Welcome to my brain
How many things can you fit in your brain at one time? The research suggests 6-7 but this is a bit optimistic for the likes of me, I think I can average about 2. Also my attention span is rather short, in fact I’ve read four web articles on koi carp whilst writing this sentence. Furthermore, I have acute hearing which will pick up and follow a banal conversation across the office rather than concentrate on the problem at hand.
Why bring this up on a blog meant to promote my abilities!?
Well I like to think that this has encouraged me to find ways of tackling problems without relying on my brains ability to focus. Whilst others were sitting in their mind palaces sorting thoughts into tiny organised drawers, I was having to find ways other ways to work. Here are some of my methods (most of which are actually the same method but I’m not going to let that stop me):
WRITING STUFF DOWN
Pretty obvious really, but i still see developers resolutely refusing to write stuff down. When I say stuff I mean code, pseudo-code, little diagrams with arrows, comedy sketches of co-workers. The more I get onto a piece of paper the better the result. As well as solidifying the names of objects/methods/whatever through the process of writing, it also means you can take your notepad and move away from teh computer to think about it, which brings me onto the next point.
WORK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER
It’s a well known fact that having a mystery box that contains all the known data of humankind on it is an irresistable thing to a curious mind. Get away from it, escape to the white board, or even better - a hammock!
WHITEBOARD!
I love working around the whiteboard, recently I spent a whole afternoon with a colleague mapping out a rather convoluted piece of legacy code on the whiteboard. One of us sat with a laptop and the other drew and after an hour or so we had a complete map of the system on the wall. We then established that we had about three lines of code to write to solve the problem, which we also psuedocoded on the wall. It felt great to have not dived straight into the code and caused an inevitable car crash of bugs. Well it still might but at least we have a diagram to refer to when finding the bugs too.
POMODORO!
See previous post, I love doing this. It’s probably good for people who burn out after concentrating hard for 7 hours straight but I use it for the other end of the spectrum, getting me to concentrate for 25 minutes straight.
HEADPHONES!
Lastly, headphones are great for instructing co-workers that you are currently concentrating. If music is distracting, then just put them in with none on. Ha! So cunning stick a tail on it and it would be called a fox. I haven’t found a way to stop colleagues giving you that little wave which means helloooo can I talk to you please? Maybe some kind of blinkers.