Communications of the ACM

practice
HAVE YOU EVER come into work, sat down at your
computer to begin a project, opened your editor, and
then just stared at the screen? This happens to me all
the time, so I understand your struggle.
Even if you love your job, you don’t always feel
like doing it every day. There are so many factors
that influence your ability to show up to work with
enthusiasm and then work hard all day long.

External events can take priority in your mind—family
struggles, a breakup, a sick pet—and make it difficult
to focus. Then, of course, there are the struggles at work
that can make it hard to feel motivated. Getting a bad
review can knock you off course. Likewise, if you work
really hard on a project and your manager doesn’t
seem to value it at all, you might won-
der why you are working so hard.

Other times you have to work on tasks you don’t enjoy (for me, that is writing lots of tests, or documentation) or projects that aren’t challenging. If your work is uninteresting or if a task you have been assigned seems beneath your ability, finding your motivation can be challenging.

So, what do you do? Many people turn to procrastination or ignoring the task—but that only postpones the inevitable. You can try to talk your way out of the assignment, and maybe your manager will support you, but at some point the work must get done.

If you want to be successful, then it serves you better to rise to the occasion no matter what. That means learning how to push through challenges and deliver valuable results.

Since this happens to me quite often, I have captured five of my best strategies for turning out amazing work even when I don’t feel like it.

Gamify Your Process

Dealing with a really big project used to hold me back. If the project had lots of tasks I didn’t know how to do or that seemed really difficult, I resisted even starting because I was so overwhelmed by the scope.

Of course, this meant I procrastinated until only the minimum amount of time remained to complete the project. Then I would end up working crazy long hours, and sometimes I ended up with code that “worked” but was in no way ready for prime time (for example, a few bugs, not enough coverage of edge cases, minimal testing, working only in my dev environment because I could not make it work on staging, and so on.). This was super stressful and usually meant my work was not as good as it could have been if I had only started earlier.