[yason]

I think I just mostly try go with the flow. Often I don't succeed in that but sometimes I do and it feels good.

Give me an interesting task that has few dependencies to others and you're going to have a hard time removing me from the computer. Give me a loose task that requires a lot of waiting and you're going to have a hard time removing me from HN or from other interests.

If I try to be highly productive all the time, I just fail myself and get depressed. Since that doesn't work I try to optimize my workflow by working on things that benefit from the idle lulls. Tasks that last days or weeks are most suitable: there might be a lot of "idling" but when I get to writing code I can bang 16 hours straight and accomplish in a day what would otherwise have taken ten days.

Conversely, doing a lot of communication-bound work will soon make me feel busy and exhausted. I'll be waiting or polling something all the time, and what's worse, I can't start anything I think is real work because I have to maintain the stack of pending tasks all the time so I know how to unwind when they finish one by one. If I dive into something then it'll take even more time for me to figure out what to do when I next hit the event loop again.

I try to teach myself that even little work is enough: working like I would love to work, the artist's way of work, is pretty much impossible in a business environment. If I'm confident I've done enough eventhough it's nothing compared to a weekend roll with a hobby project, then I don't feel so bad about getting "nothing" done. And when I get done a lot, I try to enjoy it as a precious window of time rather than the minimal bar I should reach in the following weeks.