How do you keep your focus while programming?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do you get yourself to focus?

Maybe it's just me, but after a decade of PHP programming, it gets harder and harder to find some challenge in my daily work - thats why I started Flash, but that's another story. So I sit down to work on a (non research)project and after half an hour I notice that my mind is racing on a totally different topic (flying pigs, baby porcupines, Osama, Boeing 767 etc.). It just becomes harder and harder to dwelve into a fairly repetitive, thousand times done task. I see the glooming clouds of the deadline, but I'm unable to move, until the deadline is so close that it actually burns. Sometimes I scream for sidekicks who should do the petty things and I just jump in and get the patient's heart out, replace it, and let the assistants stich up the patient. No matter how good the payment is, sadly I can't stand the monotonous work and often need some type of carrot on a stick to keep going.

Coffee, tea, energy drink, background music maybe schnapps, so how do you detour from reality and keep focused on jog-trot projects? What do you do to dope yourself, how do you swing over the deadlocks and how you persuade yourself and feed your brain with positive thoughts to actually get going?

Answer 1

Headphones and familiar music are my favourite non-programming trick. Really keeps the distractions out and lets you zone out. Unfamiliar music doesn't have the same effect for me because I end up listening to the music.

My favourite programming trick for forcing myself to do boring work is employing test-driven development or anything else that provides an easy carrot-on-a-stick, pat-on-the-head way of doing things in a measurable way. When you can see you only have to get another 14 tests to pass to get the thing finished, then you are more likely to do the work. You see progress and you feel like the tasks is measurable and achievable. I find the fact that a task is boring is not the only problem, it's that it's boring and possibly unending. That's a serious demotivator for even starting. Even in non-programming work I find having a list of small things that I can continually cross off makes me more productive in general.