Our work can't all be exciting, how do you cope with the tasks that are just booorrrring?
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Our work can't all be exciting, how do you cope with the tasks that are just booorrrring?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Oldest comments (50)
I try to automate them.
There is even a book about this : automatetheboringstuff.com/ :)
Sometimes it's nice to switch off and do a boring job XD usually whack on some comedy and blast through it mindlessly!
Break it down to micro-steps in my to-do list, then just throw on music and plug away!
Oh my god. I scrolled down to the comments section to write the exact same thing.
I try to squeeze value like adding automation as @mcsh has said. Side projects help too
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.
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.
Yeah that's basically the idea. Back-up on specific problems is done through pair programming, this way juniors are always explained the fix
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
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:
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!
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.
To keep up the enthusiasm I sing whilst coding or listen to some interesting non-technical lecture on YouTube whilst doing boring tasks.
It's always possible to have some boring tasks from time to time and in my opinion if it's not a usual thing then we need to accept it and to not hardly try to stop it. In fact sometimes I like it when I give my brain a break doing routine or boring tasks π .
doing opensource stuff
Can't all be exciting? Why not? Boring is what happens when easy meets not interesting.
I try to make all the tech work interesting by sprinkling in worthwhile extra challenges or ramping up collaboration.