What are you doing during your downtimes to still be productive?

Question

Lately I found myself having a lot of downtime at work.

Unfortunately my current company doesn't have a "research project" policy so I can't put too much effort on a side project (or I may never finish it).

So what I did so far is:

• Learning a new Framework
• Browsing Stack Overflow

What are your solutions to manage not to procastinate, and even be productive, during downtimes?

Answer 1

I read programming related books.

Answer 2

Review and refactor some of your old code. The older the better.

Answer 3

I definitely like to brush up on skills. I keep a running list of stuff to check out in uptime, like "learn more about this technology" or "research this method" and then attack that list when I'm down.

One thing that's fun is to create silly challenges for yourself and do it, like:

"Today I'm going to learn a little python and gather some info and write it to a text file, then wrap html around it" or something like that.

Also I like to do tutorials and keep notes about what I did, and what I learned. The boss likes to see this as well.

Answer 4

• Help your co-workers (if only your project is stale)
• try new things like a new Framework or programming language to keep an open mind
• take the holiday that you could not take during the "hot phase"
• refactor old code

Answer 5

You can write certification exams related to your programming. It will give added value.

Answer 6

A small amount of downtime is normally used to relax and take my mind off work. Get some fresh air. Much downtime is used for reaserching topics that are relevant to work, using books, online tutorials or google.

Answer 7

Reading technical books is what I do the most. For a change I also get into books from Seth Godin, Micheal Lopp and other smart ones. All that good stuff!

Answer 8

Personnaly, I...

• Read up some documentation and programing related blogs

• Watch railscasts

• Help out co-workers

• Go on stackoverflow (what dya mean it's procrastination?)

Answer 9

I think reading and learning about new stuff is a good thing, but writing about the stuff you already know, the techniques you discovered to solve different problems etc. will be a great thing. It will refine your own previous knowledge and let the other people take benefit of your experience.

Answer 10

Join Open Source project - and you will have no free time than ;)

or

Read. Book, news etc. Subscribe to rss bundles in Google Reader and read news. Yiu can find alot of interesting thing there.