Working from home can be the worst (especially so if you have kids). There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to concentrate on a task for more tha

Working from home can be the worst (especially so if you have kids). There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to concentrate on a task for more than 45 minutes when your, "warm-up," time is about half that time... effectively giving you 20-some-odd minutes of actual work at a time. In fact it can be down-right torture. The best, "snake-oil," solutions I have are: 1. Well-delineated boundaries for interlocutors. This means scheduling my, "off-limits," time and communicating those boundaries to the people around me. Concessions are made by appointment and I try to plan out my time a few days to a week in advance depending on how busy I am. 2. Write everything down. I try to be methodical about this but I am characteristically spontaneous and disorganized. Therefore I keep notebooks nearby when I'm not at the computer, I have a whiteboard near my computer, and I have a very organized filing system on my computer where all of my thoughts eventually end up. I find that having different mediums that I can switch between very helpful -- many an algorithm has been conceived of in the shower, doodled on a piece of graph paper (I'm a very visual thinker) over breakfast, and eventually compiled before lunch after I've finished with my emails for the day. Having record of it in multiple places seems to reinforce my memory and after reading this article I suspect I now have an inkling as to why. 3. Never leave a thought unfinished. This can be frustrating both for myself and my spouse sometimes when it's near the end of the day and I'm only half-way through something important. However I cannot enjoy myself and let my mind wander if I have some half-finished thought still rummaging around in my head. It's easier to let the mind relax and be creative if you can finish each thought... even if it's simply writing the rest of it out or hammering out all of the test cases you can think of. As long as there is some record of it in its entirety my mind seems to be able to be satisfied with it and leave it alone. It also helps so that when I get back to work on the problem that I'm able to get up to speed and not having to, "finish my own sentences." After reading this article I began to wonder if there were any cognition-enhancing tools that are integrated with popular development environments for assisting programmers in remembering where they were in a large refactoring or what they still have yet to do in various locations of a code-base, etc.