Getting Past Procastination – IEEE Spectrum

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Over a decade working in hypergrowth technological societies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly fought with procrastination. I would have assigned an important project, but I just couldn’t be started. The source of my distraction varied – I would constantly check my emails, read the random documentation or even scroll my social flows. But the result was the same: I felt a deep feeling of fear that I did not progress on the things that counted.

In the end, time is the only resource that counts. Every minute, you make a decision on how to spend your life. Most of the ways people spend their time are ineffective. Especially in the world of technology, our tasks and tools are constantly changing, so we must be able to adapt. What separates the best engineers from the rest of the pack is that they create systems that allow them to be always productive.

Here is the main idea that changed my perspective on productivity: The action leads to motivationnot the other way around. You should not check your email or scroll Instagram while you wait for the motivation to “hit you”. Instead, just start doing something, anything, which makes progress towards your goal, and you will find that the motivation will follow.

For example, if I have a complex high priority and complex fixing challenge at work, my approach is to break the problem in something much simpler. Could I just Add a newspaper instruction that prints the value of a relevant variable? My goal at this point is not to solve the bug, it’s simply to take a little step forward.

This creates a powerful steering wheel: you are productive → You feel good → you are more productive.

Unfortunately, many engineers are stuck in the opposite steering wheel, a descending spiral of procrastination: you are unproductive → You feel bad → you are unproductive.

The idea that motivation naturally follows progress allows us to reduce the activation energy necessary to enter the ascending spiral. The author and motivating speaker Tony Robbins talks about a related concept that “movement creates an emotion”. The actions we take and even the way we move our body affect what we feel. Once you realize that you can control your motivation, you can get stress -free productivity.

—Rahul

A shortage of technical workers arrives. Currently, most of these roles require university degrees, but specialized training thanks to targeted and skills-based microcredestilian courses could provide an alternative and widen the workforce. The IEEE microcredential program offers identification information that focuses on the skills necessary to become a technician, electrician or programmer, regardless of their training.

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In the midst of contradictory stories of how programmers use AI at work, wired 730 Coders to obtain more clarity – then used Chatgpt to paint through data, with a lot of help from human publishers and fact verifiers. The survey asked the coders how much they use AI, their prospects on technology and how it changed their work, among other questions.

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Unlike many engineers, Carolina Cruz-Neira had little interest in technology as a child. Instead, she dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina. But when an injury forced her to pivot, Cruz-Neira was successful in computer science, ultimately mixing his interests in art and science as a pioneer in virtual reality.

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