When I feel joy and wonder at work, I'm incredibly productive and I work long hours on top of that. When my senses of agency, exploration, and play are undermined, I'm deeply demoralized and find it very difficult to focus and can't wait to walk away from my computer.
I'm still trying to figure out how to better regulate myself away from those extremes (how to put my work down for the sake of other aspects of my life when I'm excited on the one hand, and how to push through and 'reset' when I am frustrated by something outside my control on the other). But one of the things I've already learned is that focusing on productivity in terms of sheer discipline doesn't really work. I get a lot farther working with self-reflection on my emotions and carving out space for joy and freedom in the formal structure of my work week than with sheer mental effort.
I have it similarly. For me, if I can't "play around" or explore something new in a while, my motivation and focus drops to zero.
On the other hand, most days I'm just too mentally exhausted to work on programming when I get home. So I rarely get to scratch that itch on my own time.
To get around that, every now and then I take some time while working on some issue to do something new, like play around with programming language constructs and exploring the limits of the language.
It's not always easy to do though, with deadlines and whatnot. So can be a real struggle at times.
pxc|2 years ago
I'm still trying to figure out how to better regulate myself away from those extremes (how to put my work down for the sake of other aspects of my life when I'm excited on the one hand, and how to push through and 'reset' when I am frustrated by something outside my control on the other). But one of the things I've already learned is that focusing on productivity in terms of sheer discipline doesn't really work. I get a lot farther working with self-reflection on my emotions and carving out space for joy and freedom in the formal structure of my work week than with sheer mental effort.
magicalhippo|2 years ago
On the other hand, most days I'm just too mentally exhausted to work on programming when I get home. So I rarely get to scratch that itch on my own time.
To get around that, every now and then I take some time while working on some issue to do something new, like play around with programming language constructs and exploring the limits of the language.
It's not always easy to do though, with deadlines and whatnot. So can be a real struggle at times.