Productivity tools considered harmful?

“Let’s spend a pomodoro appreciating this view, then another pomodoro taking a picture of it.” — No one. Ever.

TLDR: Great programmers don’t need to “focus” because they love coding. (Most of the time.)

First I want to say that I’ve been working from home since I graduated in 2014. Keep that in mind when you read this.

I also started working full time on my app FocusList in January of 2016. I thought working for myself is going to change things and working on my own idea is gonna make me love every minute of it.

But it didn’t. One has to enjoy the activity of coding, not the result of it. It doesn’t matter what you code on, but whether you love coding.

Over the last few years I started to lose interest in programming. I graduated university and what used to be fun, became work.

My solution? Try all planning tools. All productivity apps. All focus techniques. Then I started making apps. Zone, Zonebox, Pomodoro One and newest — FocusList + Escape.

These tools are supposed to make you more effective, they help you get your work done even if you don’t feel like doing it. They help you force yourself into doing something you don’t want to do. Do you want to code? Or do you want to want?

Here’s a big problem:

In school, I used to use Pomodoro Technique only for studying for boring classes — now I need it for my coding! I need it because making a plan and following it is the only thing that makes me sit down and write code.

Landing page of my newest app for Pomodoro Technique — FocusList

It shouldn’t be like that. Some programmers told me FocusList makes them feel stressed out. Well yeah, real programmers just sit down and code away, doing their best. And they can go on for hours.

Yes, Pomodoro is a great tool if you’re trying to hit some deadline, and you just need to timebox your activities in a day — but seriously imagine whoever took that picture of oat field would would try to timebox that!

For me, it’s gonna take some effort to enjoy coding again, but tying myself to my chair isn’t gonna do it. I don’t think using all these techniques is going to fix this.

My first step will be to never say “I’m gonna work”. Instead I’ll say “I’m gonna code”. I won’t say “I need to get some work done”, but instead “I need to fix something in my project”.

Then I have some more ideas:

• Less dull coding (building that same UI over and over again)
• Solve hard problems
• Variety. Mix Designing UIs, JavaScript, Swift, marketing
• Study mathematics & algorithms
• Meet with 10x programmers
• Conferences
• Code just out of curiosity. Trying new technologies, frameworks, etc.

Please do share your stories if you’re going through the same thing.