Here's another idea: Instead of getting good at context-switching, are there ways to set up your life so you get to stay focused (and still pay the rent)?
Well, obviously there are. I had that when I was an employee a few times. A friend of mine is studying organ in a master's program. She practices organ 2-4 hours a day, early every morning. She spends a month or two (or more) getting good at a really hard piece, really getting to know it, mastering it. I envy the day-to-day continuity that she has. Other stuff during the day is OK, like easy classes, but not something else that occupies the subconscious "workspace".
Could that day-to-day continuity be achieved in a scientific/mathematical grad program? In a solo business?
You know, I think you've pegged it. Keeping it in my head is probably the main factor.
I write down lots of thoughts and tiny tasks in a notebook as I'm working, and check off the tasks as I go, but that's not really setting up for context-switching. When I'm writing code, I'm following inspiration: playing out the idea in my head, or rather, using the act of writing code to cause the idea to become clarified and completed. While ramping up and while coding, the idea is taking shape.
Maintaining notes designed to enable context-switching sounds like something I could try. This is probably the key. This would enable working in smaller chunks of time, too.
Weird: Right at this moment, the thought terrifies me. I wonder if I'd have to completely change my creative process to make such notes.
Yeah I can see why that would be terrifying. You probably wouldn't have to completely change your process while you are working.
You might just be able to do a quick brain dump onto paper or software (maybe a mind mapping tool?) once you get to a good stopping point. It doesn't have to be everything - just enough to remind you where you left off.
Yeah, the GED is the way to go, if you want to get into college. That's how I did it. The GED is so retarded, you're pretty much guaranteed to score in the top percentiles. College are required to treat these high GED scores as equivalent to an A average (per subject).
Your state might have a regulation forbidding taking the GED to graduate ahead of your classmates. I got my GED in a different state when I was 17.
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I've been having issues lately trying to motivate myself to do mundane, or at the very least "unappealing", work (namely, [high]school work). It's not that I'm lazy — actually I'm afraid I'm a workaholic sometimes — but that I always find myself giving priority to another project or hobby I enjoy doing and find more worthwhile.
I personally find I have one of two reactions to tasks I have to do: either I'm completely engrossed in my work and won't sleep, eat, etc. until it's finished, or it is the last thing I would ever possibly want to do with my time and I will do everything but that task
Amen, brother. Same here.
Here are some things I've done about this, with some success:
1. "Pair" on it, even if it's not programming. Just doing the job with someone else often makes it a lot easier. Maybe it's theoretically not as efficient a use of time, but, bottom line, the unpleasant task gets done.
2. Find a way to not do it. That is, instead of procrastinating, cancel the task. This approach calls for creativity: you might redefine your goal so the icky task isn't necessary, or you might pay someone to do it (this is how my kitchen stays so clean), or you might abandon the larger goal that's driving the boring task (e.g. drop out of college), or who knows.
3. If the problem is simply lack of momentum rather than true revulsion toward the task, the 5M method ramps up momentum without too much pain. http://false-epiphany.com/2009/04/incompletion-causes-and-so... I usually find that it takes me about two to three days to ramp up momentum so I'm merrily humming along and don't need to play any more mind games with myself. Kinda slow, but it does work. A variation: Wait until the deadline, and rush; or do a rush job right now, with a fairly short time limit, after which you have a hard commitment to go do something fun with someone, somewhere else.
4. Pause and theorize about the task. Why does it arise? What social/physical/mathematical givens and relationships explain its existence? Why these tools? What other tools could do it? What change in the broader world could make it obsolete, or change the way it's done? What is the absolute minimum you could do and still get the benefits? What is the most efficient way to do it? Optimizing is "bad", but it's also fun, and it gets your mind immersed in the task. Devise the most efficient method you can for doing it, and test your method/skill by measuring your results.
