Curious how you other sysadmins deal with motivation and distraction. I've been adminning for about 15 years now and once in a while I get in a rut of being very distractible. I go on tangents of reading, redditing etc. Just avoiding going back to the terminal.
Its not that i find my job dis interesting. I find it very interesting and I'm self directed. Most of the time in our small company no one knows what I'm doing and I get to plan all my tasks etc.
I'm trying to identify sources of my behaviour and what starts these tangents. One is quite simply a matter of making conscious choices like "time to check facebook". I firmly believe that a person has to conquer these urges them selves and instead of setting /etc/hosts so i can't browse facebook, I need to consciously say "no, that is not a good use of my time." and I'm getting better at it.
However here is where I wrestle a bit.. say I'm doing chef development with and its time to test a recipe, so I run kitchen converge, and it takes like 90 seconds.. during that 90 seconds I'm VERY likely to check a few of my favorite websites, which no doubt will have interesting headlines and them bam. off on a tangent I go, and I look up an 15 minutes are in the toilet. (15 if i'm lucky)
I want to defeat this behaviour. Its not helping me professional or personally.
What do YOU do when things are compiling or you're just waiting on your computer to do something. Do you keep a document open that you read a bit of? Do you do a few projects at the same time and just context switch?(Btw I'm writing this while test-kitchen runs) etc.
Just looking for how others cope with what I assume to be a pretty pervasive problem for people with the world at their fingertips all day long.
Thanks.
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