Work Habits

I’ve been having trouble coming up with things to write about lately, and I just realized what the reason is. It’s not hard to get topics when you actually do something other than code. So let’s talk about my schedule and why I’m not exposed to any elements that create blog topics. I get up in the morning, take a shower, and hop on the train. Once I get to work, I settle down and start coding. I take my lunch and then continue coding. Around 6:30, I get out and hop on the train back home, which I get to around 7:30. I spend the next hour or two relaxing and getting my brain out of my day job and get some food. This is the only period of time I have to get input useful to my blog, which is really difficult since I tend to watch TV or play a video game at this point. I then settle down in my room and get to coding again. I code until my 1 am cutoff time and get to sleep.

If I don’t get to sleep at 1 am, the rest of my week is completely useless. I can’t get anywhere near the production level I had with my 1 am cutoff time and end up having to go to sleep early to recuperate from the lack of sleep, which makes me lose even more production time. Sticking to the cycle though, I’ve been in a pretty comfortable roll. I’m actually gearing up to get even more focused and I’m hoping to be able to cut my unwinding time down so that I have more time to work on my nightly project.

Even the nightly work itself I feel isn’t focused enough. I need to do some better planning of the whole program and then settle down to get each task done. There is too much of the question, “What should I do next?” There just needs to be a big list of tasks and check them off one at a time. While I was at DigiPen there were a lot of talks on how people work differently and have different needs. I am of the camp where I absolutely need a list and I need the satisfaction of moving things from the list of things needed to be done to the list of things that have been done.

Tonight is going to be my first night job meeting in a while. I think this is a perfect opportunity to really lay out what’s left to be done on the project. It’s going to get kind of technical so my partner might find trouble getting into some of the discussion that would be better suited for a programmer, but just having someone to bounce words off of will help. That’s really what non-programmers are there for sometimes. You might just need to say things out loud to someone to figure things out. I always joke that I should get a rubber duck, but I actually probably should. I also need a chess timer to time how long I take to do each task.

One thing I did for Winter Wars that really worked well was the really refined breakdown of tasks and estimating how long it would take to do each individual task. Because I refined the tasks so much, I was really able to figure out exactly how long sections of the program would take just by adding up all of the estimations in that section. I was then able to look at how long things took overall and see where I could improve not only my focus and organization, but also my time estimates. If something didn’t take as long as I estimated, I would ask the question, “Why?” This cycle is what is really missing from my current project and hopefully starting today I can remedy that.