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What's your best productivity tip?

Ben Halpern on July 05, 2022

take breaks, it's ok to relax sometimes.
eat well, not a lot though.
drink more water than coffee.
and last but not least, focus.

David Rodriguez • Jul 5 '22

Focusing. That's the hard part for me. Once I get rolling, though, it's easier to dial out distractions.

Bek Brace • Jul 6 '22

we're all that man, my friend

Waylon Walker • Jul 7 '22

I go in and out of a good habit of a bottle of water before coffee, its definitely better to start the day with. Thanks for the reminder, I've fallen off the horse again.

Bek Brace • Jul 7 '22

Absolutely

malzeri83 • Jul 6 '22

nice about water))))

Prosenjit Manna • Jul 13 '22

I do this way

Take breaks
Take a walk
listean chillout music
Read articles everyday

Sherry Day • Jul 5 '22

Don't try to always be productive. It's unsustainable.

Waylon Walker • Jul 7 '22

Time to play is really good. I really like to open a new directory and try new things for at least a few hours per week. In the long term I learn a lot about adjacent tech and can bake better descisions, in the short term its not getting of my tasks done.

Carlos Guzmán • Jul 23 '22

I would like to stop doing it, I feel I need to do something productive always.

GrahamTheDev • Jul 5 '22

Keep a "done" list, not just a "todo" list.

Many times motivation can hold you back, you feel like you are making no progress.

Just open up your "done" list and voila, you have a massive confidence and motivation boost seeing a gigantic list of things you have achieved.

Corentin Bettiol • Jul 6 '22

I have a todo, doing, done list. It's nice to see things move, but a bit tedious to edit this by hand. I need to create a cool todolist app (tui ?). Oh wait, another side project :(

KyleFontenot • Jul 6 '22

I think you might have changed my work life forever. Imposter syndrome is a plague.

adriens • Jul 6 '22

Yes, this is very satisfying <3

Thomas Hansen • Jul 5 '22

KISS 😘

Calin Baenen • Jul 5 '22

Ah yes, a nice make-out sess always helps me þink. /j

Thomas Hansen • Jul 5 '22

Hahaha :D

🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳 • Jul 5 '22

What do you mean by "Kiss"?

Thomas Hansen • Jul 5 '22

"Keep It Stupid Simple", basically implement everything as simple as possible to avoid complications and increase deliverability ...

🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳 • Jul 6 '22

Yes, I have learned about this principle on "Robert kiyosaki's" book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"

thanks for recalling it :)

Thomas Hansen • Jul 7 '22

Psst, I took it to its maximum ;)

dev.to/polterguy/software-developm...

Ellis • Jul 6 '22

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

Dmitry Amelchenko • Jul 5 '22 • Edited

I always said, good developer is a lazy developer. Be selfish, be lazy. Do not hesitate to spend more time to reduce code duplication and better design your code -- it will be huge time saving for you and your team.

Some earlier suggestions on this thread -- work hard. I disagree! Do not work hard -- work smart.

Corentin Bettiol • Jul 6 '22

Reduce duplicated code -> use deduplicated code on another thing in same project -> another thing evolve -> need to duplicate code again (and to update it) -> lost time duplicating code after having to reduce code duplication :/

🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳 • Jul 5 '22

Find the reason to work hard.

that will give you inner motivation to complete the task!

Calin Baenen • Jul 5 '22

Yes. Ðis is a great tip.
I often have to look at ðe bigger picture and why I want to achieve ðat.

Even ðough I've been slacking, and development previously was on and off, I still want to and will develop RuntDeale, even if I've gotten tired of ðe work involved.

🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳 • Jul 6 '22

exactly, first of all you have to clear your goals for effort that you need to put on that task.

Brad • Jul 5 '22

Mine is specific to those with standing desks, but its pretty straight forward.

Use your standing desk during meetings and after lunch.

This should keep you more focused during meetings, and keep you from feeling the "after lunch crash" after you eat.

fr0tt • Jul 5 '22

Put your phone (far) away.

dnasedkina • Jul 6 '22

Don't stress about deadlines or the importance of the task at hand.
Just sit down and do. At your own pace.
Turning off the stress related to the result of what I do massively helps with my productivity

Samuel Suther • Jul 6 '22 • Edited

Plan your work yesterday
Prioritize your Work-Tasks
Take at least one ultra-high focus phase a day.

