I am curious to know what other people do when they have down time at work, for example when there is no client work, or nothing which can be progressed at this time.
Apart from reading and commenting on posts here on Dev.to, I check Tuts+ for tutorials, Stack Overflow for questions to answer, and generally try to do some sort of learning and development.
What websites do you visit, what activities do you do to fill up the day so you don't get bored?
Top comments (9)
When it is completely dead. I tend to work on homework. And when I dont have home work I use the time to work on studying math and program. In between that I generally just check out whats going on here. Or I go to twitter or watch stuff on youtube. But I generally try to stay as productive as possible to use my down time wisely.
I always felt guilty thinking about doing homework when at work :/
For me I look at as if I have nothing else to do. And I am just sitting around wasting my own time I might as well be productive. So I take any minute I can to keep working on my goals. I figure at least Iam doing stuff semi related to work.
I try to improve my development workflow: I test some tools (linter, static code checkers, git-hooks...) to make my next development more effiscient. Sometimes it's juste learning IDE shortcuts :)
I read the awesome-... pages to discover new libs or tools
I write some docs
I refactor/improve existing code/docs
I make some fun stuff (test my app with JMEter or Owasp ZAP)
Read (HackerNews, dev.to, Twitter, ...)
I don't have 9 till 5 work... I do some contracting and I build my own product. With contracting there is hardly any room for boredom -- there are usually goals i need to hit and monetary reward that keeps me excited.
With my own project it's harder -- it doesn't return as much money-wise and requires a lot of work upfront. So I get demotivated, start to visit websites your mentioning -- spend my time pointlessly on internet ;-)
But I set a goal of committing one feature/enhancement everyday (even on weekends). Once I have that one new commit in master branch - I'm free to do whatever. So I try to pick something related to my project - contribute to open source libraries i'm using, read a book that may be useful or do another practice pitch to potential client.
I generally consider learning for a sake of learning to be a pointless endeavor. So I'm very focused on 'doing things to learn'. :)
I like your commitment to completing one feature a day before being free to do whatever. I really need to incorporate this in to my weekend; work on one thing in my JavaScript libraries before playing games or doing other hobbies for the remainder of the day.
I usually start to doubt everything, then I play around with editor-settings, clean up my dropbox or write comments on articles on dev.to.
I must admit dev.to is my favourite place to visit in my spare time. Especially when I have just a few spare minutes here and there.
Develop a new project.