How do you stayed focused on a task when the task involves some type of waiting?
For example, I have a really hard time staying focused at work. The problem for me is, our software can be really really really slow. While I’m waiting for Outlook to load an email, or our internal tooling to populate data, I find my mind is wandering. Often, I’ll start on another task or pick up my phone and just completely forget about the first thing I started.
At the end of the day, I have to figure out why I have 8 half written emails open in the background of my PC.
How do you stay on track when your tasks require patience?
I used to eat a biscuit every time I was waiting for my PC to reboot. It was hard to stay thin while running Windows 98.
I have a second laptop next to me so I can do something completely unrelated while waiting for my code to compile. If I watch my code compile, I’ll start reading the logs and I WILL start investigating one of the 243 linting errors I inherited from the other devs.
By the end of the week, I’m sometimes switching between 3 different branches and raising a 5-line pull request for the one thing I was asked to do. I then have a 100+ line PR because I refactored some trash module to shave 200ms off the program startup time.
Back to your question of how I manage waiting. I don’t manage. I have a dream that one day my codebase won’t be trash and I can make a change without invoking an 8 minute wait.
At least now that I have stims, I don’t feel the urge to snack every time my mind idles.