Means:
Plan your work you'll done tomorrow at the end of today.
Find the Task who is most important AND need most focus (and maybe is the hardest one to solve).
Do this task immediately if you begin to work

NO Emails
NO surfing in the Internet
NO Messenger at least for the 1st hour at this day!

You will be surprised, how much you'll boost your productivity.

Pavan Belagatti • Jul 5 '22

Go for a walk and do some meditation every day.

🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳 • Jul 5 '22

You mean "Yog" by Baba ramdev wala?

Michael Fasani • Jul 7 '22 • Edited

Alfred! Multi copy paste history and programmable shortcuts etc.

alfredapp.com

A paper and pen. I make notes more or less about any potential tasks or response, or idea, or to do. I review my notes daily, weekly, cross off what is done.

I use a Wacom Bamboo Folio, it is pen and paper but OCR if needed, to migrate notes to digital if needed.

crowdozer • Jul 6 '22

break your problems down into their smallest components

they seem daunting when you've got the entire image in your mind from start to finish, but most of the time, its just a bunch of simple things working together

Richard Guay • Jul 7 '22

For me, having many things to do and rotating around them keeps me productive. Also, having great scenery to look at every 10 minutes is great. My office at home has a very big window that over looks by backyard with palm trees and banana trees. Lot’s of birds around too!

Sarah 🦄 • Jul 13 '22

Work with yourself not against yourself. Take breaks, sleep well, eat well, stay hydrated, listen to your body. If you struggling with something or can't focus, take a step back, take a walk, play a video game whatever you need to reset.
Manage your boundaries. No one can be 100% productive 100% of the time. Know your limits, only take on what is reasonable within your boundaries. It's okay to push back.

Brian Webb • Jul 5 '22

Make sure you have a 3 hour reflection time, once a sprint. Even if you need to make up that time, Right after sprint review (every 3 weeks), I allocate time to reflect, and it may become a nap, but I'm ready for the next print immediately. Even with improvements.

For myself, if I was granted the PTO for that nap, I'd still make up that time, as I go way overboard in hours. Put in that reflection time. Weakspots and improvements will become more visible, and can be prioritized into the next sprint.

I use those 3 hours to minimize the technical debt.

atabakoff • Jul 5 '22

Don't switch contexts. When there's a request to switch a context - delegate.

MD Sarfaraj • Jul 6 '22

There are a few things you can do to avoid stress:

Exercise every day.
Spend time with your friends and family.
Take a short break every hour when you are working.
You can watch the movie.
Listening to songs

You perform better when you are stress-free.

I personally believe that it is important to work diligently so you can be proud of what you have accomplished.

andreschumacher-DePl • Jul 6 '22

In conjunction with @inhuofficial s comment about "done" list:
Have OKR goals, targets and tasks set up. Keeps you on track, "goal" is something to strive for instead of the "deadline" sword of Damocles, and seeing the percentages towards "target achieved" go up keeps motivation going

Corentin Bettiol • Jul 6 '22

Make yourself a work playlist, expand the list with some similar songs once you've identified which songs helps you stay focused.

Mine is here, mostly boom boom-related music.

Corentin Bettiol • Jul 7 '22

EDIT: Here's a website dedicated in providing cool music for programmers: musicforprogramming.net

Andrew Harpin • Jul 18 '22

Learn to touch type, seriously it lets you look at what you're typing rather than concentrating on the keyboard.
Always have a side gig, especially if what you are currently working on isn't your primary interest. Take some time to work on alternative activities, helps keep you motivated, but obviously in moderation.
Have a wind down routine, figure out what works for you when you get home from work, to let go... Helps with sleep and just life in general.

Randall • Jul 6 '22

Listen to music that helps you focus. It makes a huge difference for me.

I usually like to listen to di.fm, especially any of the channels with "chill" in the name, plus melodic progressive, atmospheric breaks, downtempo lounge, and a few others.

Sometimes I also like to listen to rain sounds on Youtube, especially if it's actually raining outside (or I'll just open the window if it's not too hot or cold outside).

Some people swear by classical music but it doesn't do much for me.

But I think most developers will benefit from some sort of music while coding.

desireebyrd • Jul 14 '22 • Edited

Maybe this is more of a workflow tip, but text triggers to place my most commonly used code snippets make my life so much easier.