5. Just fucking do it. Sometimes ya gotta suck it in and deal with it. For inspiration, read what Paul Graham says about determination. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html Take pride in your will of iron, and taste the sweet fruit at the end of a forced march, when your sweat has dried and the Sun hangs low in the sky. However, if your whole life is sucking in and dealing with, it's time to make a systemic change. Don't turn into G. Gordon Liddy or something.
I have found #1 to be the most effective by far, but it's very hard to find a good pair partner for crud like writing a meaningless paper for some stupid class. I have also found #5 surprisingly effective. It's usually been my last resort, but empirically, that weird attitude shift, the resulting commitment, and all-out expenditure of energy actually feel good. You might do a couple "forced marches" and take notes on your own emotional state, to see if the same is true for you. (This is actually a form of #4.)
Someone tell me if this is right (it's just guesswork):
Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition: the culture of educated people. The purpose of vocational schools was practical job training, nothing more.
Attending "college" was more prestigious, but also of little interest to most people. (Most people are basically practical.) Social initiatives to bring poorer people into the educated world put money into colleges, not vocational schools. But most people don't want to learn about Keats and the Magna Carta and that sort of thing, they just want to get skills to do a job to make more money than they could without those skills.
Over time, the purpose of colleges became confused. People today see colleges as intended to provide job training, and just doing a lousy job of it. Colleges, with their state funding, grabbed much of the market from vocational schools, killing off most of them.
So today, we have many colleges, with vast numbers of students. Most of the students mostly jump through useless bureaucratic hoops for four or five years, don't learn the things educated people know, and don't get job skills, either.
I've always thought this way too. The fact that car mechanics make more than programmers points to the fact that there is actually a dearth of education leading up to being a capable mechanic, and perhaps a surfeit of education leading up to being a mediocre programmer. The fact that manufacturing has been shedding jobs for decades makes it even weirder that competence in the manual trades is so expensive to hire. Perhaps America has never provided decent educational support for the trades, and for a long time, the average manufacturing job required little. I wonder how different the nation would be if this education had been available all along.
According to the BLS*
Computer Programmers (15-1021) average $73,000/yr.
Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics(49-3023) average $37,540/yr, or roughly half what programmers make.
That's not what I took from the article. A summary of this article will distort it terribly, but here's an attempt:
1. A person's entire life story contains ups, downs, and complexity, of a sort that can't be disentangled, and are unique to each person, though you can find patterns, too. For example, hitting rock bottom fuels some people to great fulfillment and happiness in the future, but of course that's not the only way, and hitting rock bottom is no guarantee of future happiness.
2. Many things make people happy, but the top factor is which kinds of mechanisms you use to deal with adversity.
3. Many things make people happy, but the top factor is quality of social relationships.
I feel your pain. Most articles on the Internet could use a summary to help the reader make a decision about whether they're worth reading. Most of them would also be a lot better if they just got to their point. And skipped the other stuff.
But this article is very hard to summarize. And it wanders. It's also quite good.
Berners-Lee's design for URLs, etc. is spectacularly elegant and carefully thought through. It's not a good example to illustrate the alleged superiority of "duct-tape programming".
There are different kinds of design, useful in different situations, harmful in other situations. Whipping out small web sites, patching bugs in messy business apps, etc., don't call for great elegance. Seeking elegance would only get in the way. Duct tape wins. On the other hand, remember Gopher? Gopher was a simple, functional predecessor of the web, designed without much insight. The WWW needed the kind of simplicity that you can't get from duct tape.
I think Joel Spolsky implied "duct tape programmers" to be those who are pragmatic and get things done, those who do not try to show off unnecessary techniques but focus on solving problems, those who do not try to play toy problems with all wonderful constructs but solve real problems with simple elegant lines of code.
FWIW, I've read that the reason for pushing interns beyond their physical limits is simply money, not teaching or building character. It's cheaper to work them ridiculous hours than to hire enough people to do the job well.
Working sleep-deprived for long periods of time doesn't really teach you anything after the first couple weeks. It just lowers your efficiency and increases your error rate. In software development, that causes you to waste time. In medicine, that causes, er, iatrogenic death, or something like that.
