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Does anyone have any advice on how to get started doing something productive at work when you've got no tasks? I feel so guilty spending endless time on reddit

Does anyone have any advice on how to get started doing something productive at work when you've got no tasks? I feel so guilty spending endless time on reddit an HN.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
You probably have forgotten about some past things that you wished you had done that would make your job easier. So keep a personal, easy-to-access log of some sort that you can quickly add notes to while you're busy with other tasks. During downtime, come back to your log and knock a few things off the list. A good task for right now would be to find whatever log you think would work best for you, and then try to think of something to add to it.
mroll 8y ago
Ask the question “How can I make the company better right now?” Maybe there is some documentation that needs to be written, or some small bug you ran across the other day, etc
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  sorry, I meant productive for me, not for the company
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    Investing in skills as a developer is a great way to benefit both yourself and your company. You have a great gift -- that of "free time at work". I had lots of this in a former life as a sysadmin, and I squandered 90% of it, and I deeply regret all of those micro-decisions to surf the web instead of learning a skill. Find problems which interest you (for me, that's currently lexers, parsers, lisp, code visualization, tools to make tools to make tools, etc), or parts of the "stack" which you never fully understood (In college we never actually went over how a C function call works, how to read stack frames, etc). If you don't have any problems at hand to fuel your curiosity, maybe try upping the signal-to-noise ratio of your junk food -- read a programming book instead of reading HN. Small, consistent investments are more important over the long run (30 min / day for months rather than a week-long fugue state). If books aren't your thing, find a structured series of exercises which you can work through. Project Euler is great. Make-a-lisp is great as well (github.com/kanaka/mal). Turn what you learn into blog posts, github gists, or flash cards -- distill your knowledge into easily digestible parts so that you can catch yourself up to speed quickly 6 months from now when you need that topic again. These won't create immediate benefit, but five years from now you will be tremendously more valuable.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get started doing something productive at work when you've got no tasks? I feel so guilty spending endless time on reddit an HN.

thaumaturgy 8y ago

You probably have forgotten about some past things that you wished you had done that would make your job easier. So keep a personal, easy-to-access log of some sort that you can quickly add notes to while you're busy with other tasks. During downtime, come back to your log and knock a few things off the list. A good task for right now would be to find whatever log you think would work best for you, and then try to think of something to add to it.

mroll 8y ago

Ask the question “How can I make the company better right now?” Maybe there is some documentation that needs to be written, or some small bug you ran across the other day, etc

PunchTornado 8y ago
sorry, I meant productive for me, not for the company
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  Investing in skills as a developer is a great way to benefit both yourself and your company. You have a great gift -- that of "free time at work". I had lots of this in a former life as a sysadmin, and I squandered 90% of it, and I deeply regret all of those micro-decisions to surf the web instead of learning a skill. Find problems which interest you (for me, that's currently lexers, parsers, lisp, code visualization, tools to make tools to make tools, etc), or parts of the "stack" which you never fully understood (In college we never actually went over how a C function call works, how to read stack frames, etc). If you don't have any problems at hand to fuel your curiosity, maybe try upping the signal-to-noise ratio of your junk food -- read a programming book instead of reading HN. Small, consistent investments are more important over the long run (30 min / day for months rather than a week-long fugue state). If books aren't your thing, find a structured series of exercises which you can work through. Project Euler is great. Make-a-lisp is great as well (github.com/kanaka/mal). Turn what you learn into blog posts, github gists, or flash cards -- distill your knowledge into easily digestible parts so that you can catch yourself up to speed quickly 6 months from now when you need that topic again. These won't create immediate benefit, but five years from now you will be tremendously more valuable.