As I sit here, I'm waiting for our CI build server to finish building and deploying my code changes. That reminded me of a productivity trick. Plan useful tasks for your downtime.
No matter how focused you are during the day, some day you will hit a point where you just don't want to dig into the code. It's going to happen and if you don't have a plan you will get sucked into a half hour plus of looking at xkcd comics (don't open that unless you have nothing else to do for a while). Anyway, at some point, you will need to procrastinate and you can procrastinate on something useful if you have a list of simple tasks you need to accomplish (e.g. write a blog post).
Now, you may have a to-do list, but if it only contains the big items you are missing out. You need to add in some of the small administratrivial tasks that need to get done in a separate list. These should be things that can take your mind off of the harder problems you will face in the day.
I know this idea is not mine, but I'm not sure which author I'm stealing this from so I'll just guess John Sonmez as most likely he's covered just about everything productivity related.
So sometimes it is best to harness that procrastination monster and put it to good use. He'll show his ugly head one way or another, so it's really a question of what you are going to put him to work on? Just another instance of if you fail to plan you plan to fail. So you can follow up on email you've been putting off or you can scroll endlessly through Facebook or the cheezburger network (same advice as before)
