Colin Ross

Colin Ross

A collection of posts by Colin Ross

A collection of 7 posts

ProductivityJun 12, 2014
My Ideal Day as a Remote Programmer: Taking Charge of Your Daily Routine

I wrote previously about why programming is a part-time job, where I extolled the virtues of having breaks to allow time for my brain to think about problems I am working on. It seemed to resonate pretty well with people, and it is definitely relevant to fields other than programming. In fact, it’s probably valuable for all knowledge workers to have quality thinking time. But how do you make the time to step away from the computer? How can you force yourself to think about things without commit

OpenMay 27, 2014
Why Full-time Programming is a Part-Time Job

The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent

Self-ImprovementMay 22, 2014
How to Stop Procrastinating on Your Goals: The Story of Fighting Alligators and Building Bikesheds

Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. A

OpenMay 21, 2014
How To Stay Focused on Your Goals When ‘Yak-Shaving’ Takes Over

At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here isa recent example .One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of

OverflowMay 15, 2014
How to Stop Procrastinating on Your Goals: The Story of Fighting Alligators and Building Bikesheds

Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. An

ProductivityApr 6, 2014
Why Full-Time Programming is a Part-Time Job

The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent

ProductivityMar 6, 2014
How To Stay Focused on Your Goals When ‘Yak-Shaving’ Takes Over

At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here is a recent example. One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of making things slightly more complicated than they really should be. This is the story of the last few weeks—the e