It was a damn Monday again! The weekend is just 2 days, but sometimes it feels like it's been ages since your last commit on the work project -- es...
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Good question!
I have a manual journal I write in on Sunday night outlining things I intend to get done on Monday — just to kick start the week. I'm not bound to it, but it does help me enter in with the right mindset.
If you'd rather not think about work on Sunday you could do the exercise as the last thing on Friday, perhaps when you're in a good state.
Great idea, I 'm definitely trying this.
Don't just hate Mondays. Be a professional and hate the whole week.
))
Sad but true
I feel the same. It’s as if my mind is still on the weekend. I can’t be as productive as I’d like, and it’s frustrating. However, I’m trying to have ‘less intense’ weekends, because I’m the type of person who enjoys parties, drinks, and staying awake all night long. This lifestyle isn’t good for my personal life or work, and in my case, it’s the main reason why I have difficulty with Mondays.
By the way, happy almost-Wednesday to us :) I can already see the weekend on the horizon.
This is a great topic, Makar! I don't have it all figured out, but I'll describe a bit of my process.
First off, I'm part of the DEV Team but I don't work on the Engineering side... I'm in Community. We always end our weeks with some automated questions sent from a bot on Slack (Geekbot) that prompt us to set our weekly sprints for next week, i.e. tasks that we're meant to focus on next week. This helps us to know broadly what we're meant to get into at the start of next week; the bot also holds us personally accountable to do the things that we say we're gonna by asking us at the end of the week if we completed our sprints that we teed up for ourselves. At the start of the week, I typically review these high-level sprints and make sure that I still agree with them — we actually have a Monday bot that asks us again what we want to do this week, so I'm kinda prompted to re-review this. Next, I try to break down my goals into a todo list... I often have a high-level project-sized goal and then some routine tasks to handle. All this planning might sound like a lot, but it helps me to get a handle on what I'm meant to do.
Aside from this, on a Monday I do give myself a bit of flexibility to chill in the morning. I most often kick off the week by catching up with notifications & conversations on DEV + messages from mods in Discord & teammates in Slack, and emails. I often like to hop into my post Music Monday (here's the latest one) — a weekly series that I share by pre-scheduling it the week before, this way I can just log on and start interacting with others' suggestions in the thread.
sounds a great routine, thanks for sharing!
I usually start off with small things that have to be done and just burn through a few of those, then slowly start tackling the big problems. I think there's a bit of a negative mindset about having to do something in a fixed amount of time or die trying, but I don't think that's how it's supposed to work. As long as you're working as hard as possible, that's what matters, time is effectively out of your control.
Good luck explaining that to a PM )
Haha. Well, we can either take our time and do it properly, or ship a half-working, hacked together feature. Although I guess that's good enough for the PM as long as it's on deadline. Idk.
@michaeltharrington @ben many thanks for your answers. For the last few weeks I have tried planning and writing down my next steps in advance and it works like a charm!
Oh rock on! I'm glad to hear that, Makar. 🙌
I think one positive byproduct of writing down your plans is that you get to mark things off when you complete them.
You know how I said I answer a bot in Slack. Well, I often go back in and use the strikethrough to mark things out during the day. For instance, check out my discussion with Geekbot on Tuesday haha:
I totally know the feeling!
I find doing some warm-up coding challenges a great way to get my brain thinking and getting excited to work on projects.
I've just started using ChatGPT to generate a few challenges, and it works well! You can tailor it to choose certain topics or certain skill levels, so it is never dull. And if you explain to it the context of warming up, it generally gives you a set of good puzzles that start off easy and get more challenging. Three of those and I'm ready to code almost anything. ;P
Hope it helps.
P.S. You may find yourself procrastinating by optimising the code for hours - so be careful of that :D
interesting approach, but what about the times when you need to start the new week with a totally new feature that requires a bit of thoughtful planning (code division, planning the flow etc) and you are totally NOT into it yet... I don't think ChatGPT can help you in that context, can it?
Generally, I just don’t stop coding… 🤷♂️😂
This seems to be my tactic as well most weekends