Ideas of My Mind
Programming or Creating – Which is My Passion?
I found a very interesting question on Programmers (a Stack Exchange Q&A site):
Is programming your passion or is creating your passion?
This made me think. Here’s my answer:
For me, creating and programming/coding exchange the roles of passion and medium.
Let me elaborate that a bit. I have 2 things that get me going – an idea for a project or a puzzle.
Puzzles are pure coding challenges for me and while I usually feel intrigued by them, most of the time I get a guilty feeling of procrastination. I’m talking here about coding puzzle like Pex4Fun where the only thing you get from solving a puzzle is self-confirmation.
If I start with an idea coding is my medium to release the creative energy that has built up inside of me while playing around with the idea in my head. I’m not one of those programmers who just write code to create and say they’re done when the application has all the functionality they envisioned. No, I also want to make my code pretty, clean with lots of cleverness in it. I hate spaghetti code and I love refactoring. I also love code architecture and patterns. This is where creativity becomes a medium to my coding passion. This is also where puzzles come in. As I said, I love solving puzzles and this time I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating. When I feel happy about the code I start implementing new parts of the idea and here the roles changes again. I get the feeling of completion when I feel happy both about the product and the code behind it.
Timeboxing – Getting Things Done
On the 13th of December I’ll have my penultimate exam. It’s nothing I’ll be looking forward to, but it’s necessary evil. The only thing that matters is that I get it done and over with. I want to start living my life and finally start working on my ideas and projects that have been growing in my head for a while now. That and the fact that after 17 years or school I’ll actually get a real and more importantly an official profession are the only two things that keep me going. I know there’s a diploma I’ll have to write after I finish the exams to be able to graduate, but I’ll be treating that as one of my projects, so it should be fun.
As you can see I have my goal set and the reward for completing it is very compelling. This keeps me somewhat motivated. The problem isn’t the reward though. It’s that it is far away. 2 weeks can be a long time. If you’ve read my post Time is a Perspective you should understand that 2 weeks with so much things to learn can seem like at least a few months. This is way the ultimate reward of being school free has a very limited motivational value.
To make studying an easier job I needed to find a way of getting more motivation. I found it while reading a great article my friend suggested – Steve Pavlina’s Overcoming Procrastination. In section 6. Poor Time Management Habits he suggest an idea he calls timeboxing. You can read more about it in his article, but the main idea is to take a fixed amount of time and make yourself do something for the duration of it. After you’re done, you reward yourself. For example I made myself write for 30 minutes and then I rewarded myself by watching an episode of House. I’ve tested it with studying and it works quite well. I did come up with a few variations though. They depend on the type of the task you want to do and how much time can you allocate for rewards.
Closed and open ended time frames
There are two types of time frames – closed and open ended. When using the closed ended version you stop doing the task when the time runs out. This is useful when you want to limit your output. I use it when writing the first draft of an article. This helps me focus on the most important parts of content I want to include. For these types of tasks you should use an alarm clock. When it goes off stop what you’re doing and claim your reward.
For tasks that you need a push to get going an open time frame is more appropriate. You can use a clock or a stopwatch to know when the time is over. An alarm clock is not suitable for this as you don’t want to get distracted when -(if) you get the momentum going. The time frame is there for you to know that even if you fail to accomplish anything in it you can enjoy your reward guilt free. This is really suitable for studying. For example I give myself a 45 minute block of time. After a few blocks like this I can study for 60 to 90 minutes before I feel a craving for a break. I then enjoy whatever reward I promised myself.
Limited and unlimited reward lengths
You will notice that I didn’t mention what kinds of rewards you can choose. That’s because it doesn’t matter. Anything from taking the rest of the day off, eating something or a TV show will do. The only condition is that you find you reward enjoyable. That will a motivation boost inside of you and you’ll feel less reluctant to take up the task at hand.
An additional condition can arise when you don’t have a lot of time to get something done. Unlimited length rewards are just not an option in this case. When you have a due date date of some kind limited length rewards are the way to go. These types of rewards are essentially closed-ended timeboxed rewards. The best kinds of rewards here are the ones that take up only a limited amount of time by their very nature. Watching an episode of House takes about 45 minutes where as something like browsing the Internet can easily take up a few hours without you even noticing.
Progressive timeboxing
I also like to employ a technique I call progressive timeboxing. What I do is I gradually increase the duration of time blocks. This is comes in handy when trying to find the optimal amount of time for timeboxing. I usually start with 30 or 45 minutes add see where it takes me. I usually get up to 60 or even 90 minutes. I depends on the type of task I’m trying to do. Pick a short enough block so you don’t have to shorten it later on, but also don’t make it too short as it won’t bring you much closer to accomplishing your task.
Timeboxing can be a very effective motivational tool when used correctly. By completing a session you also get a sense of achievement which boosts your motivation even further. I suggest you try it out and see if it suits you. I would of course like to hear what success you’ve reached while employing this technique. And if you came up with your own derivation of it don’t feel hesitant to share 
Time is a Perspective
I’m in the middle of writing an article about a self-discipline technique called time-boxing. It’s an idea on how to push yourself to do something you must or want to do, but you just can get started with. I pretty much done, but while writing it I came across a thought about time and how we perceive it. It was initially going to be a part of the previously mentioned article, but it kind of got to big so I decided to split it out. So here we go:
Time is a funny thing. We measure it in absolute units, like “24th September 2010, 11:25″. That tells us precisely when in time we are. But a lot of times we find ourselves saying things like “Time is just flying by today.” and “Is it 10 o’clock already? That meeting went by fast.” or “I can’t believe we were in there for only an hour. I felt like days.” But that’s exactly it. We “feel” time. In our heads it’s not measured by minutes, seconds or hours, we just get a feeling of how much time went by. I believe that this feeling reflects a number of significant events that happened to us in some period of time. These are the events we remember.
Let me paint you a picture to show what I mean. Have you ever traveled around for a month? I bet you felt like you’ve been gone for year when you came back home. Well that’s because when we learn to estimate how long something took we develop a certain ratio between significant events and an average time between these events. Each person has his or her own ratio which depends on their lifestyle. And changing this ratio takes a long time and it usually involves changing a part of your lifestyle. So even though you were only traveling for a month you saw  a lot of new things, seen a lot of new faces and did a lot of interesting stuff. These just a few examples of significant events. And having experienced so many of them in such a short time confuses your mind. It is still using you “normal” ratio to calculate time. This results in a feeling of time that is a lot longer then the time that actually passed.
That’s the core of my idea. The most important part of it are significant events. I gave a few examples what these are, but it’s a bit more elaborate than that. Living our lives we get used to some events and we get used to the world working in a particular way. A significant event takes place when something happens that we didn’t expect. Of course not all events are equally significant. Someone cutting the line in front of you is nowhere as significant as a car almost running you over. As you can see these events can be good or bad. The easiest way to see how much significance is in a particular event is to see how good you remember it. If it’s still vivid in a week or two it’s quite significant. So you see our mind learns how often these events happen and how significant are they. Then it uses this to give you that “feeling of time”.
The same principle can be applied to our estimation of how long something would take. As these events haven’t passed yet we imagine what would happen in some period of time. This is why I always underestimate it would take me to clean the kitchen. I my mind I just have to clean the counter-top and some dishes and mop the floor. But then I get to it and see that the fridge is a mess and there’s a lot of dust on the shelfs and all these little things add up and suddenly I get the feeling this won’t take an hour, but 3 or 4 instead.
As you can see I put some thought into this and I think it came out quite good. With this explained I think I’m ready to finish up my Time-boxing article. In the meanwhile have a listen to some songs I’ve been listening to while writing this article:
