One of the biggest things I’ve gotten from this sabbatical, aside from the purely technical skills, is a massively improved work ethic.
At my previous jobs I had a hard time focusing on what was important and wasted a lot of time working on trivial things. Don’t get me wrong, I always put in my time and reported my work hours honestly. But when given the freedom to prioritize my work, I often worked on the interesting things that gave minimum http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/returnoninvestment.asp instead of the boring things that had the most practical impact. I also had a hard time pushing myself to work fast; I always described myself as someone who took the time to do it properly the first time, But I was really just making excuses—I was slow.
Being on this crazy sabbatical adventure has forced me to change those bad habits. For one, I am very reliant on my actual programming output (my GitHub profile, really) to prove that this wasn’t a massive waste of time, that I have the skills I set out to learn, and that I will be a productive member of the development team immediately after being hired. And, certainly, the two most important factors that impact production are speed and prioritization. I suppose the raw time devoted is a big factor, too; I can’t hide there, either! I literally have all the time in the day to work.
I learned that setting looming deadlines for small amounts of work are very beneficial. The deadlines create pressure, and the smallness of the task makes it feel achievable. Personal deadlines work; shared deadlines work better. Go tell someone you respect that you’ll have such-and-such done at a certain time, and you will have little trouble focusing. Make the goal too large, and you suffer twice: once from being forced to pick a distant deadline that creates less pressure, and again from feeling disheartened throughout the process because it will feel like too much work. To put it another way: how does one eat an elephant?
I’ve been using https://todoist.com as my task manager. Its recurring tasks are the most useful feature, but something else has been creating pressue as well: karma. That’s what Todoist’s gamification system is called. The more tasks you do, the more points you get. The longer you go with overdue tasks, the more points you lose. Better yet, you get a load of bonus points for keeping your “streak” alive. I am currently on a 23-day streak. My previous longest was literally 2 days. It’s a small thing, but actually a http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem.
So there. My strategies for creating a better work ethic are to set achievable goals, create artificially short deadlines, and use good tooling to help me manage these bits so I can focus on the actual work of doing rather than managing. Sounds like I invented a lightweight Agile methodology, huh?