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When doing the most important task, if it requires waiting(eg, waiting for a long standing programming process to finish, waiting to hear back from someone), I often do one of the following:
1. switch to other lower intensity but unimportant tasks. 2. switch to a leisure tasks(watch my fav movie) 3. switch to an intensive but slightly less important task.
what's a good strategy here?
4
All are viable strategy. There is a methodology called Getting Things Done (GTD). One thing in it is to list what you can do with different pieces of time in different contexts.
This lets you choose the most appropriate thing to do. If you are waiting for a programming process to finish, you probably have a good idea of how much time if you have. So pick a task that takes that long. Or get up and walk.
For someone getting back to you, you can probably start something longer/more intensive.
1
I think what you do during the wait time should be determined by if the next task you do will also require x amount of wait time. The worst thing would be you're half done with 3 "high" priority task and waiting for response from 3 different people in order to complete them. I would suggest to do something that can be completed quickly with the estimated wait time. perhaps 20 push-ups and 15 jumping jacks
1
IMO the best strategy is to do something that requires little effort to switch to (e.g. a task that needs you to fetch special tools or opening a program with a long load time would be bad tasks). If you don't know how long your wait time will be go for mutiple short tasks to cut down the item count on your todo list.
If you want to know what to do during compile time: there is an xkcd and an answer for that.
Meditation will be the best answer, rather than anything else – None – 2015-03-03T11:23:03.453