Soft skills for QA – Control your time

Tram Ho

One of my biggest challenges at work is being focused.

On a fine morning, on a regular workday, a colleague came up with a social question about my testing yesterday, or some strange bug I found. Or come directly to answer questions I ask on email, the company’s network instead of responding to the topic I have submitted.

Or maybe a few close friends walking around the company and stopping at the place where I sat just to chat about the game yesterday they played, how the movie yesterday had an interesting plot twist.

Even I, when I found something strange and ran straight to the developer programmer’s desk, asked it, and investigated it so it took me a lot of time instead of rearranging it. rational before running away.

The distraction is really bad, it distracts me from my flow, distracts myself, distracts me from my own “zone”, it forces me to stop working full time Medium and his creation.

Like any tool or machine, my mind is not good at handling intermittent situations while working. And vice versa, you are just like me.

Learn how to hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door

If you don’t want to get distracted at work, stop distractions from coming to you.

The solution is simple, close the door, place a sign “Please do not disturb”, “Do not disturb” or foreign style – “Please Do Not Disturb” .

Most people don’t do this, because you simply want to breathe, feel the air around you. Closing the door to the room may make you think you’re anti-social, but no, think about it, the door has its reasons – To temporarily separate you from the outside world. The sign is a tool to tell people that you really don’t want to be bothered with unimportant things.

If you are working in an open environment, surrounded by nothing, try to find a room, work in 45p-60p, then compare the results compared to when you work outside. Surprisingly, you’re awesome during those times, aren’t you. Productivity you do not think you can achieve.

No private office? Is not the problem

Yes, I am no different from you, usually young and dynamic IT companies, always designing an open and intertwined environment.

Grab your headset, play a trending music that you rock to its tune – this will keep you away from everything around you. For some people it is American music, some is country music, but if you are a fan of gentle and gentle music: “Synthesis of melodious music helps work effectively” on Youtube will have Millions of choices for you.

One great tip I learned from a colleague is: wearing headphones, but not playing music. That’s right, you didn’t read it wrong, don’t open anything but still wear headphones. You simply get tired of listening to music, you want your ears to rest but still don’t want to get distracted when you take off your headphones – just wearing them, this makes people around see focus and not want to annoy you

If all else fails, just … escape from that place

As the literal meaning of the sentence I’m saying, when distraction always finds you in some way, find a place outside your office where you can focus on your work.

You may find it absurd how to focus on working in such a crowded place.

Yes, it is crowded, there could be dozens or hundreds of people coming in and out within a few hours, but with headphones playing your favorite music (aucostic, piano or the sound of rain …) it It’s really easy to concentrate. In addition, there are many people but no one asked me about the micro bug I reported last week =)).

And of course, you also have to put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your own website

In a modern working environment, social networks, diverse chat channels, you must check the type of chat channels such as Skype, Facebook business, Slack, Chatwork …

Whenever a Slack message notification jumps on your screen, a sense of curiosity makes you check what it is, what people say or anything related to you, what people say about the job. Whether your test is successful or not. More or less, you get distracted from work, although sometimes it’s just meaningless chats that don’t bother you.

What is the solution here? Just turn off the notification of that group chat, or set it to send notifications only when someone is mentioning you. You need to make sure that when you’re performing the testcase to a certain step, not being hit by a pop-up message in your eyes forgets what the next step is doing.

It’s not a bad thing to remind people to respect your time and space

I think most people will understand when you say: you need to focus, and you’re asking not to be disturbed unless there’s something important to deal with urgently.

This might make me think it will take some time for people to understand what you are doing. Because in today’s working environment, everyone is more focused on their problems than people, when encountering problems, running to others thanks to “urgent” handling because it is affecting you. But that inadvertently takes others time because of that instead of finding the right way to handle it yourself.

But once you send a request, people really will understand and even respect this.

Here are some references for you to create your own area when working from the author’s introduction:


Image source: Internet, me. Reference: https://qablog.practitest.com/take-control-of-your-testing-time/

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