Split long jobs into many small functional goals so that once each tests correctly you can leap off the chair, punch the sky, and yell "Whoo!". This will let your bosses know that you have just successfully diced some pretty sweet code and you LIKE the stuff! They don't know any better, they think they are being nice by giving you more responsibilities.

Okay, you want to keep your job? Right, only punch the sky a few times a day during heavy deadlines, and consider some of the following ideas..

Keep a personal devnotes notebook in a file or ten, if you are like me you will want to upload or search them periodically so you always know where they are. Unlike rabbit spawn pellets, these gems are more valuable when gathered and smelled from time to time.

Think about a problem before sleeping, and then when you wake up if you had a good dream enter it in the notebook you keep by your bedside. You have to go to sleep before 12 to get lucid dreams I think, that part is hard.

Use the notebook (maybe several thin notebooks and text files/folders like me) to keep all your project outlines, code snippets, interface ideas, study urls, etc. You can then go back over it another time. Some can be your own, some things you want to propose in-house later.

Also think of how to make the facetime as streamlined as possible and how to get the grunt work done quickly. I usually figure out what time of day I am most creative coding (late afternoon-evening) and do the business stuff earlier. Maybe you can do triage on it so you can be sure to have a big block of coding time every day?

When all else fails, decorate your cubicle. I recommend escher, star fields, code snippets, and pictures of monks (explain what is a perl monk to all who ask). Especially Paul Haeberli's Graphica Obscura site, maybe some definitions from cyc.org. It may speak eloquently to your interests even when you are chilling out on the veranda.

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