How do you work on the uninteresting problems?

Question

Of course all of us love to work on the interesting problems - the thrill of hunting down the perfect algorithm that perfectly expresses the desires of our hearts to both the compiler and those who come after us. We love it so much that we're willing to put up with all sorts of monkeying from co-workers and pointy-haired bosses. It's so much fun that many of us consider it play and do it when we're not at work, where we're lucky enough to get paid to do essentially hard tasks that other people don't want to do (or aren't smart enough). These are easy things to work on.

But what about the painful tedium? How do you force yourself to work on the tasks that are insanely un-interesting, but necessary? What tricks do you have to thrust yourself through the doldrums? Do you reward yourself like the subject of a Pavlovian experiment? Do you threaten yourself with worse punishment? Does your boss flog you with a cat o' nine tails, to the beat of a skin-drum while you're chained to your desk until you reach your destination?

What's your secret?

Answer 1

My secret is simple - wife and kids.

Answer 2

I try to focus on the fact that it will typically make my boss or a coworker happy, often by proxy of making a user/higher up happy.

Failing that, I pretend I'm working on the problem while sitting in the Tardis, waiting to have my next adventure.

Answer 3

I remind myself that I have student loans, a car loan and rent. I remind myself that I like to buy nice things and that at the end of the day this is nothing but a profession. It's work and it won't always be fun.

So yes, I'm selfish and greedy. But for me it's all about the $

Answer 4

That's life.. Yin and yang.

Answer 5

How do you get through life, when every day is not thrilling and exciting? When all you do is chores and raise a family? When it's not fun? You simply deal with it, make it as interesting as you can make it, and get through until you have your next great experience. Apply that to your job, at least for that you're getting paid!

Answer 6

1. Music.
2. www.stackoverflow.com + F5.
3. I try to save that kind of work for a Thursday or Friday if possible, then I make plans to do something fun after work. Makes me keep a "it's gonna be great as soon as this is done" attitude. Plus, whatever I do afterwards seems 10x more fun.

Answer 7

It is your job not only to automate the drudgery of the work of your application's users but to automate the drudgery of your own job. If you are repeatedly doing manual integration tests, write more unit tests. If you are repeatedly manually compiling and assembling a deployment package, use a build server. If you are writing boiler plate code, refactor to make it reuseable.

Answer 8

I realize the fact that in this s***ty economy I'm lucky to have a job, and if I want to keep it, I'd better do what I'm told. lol

Also my current employer is pretty laid-back... Casual dress-code, relatively flexible hours (an understanding that I'm working full-time while I'm also taking classes full-time to finish my last semester at college), plus allowing me to rock out to music over my iPod or on playlist.com help make my day easier. :-)

Answer 9

1) I listen music
2) I tell myself that it will prevent futur problems that would make my life an hell
3) I drink a soda for the extra-short-time energy to give me a boost of motivation
4) Where I work its pretty relax environnement, so I go at my rythme.

Answer 10

There are no small parts, only small programmers.

Answer 11

Absolutely what MatthewMartin said. If you're solving the obvious problems (algorithms) but ignoring the problems inherent to the way you do your job ("the business"), you're leaving out whole classes of challenges that are often susceptible to logical skill.

This is how a programmer can become a manager. Not everyone wants that kind of role, but you don't have to be the manager just to manage well. If all you want is the satisfaction of a more optimized workplace combined with less drudgery, figure out how to do it and talk it over with the people who would be affected by the change.

And if your workplace is already optimal - and optimal means you have some boring work to do sometimes - just redefine boring. I love jobs where I get to think intensely. One of my favorites was one of my first: dishwasher at a greasy spoon. I washed dishes by hand, no one bothered me, and since dishwashing is fairly mindless, I could think about whatever I wanted to think about... not bad at all, apart from the stench of a day's work.

Answer 12

People typically have parts of the day when they are less creative. For me, that's the time to do the less exciting engineering work. The afternoon is my least creative time, but it may be different for you. I try to always eat a light lunch to stop my brain from going to sleep. I take a break approx once an hour to do something different. Listening to background music to eliminate distractions is good too. With all that said, I occasionally loose the battle and find a drool stain on my shirt where my chin hit my chest due to brain numbing boredom.

Answer 13

I start looking for another job, take in offers and compare them. List pros and cons.

Pair programming is also good. When there's booring stuff to be done, having someone observing you doing it makes it hard to drift off and do other things instead ...