punch procrastination in the guts

Procrastination.
Just the name in itself is ugly, and even worst to pronounce (especially when you're french).

But to end up writing a post about it, that's the ultimate insult to my medium sized brain.

I need to kick real hard that procrastination habits out of of me, let's see if a public spank put me back in the right track.

I don't think procrastinating is being lazy, maybe just being out of focus, our being on too many targets.
Here my problem is quite simple, I got a day job that is nice but is not at all what I want to do, really want to do.

You know, that little itch that always come back to haunt you, the thing that make you wake up at 3am so you can work on it because you have to, it's there in a side of your mind and you just want to put it out.

In my case it would be put it out in code, algorithm, patterns, that kind of things.

That thing is not really important, it not gonna change the world or even bring a little spark in the immensity of the programming related project you can find on the internet, but the itch is there and it's itching more and more.

It's sad to say but I got many itches like that, not only one, I got like a dozen of them, some not related at all with each others, some interconnected somehow.

And my nightmare for the last year has been simply that I can not wrap my logic around all those itches, it's just not as simple as to put a todo list and go point by point, check, done, next one.


But what is really the problem ?
time ?

No, not really, you can always make time for something you really want to do, it's just in my case I need to get into the itch at the right state of mind, with the rigth tools loaded up there if you would prefer, so yes I can find time.

so maybe it's space ?
yes, maybe that, I noticed I like to code alone, isolated from the world, this can be solved with almost any music device in my case, load a song, infinite loop, and I can pretty much focus on abything for hours.

But there is another space, the space where I do the work, this have changed a lot in a year, I was almost proud of me to fire my laptop and be able to code almost anywhere, in a train, a station, on the street, anywhere really, but not anymore.
I need a large desktop now, something to put all by stuff in front of me, laptops, screens, books, etc. all the things right under my hand so I would not have to move from my sit and lost my precious focus.

Sadly, it took me months to realize that, and I'm still wondering why it changed that much.

It's not the first time that I'm thinking about that procrastination thingy, but you know you always can find excuses: I'm tired from work I need to relax so I'll watch a movie, I don't want to be a geek totally asocialized so I let the IM open, and off course you got messages, and off course you lose focus, oh yeah that stuff I will code it when I come back from the pub and in fact this never happen, etc.
excuses like that.

I tried many things, like cutting off my internet connection, lol this one last about 5mn, no can do, you do need to search to get going with your code, from basic RFC to other people works, thoughts, experiences... cutting off IM or your mail is ok, but the whole connection, humm it's a "no go", at least for me.

I also tried to pressure myself, announcing things publicly, to friends, to peers, to have this pressure to push me forward scrathing that itch, it worked a few time, but still I was going out of focus at one moment or another.

I thought so many things, that maybe I lost the drive, maybe I lost the fun in programming, but no it was not that...in fact I'm not 100% sure of what it is.


Long long time ago I got a school teacher who told me that

when you're smart you're never bored

he had no idea how this influenced me since then, not that I wanted to pretend to be smart (or think I'm) but I always applied myself to have stuff to do to get me busy, maybe too busy.

I should maybe unlearn that, reverse my habbits to have more boring time so I could focus on those itches and get them done.

But I'm not sure that's really the solution, reading from others about the procrastination problem, everyone come with a different solution for themselves, todo list for some, rules for other like not reading blogs in the morning, or other tricks, taking a long shower to think about the code, etc. I tried few of them a little but it didn't really worked out for me.

The only thing I'm glad for with all this proscratination is even if I don't produce code, not doing it make me think a lot about how to write code, the process in itself.
And maybe that's where is my mental block, even if you have good habits of coding, know your stuff to take some specs and problems and solve that with code, it's always good to question those habits, try new things just see if they could work better or give better results.

But maybe it's because I'm thinking of it too much that I'm proscratinating about it, the classic catch-22.
That's really strange because I'm an all time supporter of learning by doing, do things, read docs in the middle if you have to, but just do and avoid long gap of "not doing", exactly what I'm not doing now.

That's the most frustrating part, I'm aware of it, I want to change it, but something block me, maybe fear (of not being up to the task), or shame (to not have done anything for so long), I don't know really.

Bah I just gonna wait for that big desk and see if it help to changes thing.

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