Staying focused, the productive way

Your manager keeps telling you that you’re not getting enough done. So you decide to become more focused, since as everyone knows, to be a productive programmer you need to stay focused. Deep-diving into TV Tropes, chatting with your friends, or reading up on that fancy new web framework might be fun, often even educational, but they won’t get that feature you’re working on out the door.

So you get noise canceling headphones, and only read your email once a day, and use the Pomodoro technique, and became laser-focused on your code—but still, you’re not productive enough. Your colleague across the hall doesn’t write code faster than you, and yet somehow they make more of an impact, they get things more done. You know it, and your manager knows it.

Why?

Because staying focused is not enough to make you productive. In fact, it’s often the other way around: staying focused is a side-effect of what truly makes you productive.

• To understand why staying focused isn’t enough, we’ll take a detour from programming and go visit my past self: a young soldier being escorted into a military jail.
• Then, we’ll apply the lesson we learned and see how understanding your goals is key to becoming more productive, and how your goals can help you stay focused.

A short visit to a military jail

Imagine a yard full of dirty gravel, and mixed in with the gravel are tiny twigs, trash, and the like. How long could you spend crawling around looking for this debris before you’d get bored? How long could you stay focused?

Long ago I lived in Israel, and as a Jewish citizen I was required to serve three years in the military. For a variety of reasons, personal and political, I had no interest in becoming a soldier, and so I attempted to avoid conscription by getting a medical discharge for mental health reasons. While on the base I was part of a transients’ unit on the military base: we would clean bathrooms and the like while awaiting processing.

As our story unfolds, I was having a very bad day. My attempt to get a discharge was failing, as the military psychiatrist had decided there was nothing wrong me. And to make things worse, the sergeant who ran the unit wanted me to go off and do some work on the base, and I couldn’t deal with it.

So I said “no”—which to say, I refused orders, serious business in the military. The sergeant organized a quick trial, and the officer in charge sentenced me to a day in the on-base jail. Perhaps for entertainment, perhaps to enforce the importance of obeying orders, while I was in the jail my guards ordered me to search for little bits of tiny debris that were mixed in the jailyard’s gravel.

And so I spent quite a while, crawling around on my knees in the rain, working hard at a pointless task. The guards were impressed, and eventually they felt bad enough to give me an umbrella to keep the rain off.

The moral of the story

I started this episode by refusing to work, and refusing work that had some purpose (washing dishes, or cleaning a bathroom). I ended by working hard doing something that was a complete waste of time.

Both choices were good ones, because in both cases I was working towards my goals:

1. My broadest goal was getting kicked out of the military. Cooperating was doing me no favors: spending some time in jail for refusing orders demonstrated I was not going to be a good soldier.
2. My secondary goal was minimizing the amount of time I spent in jail. I had met a soldier on base who had spent his time in jail getting in trouble with his guards, so he’d been sentenced to even more time. He ended up spending months on a military prison base. I wanted to be a model prisoner, so I could get out of jail as quickly as possible.

Staying focused and avoiding distractions is all fine and good, so long as the work you’re doing actually helps you achieve your goals. If it’s not, you’re staying focused on the wrong thing. I could have stayed focused by following orders—and that would have been the wrong way to achieve my goal of getting kicked out of the military.

Plus, knowing your goals can help you stay focused. If you don’t care about your task, then you’ll have a hard time focusing. But once you do understand why you’re doing what you do, you’ll have an easier time staying on task, and you’ll have an easier time distinguishing between necessary subtasks and distracting digressions. And that’s why I was able to enthusiastically clean debris from gravel.

This then is the key to achieving your goals, to productivity, and to staying focused: understanding your goals, and then working towards them as best you can.

Applying your goals to staying focused

So how do you use goals to stayed focused?

1. Figure out the goals for your task.
2. Strengthen your motivation.
3. Judge each part of your work based on your goals.

1. Discovering your goals

Start with the big picture: why are you working this job? Your goals might include:

• Money: Getting paid so you can buy food and shelter.
• Social pressure: You want your coworkers and boss to think well of you.
• Organizational goals: You believe in what the company is doing.
• A sense of obligation: You want to help your customers or users.
• Building and playing: Solving a hard problem is fun.
• Curiosity: Learning is fun too.

Then focus down on your particular task: why is this task necessary? It may be that to answer this question you’ll need do more research, talking to the product owner who requested a feature, or the user who reported a bug. This research will, as an added bonus, also help you solve the problem more effectively.

Combine all of these and you will get a list of goals that applies to your particular task. For example, let’s say you’re working on a bug in a flight search engine. Your goals might be:

1. Money: I work to make money.
2. Organizational goal: I work here because I think helping people find cheap, convenient flights is worth doing.
3. Task goal: This bug should be fixed because it prevents users from finding the most convenient flight on certain popular routes.
4. Fun: This bug involves a challenging C++ problem I enjoy debugging.

2. Strengthening your motivation

Keeping your goals in mind will help you avoid distractions, and the more goals you’re meeting, and the more your various goals point in the same direction, the better you’ll do. If you have weak or contradictory goals then you can try different solutions:

• If you work for a company whose goals don’t mean much to you, then you’ll have a harder time focusing: consider finding a new job where you’re doing something you care more about.
• If after enough research you’ve decided your task is pointless, you can either try to push back (mark the bug as WONTFIX, go talk to the product manager), try to add an additional motivation (is this a good opportunity to learn something new?), or just live with the fact that it’ll take you longer to implement.

3. Judging your work

Understanding your goals will not only help you avoid small distractions (noise, TV Tropes), but bigger distractions as well: digressions, seemingly useful tasks that shouldn’t actually be worked on. Specifically, as you go about solving your task you can use your goals to judge whether a new potential subtask is worth doing.

Going back to the example above, imagine you encounter some interesting C++ language feature while working on it can be tempting to dive in. But judged by the four goals it will only serve the fourth goals, having fun, and likely won’t further your other goals. So if the bug is urgent then you should probably wait until it’s fixed to play around.

On the other hand, if you’re working on a pointless feature, your sole goals might be “keep my manager happy so I can keep getting paid.” If you have two days to do the task, and it’ll only take two hours to implement it, spending some time getting “distracted” learning a technical skill might help with a different goal: switching to a more interesting position or job.

Start with your goals

Once you know goals, you can actually know what it takes to be productive, because you’ll know what you’re working towards. Once you know your goals, you can start thinking about how to avoid distractions because you’ll know you’re doing work that’s worth doing.

Before you start a task, ask yourself: what are my goals? And don’t start coding until you have an answer.