How do you energize yourself when working alone on a project?

Question

I am working in an environment with a very small team (3 developers only) and each of us have been assigned a different project, without counting support tasks. I know this is a bad business practice and that we should all work on a single project at a time, and then move on to the next one (Already explained to the management on how much it sucks).

So don't answer me that we should work all together on one project at a time. Energizing the work when in a team is mostly pair programming we did that when less project were thrown at us and that was great.

What I would like to know is how you energize your work when working alone on a project.
Do you follow any particular practice?

EDIT

We already do daily stand-up meeting across the whole company, I implemented several "agile" ceremonies while writing my master thesis about Agile software dev practices related to software quality. And that DID improve the overall involvement of the employees.
What I am after is

practices

that anybody could apply, not subjectively questioning the passion of developers.

Answer 1

The plain and simple is if you love what you are doing, the energy will be there to achieve what you need to do.

Even though the team might be working on different projects at the time, spending a lunch together, having a chat, or morning scrum meetings as to where you are, and what is happering your performace, can greatly increse productivity.

You will be amazed at what you think you have no idea of fixing/sorting, that your fellow rpogrammer might have read an article about, or have heard a discussion.

All in all, the passion you have for what you do, will mostly dictate the end result

You might find that as a coder, on these days without fire, you might have some other encouraging task, just that needed completing, that there was no time for. When you get to the stage where you feel you have been stuck to long, step back, take a beak(lunch/coffee) and work on something interesting. We do this on Fridays. Fridays is our day for working in concepts (that management might not accept) but we know will make life better, or seems like a nice to have. The rest of the week is grinding X-)

Simple pratices would be to set yourself reasonable goals/timelines to meat. Also a good thing to do is in these standup meating that you have, developers should brag about something really good they did this week, and a small prize should be given to the developer that wins that week. Let say a round of drinks. As lead, you might consider spreading the prize so that no developer feels that they are always last. No team member wants to be the burden.

Answer 2

It might sound silly, but the salary in the end of the month (or week, depending on the country) is a very powerful reason to be energized, but not the only one. I think a good companion to the salary is thinking about the project getting finished, and the feelings naturally bound to it.

Answer 3

Depending on the project I find it's fun to work alone. I'll use this situation as an opportunity to try to learn something new and do something different.

[EDIT] You can treat this more like a research project. If you find something that the rest of the team could benefit from, a quick pair programming session will easily get everyone back onto the same page.

Answer 4

The book Passionate Programmer helps to put any practice you have in a more global context (i.e. your career)

It's a book about finding fulfillment in what you do. It's a book about rekindling the fires that you felt when you first entered the profession. It's a book about creating a career, rather than turning up for a job.

And that is a good practice to have for your days "without": step back (from your current work of the day) and look at the big picture, seeing how the daily job helps you progress towards a greater goal.

Answer 5

The situation in our company is similar. We are six developers and work mostly alone on the different projects. To stay at some level of quality and keep some motivation we do:

• We hold weekly meetings with the developers. Every running project is short summarized in it's actual state and with the next milestone. Every developer shortly tells what he did last week and will do next week, and talks about problems encountered (some others may have already solved this problem and have advises).
• Every week on friday one of us does a short talk. Often he introduces in more detail the project he is working on, but we also make talks about interesting technologies, new libraries/languages/tools or try to solve together a bigger problem.
• We make milestones with releases. Every milestone have to be planned with the tickets included (and which tickets should not be part of this milestone). At the end before the release have to be an approval by another developer to find possible problems before the release.
• We have continuous-integration with hudson and the continuous-integration-game activated.