A Programmer's Work-day

Schedule of a bipolar programmer (me):<p>Spent N days working 12 hours a day and enjoying it as hell.<p>Spent next N days watching sitcoms, playing Quake 3, chatting with people, learning new technology (passively), and being generaly apathetic and depressed.

While not a programmer per se (I do data "stuff" like assembling reports, analyzing correlations, split tests) when I need to write code for an analysis I just come in extra early (0630) or stay extra late (2300) otherwise the meetings/phone calls/IMs/blah just completely kill my focus. That one day every couple weeks is where I get 50% of my real work done. I think it is far better to work one day with 5 hours more work than 5 days with 1 hour each. Otherwise any one of my numerous bosses may stay an extra hour late and interrupt my work flow when I'm actually trying to get stuff done.

While I don't have a job per see, I once did a 30 day experiment of time-boxing and scheduling.<p>I did 4 hours every day. So each week, I clocked 28 hours per week. The hours were choked full of coding effort.<p>Mostly, I encountered difficult obstacles that would slow me for a day or two. I couldn't just solve it siting around so I go around to coding different projects.<p>It was actually a little understatement. I did a programming session in the middle of the experiment when I tried to develop a game in 48 hours for a contest. By the time I finish the project, I have a hard time protoyping newer versions of the game so I got something like last place.<p>I did a the same thing for a week back in the beginning of April. I ended up releasing a new version of a game I made but I worked really late. Mostly it is because I procrastinate until the last minutes. So quality of life suffered due to that. So I learn to not only time-box but also schedule my time so I don't end up hacking at strange hours.<p>I got time management down to a few set of tools that allow me to do a lot of solid coding. I can't get much better than that.<p>The actual major hinderance is the fact that I am extremely slow in term of programming speed. Veteran hackers can complete trivial games even with unit tests in mere hours while it takes me days or even weeks to accomplish the same feat.

At first I thought this was a very accurate article, but then I realized it made no mention of sharing hilarious youtube videos.

I feel lucky to have never worked long-term in an environment like this.<p>Quite often middle management doesn't feel the need to know what the process is (or rather, they can't grasp what goes on, so they become defensive), and so they lose touch and cause this despondency..<p>I think management in these places needs to wise up to how developers work. That way us devs are kept happy and stimulated (and don't spend all day on HN/digg/reddit), and they get results.<p>But alas, I'm sure nothing can break habits like sending emails in 12pt comic sans.

"If you really need to have an 8 hour work day for some reason, you'll only find that the extra two hours ends up going into work-place play or dawdling"<p>Either you don't have enough to do or aren't passionate enough about what you're working on. What a shame. Start a business and have the opposite problem. There won't be enough hours in the day.

Usually I find that there's plenty of non-programming, semicognitive work to do that hits another part of the brain. E.g. testing strategies, good ways to properly document a system, etc.<p>Coding's just one part of the brain. Other parts are still ready to go.

It's really simple.<p>Once the money starts flowing, it's hard for it to stop. Hence, laziness.<p>Getting it started flowing is the tricky part.