So the last 3 months has taught me something about myself. Solitude makes my brain explode in inspiration and ideas very easy to explore without anyone looking over my shoulder and at home with easy access to all my hobbies and beloved gadgets. - I'm pretty sure now I could get an ADD diagnosis or maybe some other letters.
Problem is - I don't get much work done and in the end the people paying me to work will probably stop.
Procrastination is not new to me but I manage it a bit better when in the office. There I hate the noise and stress, but at least I kind of "feel" that I need to do some work.
It's frustrating - BUT - I found a solution: Peer programming.
I did have a chance to work with a colleague - a new guy who need to learn the way around old code. So he watched and listened to me sharing the desktop while I got work done - I was telling about why stuff was implemented, getting a lot of insight myself and having razor focus for 4-5 hours straight.
I was amazed! - but this was temporary. We don't use peer programming all the time and having a redundant peer who just pretend to listen is an expensive way to work.
- So my question: how can I trick my brain into this : "someone is watching and you need to keep focus" mode, where I actually enjoy working ?
I actually like what I do and I am OK at it - it's not because my work is boring - the procrastination I do is very similar to the real work I need to do.
I might just be hopeless - I might be the only one with this disorder. I see lots of people praising this work from home period, where they can work in silence and get focused. I envy this!
If you've found that sporadically jumping into new work has a negative effect on your overall productivity, are there steps you can take to ignore distractions? Starting with 10 minute meditation sessions might help.[0] Be aware of when random thoughts are taking over and pulling you off task. If your higher-level goal is to focus better it will most likely require an internal change rather than an external force watching you. Although I guess software to block distracting content could help temporarily.
Building up focus and the ability to work in isolation probably takes time. It might help to write your frustrations down in a personal journal to try to identify issues and trends. Maybe the wikihow articles on how to focus would help for some focus strategies?[1]
Getting a friendly desk animal and doing some rubber ducking might help too. :D
Work shouldn't be so adversarial... The way you frame it makes your job sound like it's at odds with your personal development. Maybe your manager would have some ideas? Remote work is weird so lots of people are most likely running into things like this. Engineering people are probably the exception since having isolation for work is usually seen as a good thing.
[0] "The Mind Illuminated" is a good meditation book
Also many a problem has been solve by entering the question as a slack message that I never needed to send.
WFH makes talking to myself possible now!
On the other hand, one has to be super careful about privacy, security, NDAs.