Do you procrastinate?

[Uncle Gizmo]

Good tips for programmers here:-

How I stopped my procrastination: Insights into developer mindset

You’ve been at your job for years, you know how to write code good enough to get you by comfortably,...

dev.to

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I'll answer your question later.

 

[GaP42]

Hang on - there is this other (thread) to read/ action. Where was it? What was I thinking? How can I find it? What was the question? Nice day for a ....
Damn!

 

[conception_native_0123]

Do you procrastinate?​

only when I'm thinking whether or not to respond to your posts in threads .

 

[Cotswold]

Doesn't everyone?
It is a form of relaxation, a time to pause.
After procrastination should come a surge of energy.
If it doesn't just accept, then just accept the fact that you're an idle beggar.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

What I hate about my procrastination is that it's insidious. It operates by making me think that something I need to do is of utmost importance, taking precedence over anything else. When I realize I've fallen into the procrastination trap again and reflect on my actions, I suddenly understand that what I am doing is absolutely pointless and counterproductive to my real goals. Yet, it happens again and again...

And before Adam pipes up with his usual inane comment, exactly this! What I'm doing here, posting this on access world forums! (AWF)

 

[GaP42]

And I am here reading this ...

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I'll tell you my real reasons for procrastination ... if I get around to it.

 

[Cotswold]

Of course you may be procatinating because you just know deep down that what you are doing
is either a complete waste of time. Pointless, or you simply aren't interested in doing it and
you'd rather be doing someting else anyway.

 

[KitaYama]

I have a feeling you guys have never been against the clock or had a deadline to finish a program.
Sorry if I'm wrong.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I have a feeling you guys have never been against the clock or had a deadline to finish a program.
Sorry if I'm wrong.

I had a customer who gave me a database which needed some improvement. It was an urgent job and although I said it would take three months they said they wanted done in one month so we sort of agreed on two months!

As I got deeper and deeper into the database I discovered that for some strange reason they had decided to link tables together with a date/time stamp field.

This was untroduced from the original program which was created in Ms Excel.

I endeavoured to convert this date time stamp ID into a real number and that's when I ran aground..

The number of records never matched up and I eventually discovered that the conversion would sometimes convert it into one figure and sometimes convert it into a different figure!

It was a nightmare! I tried every trick I could to sort it out.

I've never seen a deadline which would stick, they always get moved particularly if you discover something isn't as it should be.

Also customers change their minds and you end up creating something different than you originally intended.

One of the worst things is when you think the customer knows what they're talking about and you take their word as gospel. You find out they have no idea what they are doing, what they have done, and what you are doing....

So working to a deadline, the only way to make that work is to break the project up into small sections with short deadlines of a few days.

Once you have completed one piece then re-evaluate your deadlines for the other pieces, the deadlines will always change!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I have a feeling you guys have never been against the clock or had a deadline to finish a program.
Sorry if I'm wrong.

As a systems admin contractor for the U.S. Navy, we had all sorts of deadlines for which the penalty for missing was that a server would be shut down in the middle of the day to do specific work if we didn't do it before that deadline. That unscheduled outage would show up on our record and could lead to contract termination.

Two jobs before that, I was a project manager for a company that made oil and gas pipeline control systems, and the customer had delivery dates with late penalties.

I fully understand deadlines. But then again, U.S. citizens understand deadlines every tax season. Given that my state's income taxes are offset from federal taxes by a month, I get two of those per year, plus local property tax deadlines. LIFE has deadlines.

 

[KitaYama]

I had a customer who gave me a database which needed some improvement. It was an urgent job and although I said it would take three months they said they wanted done in one month so we sort of agreed on two months!

As I got deeper and deeper into the database I discovered that for some strange reason they had decided to link tables together with a date/time stamp field.

This was untroduced from the original program which was created in Ms Excel.

I endeavoured to convert this date time stamp ID into a real number and that's when I ran aground..

The number of records never matched up and I eventually discovered that the conversion would sometimes convert it into one figure and sometimes convert it into a different figure!

It was a nightmare! I tried every trick I could to sort it out.

I've never seen a deadline which would stick, they always get moved particularly if you discover something isn't as it should be.

