How to overcome procrastination - experts answer.

Often, creative people, to whom programmers can be safely attributed, experience stagnation when they do anything but not work. How to overcome yourself and stop being distracted? We learn from the experts.

Programmers are about 70% creative people, the rest is routine (debugging, tests, writing documentation). In my opinion, it is routine that leads to laziness, it is like sand, getting on the well-functioning "gears" in the brain, undermines and slows down the mechanisms. Therefore, the number one task for a programmer is to get rid of the routine or automate it.

For me, a great way to avoid procrastination was to change the situation or activity to the exact opposite. For example, drawing, modeling, jogging, cleaning the house. At the same time, loading ourselves physically, we simply stretch the body for future work. For the brain, you can think of the following types of load: music, background listening to audio books, broadcasts, documentaries.

In such a simple way, overloading the available channels of perception, you can prepare for further work or simply want to “create” again in your favorite IDE. I think you need to get rid of laziness by any method that works for you, because the procrastination is "dark and full of horrors."

With success it is possible to procrastinate in the office, but at first glance it seems that for a distributed team, procrastination can become a serious challenge. It is especially difficult to fight procrastination to those who work at home. There is at least a working atmosphere in the office, and when you work from home, there are potentially much more distracting factors: the sofa pulls to lie down, and you want to talk with the family, and look out the window - whose dog bark there. But these problems can be avoided if you build a distributed team from the very beginning and select suitable people.

Distractions even at home can be minimized. First, we need a working area designed exclusively for work (the kitchen and bed are not suitable). At our company, we are still at the interview stage, we are sure to ask candidates to show their workplace. It should be comfortable and so that you can concentrate entirely on work. For some employees, we even rent individual apartments or offices near the house so that they can work from there.

Secondly, daily communication with colleagues. All our teams conduct daily stand-ups: they call up and share status by task, discuss future plans. It also helps to meet deadlines.

Third, turn off the noise. A good way to stop being distracted and start working is to turn off notifications. In general, everything: in messengers, social networks and browsers, on your computer and phone. You can even turn off working chats - they can break the rhythm just like any other. But from time to time they are worth a look. For example, once an hour.

In addition, there is a well-known time management technique called the tomato method. This is a job during the day in short sprints with a few breaks in between. Its essence is to determine the task, to set the timer for a short period of time (usually about half an hour) - and not to be distracted by anything else until the timer works. Then take a short break, repeat. After four approaches, you need a break longer. It helps to concentrate on tasks, without being distracted or prokrastiruya. The technique is named after the tomato timer (pomodoro timer), which was used by its creator.

Old as the world, but still effective way is a to-do list. Enough in the morning to spend ten minutes to make a plan for the day, and stick to it. And in the evening, in ten minutes, take stock of what was done. By itself, planning can and will not save guaranteed from procrastination, but in combination with other methods will help streamline and systematize the working day.

And, of course, it is very important that the project and tasks were interesting, and then I want to be distracted at a minimum.