Ben Halpern

Posted on Jun 23, 2020

How do you fight boredom in software development?

#discuss #productivity

Our work can't all be exciting, how do you cope with the tasks that are just booorrrring?

Top comments (50)

erica (she/her) • Jun 23 '20

Break it down to micro-steps in my to-do list, then just throw on music and plug away!

Syed Nasim • Jul 20 '20

Oh my god. I scrolled down to the comments section to write the exact same thing.

wayofthepie • Jun 23 '20

I was thinking about this all last week. Monday I set a goal of mapping out our infrastructure to see what we could cleanup. Tuesday came and i still hadn't even logged in. Wednesday came and I thought

This is going to bore the crap out of me, but it needs doing. How can I make it exciting?

Thursday came, no bright ideas to make it exciting, so I just dove into a pomodorro session. Twenty five minutes later I had made a good start and mapped out all vms we used. Five pomodorros later, I was done! At least for that cloud provider.

It reminded me of something I learned from the Coursera "Learning how to learn" course recently, but is still not at the front of my mind:

Focus on the process, not the outcome.

Doing so in this instance I always had a quick feedback loop, every twenty five minutes, so it never felt boring. If I tried to sit down and focus solely on getting it done entirely I would have been frustrated. I do this when coding all the time, it just never occured to me to do it for other tasks!

Zaerald • Jun 23 '20

In my case, I think of it as an input based rather than the output based, by doing an output based you're focused on how many tasks you've finished and be demotivated afterward if you didn't finish any, but by tackling the task as an input based, which time, in this case, you'll be much more motivated as you're seeing progress over the time you've worked on the task.

Rémy 🤖 • Jun 23 '20

With interns, that's how.

More seriously, the more I move forward the more I feel that development should be layered. When you're starting out everything is new and exciting and the more you progress the more you need advanced stuff. But in the end there is not so much funky stuff out there.

So the organization I'm trying to figure right now with my company is having several layers of developers based on their experiences, the front line being juniors doing junior jobs and backed by another line of seniors that teach them how to unlock the funky stuff.

This way seniors are always busy with interesting-ish stuff and juniors are never blocked for a week on stupid stuff.

Simon Landry • Jun 24 '20

While it makes a lot of sense, it could also be really beneficial for your company to share the knowledge and do pair programming with juniors.

Rémy 🤖 • Jun 24 '20

Yeah that's basically the idea. Back-up on specific problems is done through pair programming, this way juniors are always explained the fix

𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝 • Jun 23 '20

Sometimes it's nice to switch off and do a boring job XD usually whack on some comedy and blast through it mindlessly!

jeikabu • Jun 23 '20

I've been a software engineer 20 years and never been "bored". If you find your work boring, that's probably because it is. Perhaps you've outgrown it and it's time to move on. If the company you work at lacks opportunities, it's probably time to move on.

All "work" involves occasionally tedious tasks: attending pointless epic meetings, filing TPS reports, etc. If it was fun all the time we'd pay to do it, and not vice-versa.

Galuh Utama • Jun 24 '20

Procrastinate until deadline. Usually motivation comes by then.

XeRA0 • Jun 23 '20

I found the pomodoro technique the most efficient way to fight the boredom off as I am at the moment learning JS with a lot of frameworks and I am rocking 10-16 hours per day and I can vouch for it it helps alot

Glenn Stovall • Jun 24 '20

I try to remind myself why I'm doing the work in the first place. But not all work is fulfilling, so when that doesn't work I try to put some kind of challenge on it.

can I improve my efficiency while working on the task? That way I can get through the boring stuff faster as well.

Can I learn some other skill on top of it? Once when I had a data entry job I spent time learning all of the shortcut keys on the computer.

If that doesn't work, I try to be mindful of how working through boredom is a mental muscle in and of itself. I'm actively learning a new skill and its how to sit with and work through boredom. Similar to how part of dieting can be learning how to sit with being hungry if that's something you aren't used to. As my old coach used to say, "get comfortable being uncomfortable."