Hot answers tagged projects
12
How to be productive in the buffer or grace periods of the project or work?
Here are a few things which might keep you busy and motivated:
work on your technical debt (there is always something)
improve your skills (do several research spikes around technologies you might have to use in the future)
build a prototype of the next project (even if ...
9
Here's an example. Put a rat in a maze. Have a piece of chocolate at the exit of the maze. The rat will smell it and find a path to the chocolate. After repeating this a few times, the rat will learn the correct path and go there over and over again, faster each time. The rat will take some wrong turns and maybe get lost, but will eventually gain the skill ...
9
Some ideas for your 12 books:
Choose your books carefully. Pick good books on topics you want to know about.
Read for enjoyment first, information second.
Don't get hung up on the number of books you read. Instead, focus on getting the best from each book.
If numbers really matter to you, choose thin books.
Consider whether all your books need to be ...
7
I think your issue is calling out for some type of breathing exercise or meditation. I have personally found a lot of relief from racing thoughts and stress through this method. The idea is to actively clear your mind, and allow it to focus on something other than work for a few minutes. I think you will find that an active approach to removing stress is ...
6
Side projects do not need to be related to your primary vocation.
I don't find side projects, they find me: I have a need, I see the need of others, I'm intrigued by an idea or research, I'm learning a new technology, ad infinitum/nauseum.
Re: love life–build a two-person, gender-appropriate Sybian with biofeedback, sensors, and automation.
Bam. ...
6
I don't want to comment too much on energy drinks or pills because I don't know what meds you're already on...
HOWEVER, crunch time programmin...now that's something I know!
For my experience,
Get to the enviroment you work best in. (For me, the middle of the Library with lots of ppl around)
Have a back of chips or something. (animal crackers are my ...
6
if your routine going on for sometimes then it is really the time to break out of your routine now. yes breaking your project into small pieces as pointed out by @gekkostate will definitely help.
1) i think that taking some sort of a break is also important to bring the motivation back for example if you can take 1 month all fun trip to somewhere leaving ...
6
Yes, you could work on many active tasks and still be as productive. Sometimes you find that a task is blocked by some external factor; then it makes sense to do something else rather than sit idle. It might also be more fun to have several things going; in that case that could boost your productivity. But there are some things to observe:
Never do several ...
4
Motivation is something that someone else can't give you. I've had a similar problem with getting work done. Here are a few things I would suggest to get some work done.
List the benefits of completing the code
Break the code/work into small parts so it doesn't feel long and tedious
I am a programmer myself and this is recurring problem that I face. ...
4
I think 90 days is the absolute most you can plan out in a single time period. And I mean in terms of a full project or to work on a bigger goal. 90 days is something our minds comprehend and we can logistically plan out very well too. But anything more becomes super hard.
But when it comes to accurate planning and "accuracy" is the big word here, planning ...
4
I am 44 weeks into my year with the goal of reading 52 books in the year. I am right on pace.
The way I did it successfully was ever time I picked up a book I figured out a way to track the number of pages I needed to read in it per day to finish in 6 days (one day of wiggle room in case something weird happened). I can't tell you how great this is. Instead ...
4
edit: Seems like I did not read you comment about how you wanted to see edits to your notes (in this case Evernote is no good). I think for this purpose markdown + Git is a good idea, however you might want to have a script which e.g. runs every day and makes a commit to your repository automatically (example how someone did a similar thing). IMO making the ...
3
Remember the Milk (rememberthemilk.com) is a multi-platform task management system, and it allows you to assign tasks to other people (I don't know too much about how well it works as I haven't used that functionality much myself). See: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/help/answers/sending/sendtask.rtm
3
When you are performing any activity, you are in one of these 8 mental states (top right states are where you be when you are productive)
I assume reading non-clear requirement of not-yet-confirmed project would be boring. So you are in boredom state. Add more challenges in the task and that you make you be more productive. One way of doing it is to do ...
3
What I used to tell my clients was: 60% to 70% of my time will be spent preparing and/or planning. This is probably most analogous to the Pareto principle of 80% of the value coming from 20% of input. It's what you do during that planning that makes the difference.
