Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve been drawn more frequently to YouTube, that glorious time suck. I suppose it’s because YouTube is now even easier for me to abuse than ever before, but the fact remains. I saw an interesting one over the weekend, the “hipster PDA” which is an organizational tool consisting of note cards, a pencil, and an alligator clip. The “hipster PDA shuffle” is the same, but with an iPod shuffle instead of the alligator clip (funny, right?)

Also over this last weekend I had a programming spurt of unprecedented effectiveness and productivity. All this, plus the normal course of my reading has led me think a lot harder about why I work the way I do, which is to say, why do I have such great and productive 60 hour spurts which last a few days and then return to normal efficiency? Or more importantly, how do I change my ways so my output doesn’t drop but the schedule is more predictable?

I’d like to think that I started to answer this question for myself over the weekend. See, my biggest problem is that when I hit a brick wall in the course of writing code, invariably I end up watching YouTube for three hours (if I’m good at programming I’m much better at watching YouTube). So this weekend, when the urge to watch the ‘tube hit, I managed to drag myself out of my chair and into the conference room, away from any computer, and refocus on planning and architecture. It worked amazingly. I did about two weeks worth of work in three days.
Anyways, working at the office with other people, I can’t always go to the conference room or pace the floor with my music blasting, so I’m going to need to find a more social method of working. Ideas?

Oh, by the way, I wrote this post from my iPhone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.