I’m going to be talking about 5 different methods of minimizing boredom when coding. This is important because there are times where you’ll have to bust out some code for hours at a time and if there’s nothing interesting to keep your mind occupied while doing so, your focus can waver easily and everything can just go downhill from there.
Table of Contents
Know your enemy
If you’re going to be coding for many hours on end, it’s important to know what can distract you. People like to say that what happens on the internet stays on the internet but if you’re someone who tends to lose focus and get distracted very easily, then actually using this knowledge for good instead of bad can help keep your mind from wandering away.
When browsing YouTube or other websites with lots of videos, I’d recommend searching up some educational videos about topics you find interesting or fun so that if every time a video comes up in your queue, it’ll be something relevant to you as opposed to something random and useless.
Create your own boilerplate
This one has been a godsend for me. In the past, I would always have to spend time putting together an HTML skeleton for every single new project that I wanted to start and it was such a pain. My solution was to create my own boilerplate with basic tags, CSS and JavaScript already filled in so that it wouldn’t be as much of a hassle later on.
You can use this same concept if you want to not get bored while coding. All you have to do is create something simple like a tag cloud or video player which takes very little effort and then save the file somewhere where you’ll know how to find it again at any point in the future. Whenever working on your next project, just open up the boilerplate file and edit it to your liking!
It’s important that you don’t get too carried away with this because an overwhelming codebase can easily distract you from the task at hand but if you keep it simple and don’t add too much stuff to it, then you won’t have anything to worry about.
Listen to music, not people
If you spend much time on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook then I apologize for what’s coming next… Your problem is that a lot of the content which appears in your feed is way too generic and people just want to get a lot of clicks by posting whatever will most likely catch your attention.
If you’re not careful, this can have the opposite effect on you which is why I highly recommend turning off all social media notifications while coding. Keep your Twitter feed or Facebook newsfeed open in another tab but turn off any notifications that could pop up and distract you from what you’re working on. You don’t need every other person who posts something on those sites getting to know when you post something so it doesn’t matter how many people like/reply/retweet your work – they weren’t going to register anyway.
Get some exercise
This one’s pretty straightforward: Get yourself moving! Take a walk around the office, run around your house or somewhere else where you won’t be bothered and just get yourself moving a little bit. Running up stairs, doing jumping jacks or even just walking in circles will help you stay awake for way longer than sitting at your desk would.
If you’re really feeling the burn, try multitasking with this method! Jumping jacks while editing a file works pretty well as long as you don’t mind getting sweat all over your keyboard. Just beware of cars if you decide to move outside…
Read/watch something interesting
This one’s also pretty straightforward: If you want to not get bored while coding then read an ebook about programming (I highly recommend “C++ for humans” by Harry Roberts) or watch a programming-related video on YouTube or another website.
If you have any suggestions for improving this guide then please leave them below in the comments section. I’d love to hear what everyone has to say about it! Thanks for reading and hopefully my advice helped some of you out there who are looking for ways to spend less time doing boring stuff so that you can focus more on your own projects!
