Productivity++

Trolling through work the last few days, just thought I'd share a few of the things I have done/know I have to do in order to have the best day at "the office."

Sit, or stand. Don't lie down.

Living in Napa was tough. I didn't have a chair to sit in just a futon that was not ideal. I lay down a lot, and that just screams failure. Once I moved to New York, I made sure I either had a) a desk that I could stand at, or b) a chair that is only comfortable with good posture.
Hanging out at the General Assembly can make this difficult with their beautiful (and by beautiful I mean seductive) black couches, but I know it'll be a good work day when I can find a chair or find a place to stand at the bar.

Find a script to get rid of reddit.

I have a ridiculous habit of hanging out on reddit and clicking on imgur links nonstop. There are scripts all over github to disable select websites, so I'm going to turn one on that just says "Problem?" if I attempt to access it. Self-restrain can come later.

Do a warm up.

For now, I do about an hour or so of warm up work each day. Read out of a book and do "write as I tell you to" code; something relatively simple and gets my mind going. It reminds me of when I taught how students complained about doing Daily Oral Language every single day insistent that their writing was "fine", but nonetheless they sucked it up, did it, and after a few months we all slowly began to see improvement. It's a witless activity, but a great reminder that 99% of the errors in code are probably my fault, even to the point that I just didn't copy it correctly. Eventually, I'd like to move onto using this hour to just looking around on github or stackoverflow to learn new code to implement or find questions within reason that I could answer. But for now, I still have a lot to learn.

Make everything on my computer huge.

I started doing this for a couple of reasons. One, as monitors become better and better, the resolution increases, and then everything gets smaller. I'm not getting old, but if I'm reading an ebook online (probably because I was too lazy to take out my kindle, or put the book on it), I like to make the text readable to the point where I'm not squinting or leaning forward--again, something that doesn't promote good posture. On a typical ebook or article, this is at least 2 cmd+'s on Chrome, somewhere between 20-24 lines viewable on a full screen computer. I do the same thing with terminal (2 cmd+'s), and set that to "hacker mode" (pro mode) to contrast the typical black-text-on-white that I see on the web, or even my textmate workables. This all lets me focus more on my work instead of straining to determine where I left off or to find a bug in the code.

Meet someone new.

This I kind of take for granted since I live in New York with 8 million people, but I make it a goal to talk to someone that I haven't spoken to before. This sounds like simple networking, sure, but just a matter of opening my mouth every day for the last two weeks has gotten me two job interviews, plenty of business cards, and chances to meet people I would have never met otherwise.

Work with a goal in mind.

Short term goals seem tame, but any responsible person understands that in order to succeed, you need reachable daily goals. I figured that out the hard way when I would tell myself "I'm going to read these ten articles and then do some crazy stuff with it!" That never happened, and I got frustrated fast. Instead, I'm finding what's doable within a day, getting that done, and taking a break before I try to figure out what my next steps should be.



On that note, I've finished all my CSS review, and what's left on github of my splash page is just garbage. Tomorrow's gameplan: rewrite this from scratch on paper, and start doing the visual designs in inkscape. I'd like to get this page running on just HTML and CSS before I start cruising into javascript land again--or before I implement some anyway.
I also completed the next three exercises in Zed Shaw's book on Python (my current daily warm up). If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it.