MetaWork

I’m working on a personal project related to some work I’m doing for my day job.  It’s a big idea I had recently based on ASP.NET MVC and I’m excited about it, so I’m pushing hard to get the work in.  I’ve done a lot more coding in the last couple weeks than I have since I “finished” VSTime.

My “productive” time starts at about 6am and ends, on a good day, around 6pm.  On a very good day, caffeine can extend that time into the evening.  I know this schedule is grounds for revocation of my geek card, but I’m a husband and dad with three kids, so my schedule is largely theirs.  Outside my productive time, my brain slowly descends into guacamole.  The frontal lobes turn to runny eggs and I can’t focus on code anymore.

This means that I have about eight good hours a day to devote to work, be it my own or otherwise.  Eight hours sounds like a lot, but when you count drive time, boot time (our login scripts are glacial,) lunch, and body breaks, it rounds out to more like six.  I try to game the system by working from home when I can (no drive time) and eating at my desk, but it’s still less than eight hours.

Six hours per day isn’t a lot.  I have to squeeze every possible moment out of those six hours in order to accomplish anything meaningful from one day to the next.  This means staying as focused as possible on the tasks that will truly make things happen.  I’ve recently noticed a major productivity killer: metawork.

Metawork is what we do to convince ourselves we’re doing something useful when we’re actually slacking off.  When our brains seize up and our focus is off, we turn to metawork to look and feel busy.  Examples of metawork include:

• Updating to-do lists
• Writing pseudocode
• Tweeting/Talking about writing code
• Meetings
• Reading about technology that has nothing to do with anything you’re working on
• Answering random StackOverflow questions
• Reading blog posts (D’oh!)
• Writing a blog post (Double D’oh!)

This is an incomplete list and will probably apply differently to different people.  Some people are paid to blog, so that wouldn’t be metawork for those people.  I’m not paid to blog, so I’m currently burning valuable time.

Back to it!