If you are "just sitting around" thinking about it, and plotting a course, there's probably ...
3
In any kind of engineering, it is to be expected that inferior solutions result if you skip planning your projects. No matter what project management method you use (Waterfall, Agile etc.) you need planning to avoid choosing a poor route.
Planning a project normally involves evaluating different ideas, technologies, proposed user interfaces etc. Often ...
3
My friend, you've come across a principle of life that most people never learn:
You need feedback to improve.
You don't get any real feedback unless you do it.
Planning has diminishing returns. You won't ever know everything about the project, and very often it takes more time to think of all the things that can go wrong than it would take to get it ...
3
First of all, rest is just as important as action! Don't be tempted to skip your breaks. Taking breaks improves your productivity and creativity. Not taking breaks leads to stress and exhaustion (see also this NY Times article)
The Getting-Things-Done (GTD) system is ideal for combatting all your different post-it notes and to-do lists. It requires some ...
3
I'm going to terribly quote Randy Pauch again... from http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/TMenglishTranscript.pdf we have
I like to talk about "The Time Famine". I think it's a nice phrase.
Does anybody here feel like they have too much time? Okay, nobody,
excellent. I like the word "famine", because it's a little bit like
thinking about ...
3
Strenuous physical exercise always works for me. When your legs, lungs and hearth are screaming for attention you won't think about your TODO lists anymore.
See "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" for some interesting research into the good effects of physical exercise.
Also, fun social activities are a good way to get out of ...
3
I'll start with reading speed. I know that for me, speed can be affected by my level of focus, distraction, and the complexity of the material I'm reading. For instance, Reading a short story by Raymond Carver, with his sparse language breezes by. However, switching to Dickens, with embellished, and sometime run-on sentences, I find myself re-reading ...
3
To answer your question
So my question, Is their any online RAILS community or any other
community/website for such things where I can volunteer my spare time
and in the mean time it will enhance my rails skills
Look up github, they have a languages page where you can browse projects by language. It will take hours, maybe even days, before you find ...
3
Given I am a proponent of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system, my advice would be to treat them as either standard projects, or in the GTD bucket of Someday/Maybe, and just integrate them into your normal workflow.
If they are a standard project, you will review them during your weekly once-over, and generate any new active tasks to go into your various ...
2
I cannot emphasize enough to keep track of your ideas. Here are some ways to do that.
Have a document you keep somewhere readily accessible- either on your desktop or within a few clicks reach. Keep your project information with discussion points in this document. It may be more organized to use an Excel spreadsheet to establish common fields for each ...
2
I have the same problem. I adore the planning and preparation part of things but have a hard time calling it "finished" or "ready". Perhaps my experience will be close enough to yours to offer some insight.
I work in media production, and a friend once told me that you never really finish a project, you just get sick of working on it. That is certainly the ...
2
Short answer:
Just start coding!
Long answer:
Judging from that you posted a question on stackexchange i assume you are not coding right now. From my personal experience (I'm a perfectionist) - I always look for ways to make my code beautiful, extensible, fast etc. I want to make my process fast, manageable and organized. But the truth is - if you are on ...
2
Project management is project management, whether for software, construction, making movies, putting on plays, or anything else. Software developers (I am one) are always thinking "but my world is different" when it comes to project management, and looking for the magic bullet software tool that will make it work. There isn't one.
Learn and understand the ...
2
Give http://trello.com a try. It is good for agile development.
Check out this article that explains how they use Trello for software development: http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-product-management/
2
I have battled with this question of projects also, but my understanding is that project names/titles are all that is stored on a Projects List. (This is a separate list than your 'next actions' list).
However, I must admit that I do NOT have a Projects list in my work system, because things just move too fast - I only want to look in one place.
I use ...
2
I'll just leave a list for you here. All of these do task management, have a contacts list and allow assignment and communication of things between people, and having a free version of some type. I've used all of them at least briefly, and I came away with a positive experience. I currently use Doit.im on a daily basis for myself personally, but ...
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