In my last semester here at Michigan State, I'm working on a web development project with three other classmates. We are supposed to be ready to present our beta demo tomorrow for class, but since we have 9 groups and only 2 groups can present on a given day, it takes 4.5 class periods to get through them all. The professor doesn't post the dates that each group is going to present until the day before, in the hopes that everyone will be "done" with their demos even if their presentation isn't due for a week. Little did our professor know, we still had lots of work to do! We just found out that our project doesn't need to be presented until next Wednesday, and my teammates just sent a flurry of emails around to the effect of "whew! now we have plenty of time!" Something tells me we will be in the same boat next Tuesday night trying to scramble to get our beta demo working...
Procrastination is a huge problem. I have noticed time and again that when you give someone a task that they don't want to do, they wait until the last possible second to do it. I mean, I would understand if you ask someone under 18 to do a task and they try to get around it. They play by high school rules, and that's normal. You have no control, and you're constantly resisting so you can play video games. But what about when you are in college? When yo u start your career? It still happens!
I also know this to be the case with even professional developers. This is why agile seems to work better than waterfall. If you give them a task and then have daily status meetings, then they HAVE to get something done or they look like slackers. If you give them the requirements and then come back in 6 months, they will most likely not be done.
I think I partially alluded to the lesson i'm trying to get at here.
You need to set small, achievable, frequent goals for yourself and others.Usually the only time that someone is going to say they aren't busy is if they actively have
nothing to do. This means they have not only written off work-things to do, but they have also depleted their list of time-wasters and want you to entertain them. They are
bored.Therefore, the point is to be truly really
busy when you are working - and work hard. And then when you have times of free time, you can really enjoy it. Obviously, you need to take breaks, but those 3-hour long StumbleUpon journeys are cutting into your productivity. It's way too easy to get distracted (especially when online, which is
always).
I would suggest a good way to do this is to actually keep a list of things to do. I have a simple Google Desktop app as a to-do list. This isn't perfect because I can't see it across multiple computers. However, it works for me. I can see how much I
really have to do, and plan accordingly (plus it really feels good to click that little checkbox and make the image shoot to the bottom :).
How do you keep from entering an infinite loop of Google Reader, Twitter/Friendfeed, email?
