Build a Focus System for Better Work/Life Balance as a Web Developer

What's hard for others may not match what's hard for you.

It just seemed completely counter intuitive to me (as a Zen practitioner) to introduce something needlessly complicated on probably the simplest (not the easiest) thing you can do in your life.

There is a significant amount of learning involved in focus and meditation, by and large the people reading and buying these want a short cut and do themselves a disservice. Work is part of your life. Trying to have certain hacks to focus to work then pull up an app for more hacks on how read, then a different app for hacks on how to meditate to cast out the stress of work, misses the connection between why you cant focus in the first place. Not being able to read, work, relax are all symptoms of a problem: you are terrified of being bored.

The Pomodoro method seems like a good start, but in my opinion mindfullness should be applied to every part of your life.

Learning to focus on work will help you focus on work. Learning to be mindful will help you with relationships, sex, reading, work and pretty much every part of your life.

My best advice is to get comfortable being bored. Stare at a blank wall for an hour every few days. It will profoundly change your life.

Once the requests started coming in for significantly more than that, I needed a system of rejecting requests and creating project timelines based on very consistent output.

I feel like these two things go hand in hand. But if you only have 4-5 hours of work to do, go ahead and be disorganized. The cost of the productivity system is bigger than benefits you receive.

Now when someone asks about procrastination I give it to them straight. You're at work to work. Small breaks / breathers will come naturally. Get it finished and mess around on your own time or when you're done with your tasks. You'll only be benefiting yourself and be at the top of your team in no time.

Distraction wise I have eliminated anything long before that. No notifications except the 3 I actually have to react to immediately, phone in "do not disturb" mode and co-workers learnt that it can take several hours for me to respond to slack messages (but once I do, they get a quality response).

This was a complete productivity killer for me. For a long time, I blamed myself. I tried different techniques, motivations, even prescribed substances. Eventually, I realized that the problem was with what I was doing with my time.

Now that I am programming for myself, I have all the motivation that I need. I am not beholden to deadlines or commitments, I am free to Do It Right, refactor as I see fit, and finish whatever I'm working on with the level of Quality that I am happy with.

I get more done in a two-hour session than I used to in a day and sometimes a week.

I've got ADHD, so while I don't expect 8 hours of productive work from myself, if left to my own sense of "focus" and "discipline", I'm lucky to get 20 minutes in. If I'm emotionally or intellectually invested in something, time loses all meaning. And when the only work to be done lacks that pull, I inevitably get drawn to things which are either not work, or are only tangentially work related and get lost in that for hours at a time, even though it didn't feel that way. I can get lost in breaks too.

I make up for it by eventually getting that "oh shit" feeling and hammering everything out in the early hours of the morning when there is nobody online to distract me. The downside to that though is I end up staring at a screen too long, forgetting to eat or drink, and sometimes making myself physically ill from it all.

So pomodoro gives me a great balance. I write down one task to do, start my timer (in this case I use an instrumental soundtrack that goes 25 minutes) and when the music is done, get up, drink water and have a snack (I try to avoid browsing the internet) and get back to it (I don't use the 5 minute break timer, which is sometimes a problem, but if my mind is hooked into my work by then I'm usually eager to get back to it). The other big benefit of pomodoro is that I can use the first session for planning the other sessions, and that is a great way to plan and prioritize for the day without going overboard and spending 2 hours making a to do list that is too long anyhow. Also if I didn't write out what I was doing every day (even if it's written out somewhere else like JIRA) I would just straight up forget when I come back from a break and have to replan it all out again in my head (which would probably be forgotten again).

Pomodoro also helped me get better at shifting contexts, so since most meetings start on the hour, or half-hour, it doesn't feel like a huge interruption to stop anymore (though I find it's good to have a post-meeting pomodoro session that's half "write down what the heck that was about" and half "give your brain an extra break because meetings are hard".) So yeah, I need a timer. I agree that you don't the overhead of applications at all though. Pen and paper and timed soundtrack (or actual physical tomato timer which used to be something people had just laying around) keeps it dead simple.

If you're one of those people who can work at a high-level of productivity on complex knowledge work without getting distracted or interrupted or losing focus constantly, congratulations.

Most people aren't like you.

And your advice is useless to them, at best.

Most people have a hard time with this and it's getting worse [1]. We didn't evolve to do the kind of work we do today [2], and beyond that, people's brains work differently. Many people with ADHD who started taking medication after years of struggling with focus issues describe it like a light switch in their brain. Why is it so hard to believe that it's a spectrum and that many without a diagnosis of ADHD find it harder to focus than you do?

Those of us who struggle with focus and productivity have heard the vapid advice of "just do it" hundreds or thousands of times. Not only is it worthless advice, it's often actively harmful.

Also, not to point fingers, but some of the people with your attitude (not all or even most) aren't actually all that productive and could stand to take a look at some of these methods.

1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/121...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world...

The point is that not everyone has the capacity to be even 10% productive without help, let alone 100% productive. Just like some people are still nearsighted even after all the vision correction possible, some people still have trouble focusing even after taking ADHD medication or whatever else.

If such people want to have any chance of doing a single thing with their lives, they need to fight their own brain the way one would fight a war: with strategy, bait and traps and feints, and a hard-eyed evaluation of which battles are worth fighting. That is, essentially, what these “productivity life-hacks” are a euphemism for.

I want to add one point, which is related to your final points: we all need to move regularly for health. Getting up and running up and down the stairs, round the block, or round the room is essential. It actually improves concentration too. Unlike conversational interruptions, intermittant bursts of exercise don't make you forget where you where, instead they help prevent tunnel-vision and allow your mind to zoom-out briefly to ensure you're going in the right overall direction.

In my experience Americans took this concept and turned it into the brutally utilitarian daily standup. Chop chop no chitchat get to work meetings are a waste of time!

Then they said you know what this is taking too long. Let’s just do standup via Slack.

I miss the morning coffee from my first jobs in Europe.