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While I may FEEL more productive if I can't access LJ at work, at the end of the day I'm not sure I'd gotten any more done than on any other day.
Darn. I'd been so hoping I would magically turn into a whirlwind of Super-Coder efficiency. (There's something about working at a startup that makes me desperately want to be superhuman.)
Maybe I have been guilting myself over something that didn't actually make much difference. When I'm working a hard problem, I take breaks. I have to. I rapidly become useless if I don't let my brain shake itself out every so often. Maybe whether those breaks are LJ or not doesn't matter.
Hard to say, this early. I'll give it more time. Maybe this change is merely a small positive thing.
Darn. I'd been so hoping I would magically turn into a whirlwind of Super-Coder efficiency. (There's something about working at a startup that makes me desperately want to be superhuman.)
Maybe I have been guilting myself over something that didn't actually make much difference. When I'm working a hard problem, I take breaks. I have to. I rapidly become useless if I don't let my brain shake itself out every so often. Maybe whether those breaks are LJ or not doesn't matter.
Hard to say, this early. I'll give it more time. Maybe this change is merely a small positive thing.
no subject
I've found this to be true about myself too. I end up taking the breaks no matter what. The danger is that sometimes I get wrapped up in LJ (or whatever my break activity is), and I end up taking a longer break. If you wanted to try a variant, you could try setting an LJ timer that lets you have 15 minutes and then doesn't let you go back for at least 15-20 more minutes. (I remember someone at MIT who was working on his thesis and had bad RSI set his computer to auto-lock every 20 minutes to force himself to take a typing break for at least 2 minutes.)
None of these methods has worked for me. What works best for me is to have a list of deliverables for the end of the day, and to be held accountable for whether each one got done. If the deliverables got done, it doesn't matter how much of the time I spent on LJ.
My guess is that you can probably improve your efficiency by up to 20% or so, but much more than that would be possible only for non-sustainable short bursts.
no subject
Yes, I find this one very believable for me. The timer idea could work well there.
What works best for me is to have a list of deliverables for the end of the day, and to be held accountable for whether each one got done. If the deliverables got done, it doesn't matter how much of the time I spent on LJ.
I like that idea. I find it can work well for deliverables with linear effort-to-results, such as writing up a status report, documenting a complex piece of code, or verifying old bugs. It doesn't work at all for me for debugging. Finding a problem can take a little time or a long time, and it's awfully tempting to say "gosh, still haven't found it, time for some LJ".
My guess is that you can probably improve your efficiency by up to 20% or so, but much more than that would be possible only for non-sustainable short bursts.
Might be. 20% would be pretty useful.