It would probably be even smarter of me to take 20 seconds to figure out exactly the right set of Emacs tabs/frames to keep open alongside them, so when it was time to start up again, I'd get sucked right in.
The idea being, it'll be much easier to get back into the groove the next day if you aren't confronted with the proverbial empty screen or blank sheet of paper the minute you walk in the door.
After you spend 30 minutes wrapping up the work from yesterday, you will already be in the zone, and it'll be easier to move ahead to the next big thing on your list.
"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."
I often create fun little mini-projects for myself to do and store them for later. I find that completing a small and fun project motivates me to work on whatever actual task I should be working on.
I think of it as leaving work "hooks" for myself to pull me into work the next day. Work hooks are small in scope, and satisfying to accomplish. The next day, not only do I know exactly what I'm going to do, I'm looking forward to it.
...but I know there are the opposite kind o people, like fellow programmers that love debugging but are just "stuck" if they have to start from scratch (I'm the opposite, I hate debugging and working on projects started by other people, but I'm incredibly productive at starting from a blank whiteboard or imagining things from nothing)
Next day, you'll be sucked right back in because of that damn test failing.
For me, it's also a good way to keep habitually doing TDD.
When I start from neutral, whether at start-of-day or after finishing a task, I check off what's done, then review the list to find a ripe task to launch into.
I highly encourage people to think skeptically and scientific as well using the self quantitative approach to self improvement, even when they're certain when their theory is right.
For example, I am measuring blood pressure, steps count, weight, blood sugar level, awake and sleep time everyday. I also just recently concluded that walking 10K steps have almost no effect on my weight or very subtle one.
http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#interventio...
In the future, when I finish my analysis, other people might decide to replicate my experiment or comes up with their own conclusion based on the data I gathered.
Although how one could test the idea proposed in the blog is unclear to me. I like the idea of having a clean desk or clean environment though. The ugly environment in my house doesn't appears to deter me from getting things done, though.
If you're going to change and track something to test its correlation to weight, please consider calorie intake instead.
10k steps is really not going to burn many calories (my marathon running friends use the "1 mile = 100 calories" rule of thumb). Additionally, many people starting cardio see an increase in appetite and if they are not already used to carefully controlling their food intake, end up _gaining_ weight.
Having known many people who have made the 50 lbs. fat loss goal you're looking at (and having cut 25 lbs. myself), a major diet change is likely the only thing that'll get you there. If you continue to take in enough food to sustain yourself at ~200 lbs, nothing short of training like Michael Phelps will get you down to ~150 lbs.
EDITED to correct some bad arithmetic :(
Weight also impacts how many calories are burned. (http://caloriesburnedrunning.org/; not sure how accurate this particular site is, but I've seen similar results from other sites). A 6'6" person with a healthy BMI weight of 215 lbs would burn around 175 calories per mile at an 11.5 minute mile pace.
Despite this, as a tall person who runs a lot, I've found that a diet change is still really important if one wants to lose weight. (But after this is done, it is nice to go for a ten mile run on the weekend to cut a half pound that can be used as weight loss or to allow more eating throughout the rest of the week.)
I once dropped 50 lbs in about three months solely from returning to my previous running habit. At least according to my calculations, I was burning closer to 1000kcal/hour (more like 100kcal/km). I wasn't doing competitive-style twice a day training, either. Just one run, six days a week, usually for 60-90 mins at a BPM of <150. Once a week I ran 800m sprint repeats all-out, and two or three times a month I did a long run (which was increasing by about 10 minutes each time until I got it up to 4 hours).
All in all it averaged out to just over an hour of exercise per day, and the mental benefits more than made up that time in productivity. I didn't change my diet at all, except to eat a bit more after the long runs and possibly to eat a bit more cereal. And I lost just about every spare bit of fat on my body.
The article is not very good at expressing its own point, unfortunately. This wasn't it.
Take periodic task A, such as making dinner or sitting down to work. You do this task on a mostly regular basis. Doing this task creates waste: a dirty sink, an unclean workspace, and so on. When you complete the task, it often seems like yet another task (B) to accomplish when tired to do the cleaning. Thus your workspace starts to degrade. The next time you need to do task A, you have to do task B first. You're psyched and ready to do task A, but you can't, because task B wasn't done. And task B is not what you're psyched for.
All the article is pointing out is that you need to do task B as soon as you're done with task A. That way, when you come back the next day to go for task A, you don't have a preliminary step to go through before you can really get started.
> Although how one could test the idea proposed in the blog is unclear to me.
Take any such pair of tasks and measure the time it takes to get started on the task pair over the course of a decent period of time, such as a month. Try to have a balance of which task is performed first. By "time it takes to get started", I mean the the delta between the time you say, "I should do task A", and the time you actually start doing either task.
Of course, that's subject to the observer effect: noting down the time at which you say you should do it will probably in itself incentivize you. Thus, it may be helpful to regularly schedule a task pair and note the offset from the scheduled time.
Anyway, good luck with your experiment!
Regarding eternal counting, two things that may help:
Yoga and meditation have both made me much more aware of the experience of my body. Before I would eat long past the level that I now recognize as "full". Often because I just didn't notice. (Reading while eating made that especially easy.) Now I find it much more easy to keep stable.
The other trick is one from Carol Lay's graphic memoir The Big Skinny. She weighs herself every day. If she's within her goal range, she just eats without worrying. If she's above the limit, she goes back to counting. (Her system is simpler; she just tracks raw calorie numbers, not full food lists.)
So I've identified a few ways I use my computer and I'm setting up a user account for each one:
* coding in Ruby
* coding in Java for work
* blogs and email (and hacker news)
* personal and household maintenance
If it goes well, I'll try to write it up in a blog post.
Have you looked into a virtual desktop solution yet? I use virtual desktops for very similar reasons (tuck all the real time wasters away in one desktop, put music playing controls and such in another, and use every other one for a different task), and I find it does a very good job of keeping me focused on the task at hand without getting in my way when it's time to do something else. Each one of my desktops is just two keypresses away, but there's no indication that anything is even running in any other desktop but a tiny square in the bottom right corner of my screen.
There's a free version on their website (scroll down a bit) if you'd like to try it. It lacks the toggle hotkeys, but it'll let you know if it suits you before buying.
Physical separation has been great. It makes it much easier for me to remember which context I'm in, and it makes context switches obvious.
Nike nailed it: Just do it.