Also customers change their minds and you end up creating something different than you originally intended.

One of the worst things is when you think the customer knows what they're talking about and you take their word as gospel. You find out they have no idea what they are doing, what they have done, and what you are doing....

So working to a deadline, the only way to make that work is to break the project up into small sections with short deadlines of a few days.

Once you have completed one piece then re-evaluate your deadlines for the other pieces, the deadlines will always change!

Here, every company has to pass a RoSe test, twice a year to be able to continue its business. It's a test done by government to prevent environment pollution. Last week, we had this test and just before the G-Men come to check on us, they called and asked for a new graph and the total of F-Cost (Failure cost) during the last quarter.
It was 10AM and they would start their examination at 3 PM.

Our database is used by more than 50 client PCs and asking them to stop using it to be able to issue an update, causes the production line to stop. It means that only during the lunch time (60 minutes), we had to bring the database off-line, add the queries and graphs and make it available again at 1 PM.
Two guys take care of our databases and I asked them to let me sit and watch them how they do it in 60 minutes.

They made a copy of the FE, and scheduled how to do it. One would work on necessary queries and functions, the other start working on exporting the data to excel and creating the pivots. 30 minutes to do what they had to do, 15 minutes to test if it's OK, 10 minutes to merge the FE they were working separately, and 5 minutes to issue the new update.

I was sitting there and watching them how fast they're doing it, but for sure it was not perfect. A lot of things were postpone for the next version up, comments that said to add something later, error traps that were not the perfect way, missing links to help files etc.

What I meant by being on the clock, was that when you have a time limit, you don't care if it's good enough or not. You postpone a lot of steps to a later time. At some situations, there's no way around procrastination.

 

[KitaYama]

Given that my state's income taxes are offset from federal taxes by a month, I get two of those per year,

In US, you have two types of taxes? Federal and state?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In US, you have two types of taxes? Federal and state?

Yes. And in some places, even municipal taxes. The state and local taxes vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some states do not levy an income tax but stick other kinds of taxes elsewhere to make up the difference. AND of course the states can levy sales taxes, property taxes, road-use taxes...

We used to live in the land of the free, but the tax burden makes it not so much free any more.

 

[KitaYama]

Yes. And in some places, even municipal taxes. The state and local taxes vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some states do not levy an income tax but stick other kinds of taxes elsewhere to make up the difference. AND of course the states can levy sales taxes, property taxes, road-use taxes...

We used to live in the land of the free, but the tax burden makes it not so much free any more.

@The_Doc_Man
Here, we have a tax that have to pay to the city we live in. But it had its problems. Cities with high population, had a good amount of income from tax and could improve more and more, but cities with a small population had problems with the lack of money.

Since 2003, we are allowed to pay our taxes to any city we choose. We can choose the city we live in, or any other city. We also can divide our taxes to any number of city from 1 yen, up the full amount we have to pay, to one city up to any number of cities we choose.

This system caused an unexpected phenomenon. Cities with low population, started to give away money and gifts to gather tax from those who live in other cities. For example, city A returns 50% of the amount of the tax they receive. Imagine I pay 20,000 yen of my tax to this city, they will give back 10,000 of it as a "thanks for selecting us". This "Thank you" gift, is not paid back with money, but with gift cards or exchange.
We have a site like amazon for this purpose with millions and millions of items. Cities show what they can offer for our tax. We can go there and search for anything we need, and barter it with a tiny part of the tax we have to pay. You can find food, dress, toys, tickets, phones, Car parts, household appliances ....anything you can imagine.

This is a win win game. We pay full amount of taxes that we have to pay, but in return we can select whatever we need (free of charge) among several millions of items. Cities with low population will gain a part of our tax, and we will receive almost half of it as anything we choose.

Another good aspect of this system is that when a part of our country faces a disaster, earthquake, Tsunami, ..... , most people pay their taxes to that part of country to help reconstructing the damages, and don't accept the gifts in return to keep more money there.

@Uncle Gizmo my apologies for going off topic.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

my apologies for going off topic

I love the off topics stuff. It gives deep insights into other people, other communities and other countries. It's one of the best features of this site!

I have been on regimental sites run by stuffed shirts and they are not pleasant....