- You need as many environmental reminders that you are doing work as possible:
- dedicated work place where you don't game or browse or do chores and taxes on.
- dedicated work time where you are allowed to do work.
- dedicated non-work time where you won't work and don't get to feel bad about not working on the project and avoiding negative emotions associated with the work.
- I have a dedicated work shirt only worn while at work
- figure out your attention sinks: music/podcasts/YouTube w/e and apply them strategically to signal that you are or are not working
- Plan. Identify as many tasks as possible ahead of time and figure out what is motivational an demotivational. Motivation takes a nosedive once the low hanging fruit runs out.
- make sure to front-load the boring stuff and keep motivated by anticipating the fun stuff later. Please, Start out with the tests. TDD is a hack for ADD
- Ration your creative sessions. Once you feel you are plateauing force yourself create some novelty in the project.
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Want and grit. At some point you'll have to grit it out. You have to make it clear to your brain that you want it. Make it personal. Want it not the way you want to have a cookie after dinner, want it the way you want to breathe. Don't even want the project, but want to prove to your brain that you are a rare capable human, able to start and finish a creative endeavour independently.
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Make work time scarce and urgent. Having a child has done wonders for my creative output. I used to splurge 6 hour sessions kinda working on something..now I get maybe 40 minutes a day. An hour if I'm creative about it. But heck, does that hour get applied like nobody's business.
Hope this helps, best of luck!
This is a bit of a narrow view of a very vague term. Having worked with many different sizes of organisations i can say that the responsibilities of whomever is labelled CTO are completely arbitrary. The only thing you can establish is that they are the person accountable for the technology decisions.
Sometimes that's a legacy developer, sometimes that's the first sys-admin.
Sometimes it's the VP of engineering.
Sometimes that's the person that maintains the best relationships with software vendors.
Sometimes it's the person that was hired externally to explain the tech to the CEO and let's them make informed executive decisions.
Sometimes it's just a public figure used to promote the org and maybe do DevRel.
Sometimes it's the Architect that designed the ecosystem.
Sometimes it's the ancient programmer that has kidnapped the entire codebase so that no-one else can sanely work on it.
Sometimes it's a six sigma type that setup the ticketing system, PRs and the release process.
At any size, the CTO is whatever the org needs him to be at that point.