at work, I don't have anything to actually put off doing.
I remember procrastinating by researching procrastination one time. I ended up choosing it as a topic for my term paper. Unfortunately, I ended up procrastinating differently once it became work and didn't learn a great deal about procrastination in the process.
DSMatticus wrote:Obviously, you have to find a way to force yourself to start working, and you have to find a way to avoid distractions once you've started working. Like Koumei suggests, the way you should do that is probably by doing work first and just not signing in to or opening any of your usual distraction sources until you are done with the day's work. I... have no real advice on top of that. You just... have to do it. If you find some super secret ninja technique, by all means, fucking share.
Beyond that, if you approach your tasks with the mentality "how much time can I procrastinate and still meet my deadlines," you are either outright setting yourself up to fail or walking a very dangerous line. It's easier said than done, but it's a lot more productive to just assign time out of your day to working on shit. If you find your to-do list growing, assign more time; if you find it shrinking, congratulations you found some leisure time. Be realistic about the assignment of such periods. Four two-hour blocks of work over four days is better than one eight-hour block of work on one day, because you are more likely to stick to it and less likely to burn yourself out.
TL;DR "how many hours can I work today?" is a fuckton better way to tackle things than "how many hours can I not work at all before I fuck myself over?"
Yeah, I really need to start doing shit first before goofing off.
K wrote:If you want to get shit done, you need to sleep.
I know that in the modern world we tend to think of people as heroes if they don't sleep to get more work done, but not getting sleep ruins both motivation and productivity in such a dramatic fashion that you'd have been better off just sleeping. A lot of research about burnout and job fatigue has landed on sleep as a major factor is preventing it and recovering from it.
Meikle641 wrote:Sleep is a big deal, indeed. I never realised how much fatigue was messing with my ability to concentrate and think clearly til I actually started getting rested. Being sleep deprived is like being drunk, minus the fun.
Yeah, I really should get more sleep.
I was freaking out when I first started posting in this thread today and was having trouble sleeping. You know, one of those, 'what am I doing with my life' moments. I feel better now. Sort of at peace. Thanks guys.