Most Obvious Yet Ignored Concept About Programmer's Concentration

His comments are provably false. There are countless scientific studies showing the benefits of various strategies for increasing productivity as well as increasing your enjoyment of your work. (e.g. how to make masturbation feel better, how to make programming more addictive, how to enjoy yourself while doing the dishes, etc etc)

He even suggests time-boxing, a very popular strategy for countering procrastination.

Suffice to say, he is yet another unqualified non-expert giving opinions on stuff he doesn't know anything about.

For those who like to have music playing while they work, I've found that albums can be a nice way to pace the work day, and to account for time.

Open up my editor, start an album that fits in with my current mood so it will service its purpose of covering up outside noise but will not distract me, and start hacking away.

When the album ends, I get to a good pause point, and take a break to plan my next move, and pick the next album. Good time for a stretch, or a snack, or a check of HN. Then start the next album and back to work.

This naturally breaks my day up into the kind of concentrate/break cycles that many recommend. At the end of the day, if I need to account for my time, It's easy to check iTunes and see how long each album was, and therefore how much time I spent on that phase of my coding.

On the other hand, here are some organic ways that I've found useful for strengthening my level of concentration, independent of my programmming focus:

- working out regularly, especially running long distance

- playing games competitively (eg: chess, bridge, go)

- training your mind/memory or practicing mental arithmetic

- eat blueberries daily (random tip from Nelson Dellis, the current US Memory Champ: http://climbformemory.com/2011/01/05/blueberries-rock-my-bra...)

This is just wrong. Sometimes you run into a knotty problem that requires you to hold a lot of things in your head while you try to fit them together. A conversation in the next cubicle can prevent that from happening.

The post reminds very much of the "Back to Work" podcast by Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann:

http://5by5.tv/b2w/10

off topic: I like the fact the content renders perfectly on my phone, as opposed to most others with tiny font and fixed width.

Inflammatory stuff by someone who seems to have never dealt with burn-out near the end of a project, or the fact that sometimes work is work, and you just have to push through it to get back to the things you find exciting.