1. Eat your frogs.

“Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” -Mark Twain

Seriously. The first step is that you already know what you have to do. Just do the thing you are dreading. Defeat Bowser and then go back and smash those Koopa Troopas later. Do the most important thing first. Otherwise, you are engaged in productive procrastination.

2. Make a list.

Don’t be scatterbrained. Just write all the important things down every morning and then work through them. This hitlist makes your day shorter. Just get everything on it done and you can goof off consequence-free. Instead of looking around, wondering what to do next, you have already set up a game plan at the start of the day and now all you need to do is execute.

3. Talk to others.

“No man is an island.” You work on a team and you need to bounce your ideas off your team. Partly to show off your brilliant ideas but mostly to stop you from carrying out the… other ideas. We all strike out sometimes. Let the team help you. Fire up chat and start chatting.

4. Pair program.

Virtual pairing is amazing these days. Pop open a screen share and be on the same desktop as your coworker on another continent. Learning from all over the world has always been the dream and now we can do one better, creating with others all over the world. Also, nothing else is going to sharpen your skills like live coding.