_(The downside to this is if you come to rely to heavily on them its easy to forget how to type them out from scratch if needed!) _

Auroiah Morgan • Jul 6 '22

plan ahead even if you think it is trival or easy to do. Saves way more brain power sometimes to look at a diagram or chicken notes to guide you through your coding. So many times I gave up on a project or got frustrated over a small issue because I had to rethink the entire design in my head trying to just rush.

Edisson Ballesteros Aguilar • Jul 6 '22

I Lately I have found that working from a place other than your desk, a cafe, a cowork helps a lot with productivity, since you don't seek refuge in the everyday things you have around you.
You have to focus on your stuff, it has helped me a lot!

zankyr • Jul 7 '22 • Edited

Close the email client and forget about emails (of course if your role allows it)
Disable all PC notifications (Slack, Teams, etc.): you can configure a session "do not disturb" (e.g. from 9 to 11) or disable them manually (I think every application has its own configuration, maybe even the operating system of your machine has this feature);
Set up a "do not disturb" session on your phone, disabling all intrusive apps like Facebook and Instagram (with Android this is called "Digital Wellbeing" or something similar)
Depending on your environment, use a good set of earphones/headphones, something that can isolate you from outside noise and distractions
Music: something without words, such as classical music, video game soundtracks, etc. Personally, I love psy-trance playlists (infected mushrooms, 1200 micrograms, etc.), Combichrist and similar artists.
short but intense work sessions: classic Pomodoro Time, take a break every 20-30 minutes, have a drink (water, tea, coffee, anything), move around the room. After 5/10 minutes, go back to your work. Repeat.
Light meals. Take the time to prepare a light but satisfying lunch, so as to "disconnect" your mind from work without wasting too much time (preparing food, washing dishes, etc.). Light meals prevent you from "falling asleep" in the afternoon, even better if after lunch you take a walk of a few minutes (30/40 minutes), just to make a minimum of movement.

devhe4d • Jul 12 '22

Being productive is much more than one or two task management apps, doing some hacks in environments, or learning techniques, Although these tools, definitely will help along the way, but they are just tools and nothing more.

Being productive is a mindset, a vision, and it differs between different people.

What does it mean to be productive? become productive to do what? what do I want to do with my time? do I want to be productive just for the sake of being productive? ( I saw lots of people doing that without a clear vision, they are just doing much more things in a shorter time but still useless, random and no result )

Some bullet points I use as a guide that will help in the long run:
The action comes before motivation, never wait around to get motivated out of the blue, do the action and you will get rewarded with motivation after a while.

Consistency is more important than bouncing of between a full-blown working week and burnout.

it's easy to be productive for a week or two, setting everything up, clearing things off from the to-do list, but what about a year? just try to set achievable goals, as tiny as possible. like I'm going to do X thing for half an hour a day for the next 3/6/12 months ( Consistency )

Don't evaluate yourself in a short time ( like a week or a month ) because you will get false results. either you are super happy because you did a great job in that week/month or you are mad at yourself because you missed an amount of time watching Netflix while you should do your goal-related job.

Evaluate yourself at least every 3 or even better 6 months, because it's really quite a good amount of time to see how actually you did in this period and if your productive system made you better at your goal-related work or not.

Just try to be 0.01 better every day and don't care about the rest.

Kavisha Nethmini • Jul 5 '22

Drinking more water, Meditating and Journaling <3

Luthira Geesilu • Jul 7 '22

This is very satisfying <3

Kavisha Nethmini • Jul 12 '22

IKR

Waylon Walker • Jul 7 '22

I jump in and out of many projects throughout the day. I have a tmux script that makes sessions for me per project, and can fuzzy jump between them with just a few keystrokes. Without this all the projects blend together and I end up changing the wrong one. There is no BEST workflow, but this works damn well for me.

Sandor Dargo • Jul 6 '22

Take a walk!

Ken Simeon • Jul 7 '22

My tip is to embrace your personal & work life schedules (granted that many of us are still working remote). Most people have a regularly set of work scheduled meetings & collaboration times. Given those set factors you can find times to be focused on a given set of tasks.

My goal is to be ready to work between 8:30/9:00am. That means I've showered, feed all the animals, walked the dog, reviewed my personal emails, death scrolled social media and chatted up the fam (if they're up). By the end of catching up on my own personal needs I've already started to drift into what I need to accomplish for the day and narrowed down to what I'd like to accomplish before my first meetings of the day. From there, its about trying to complete my personal set goals for the day and mitigate any other on coming distractions (aka other people's fires).

Andrew Baisden • Jul 6 '22

The best tip I can give would be to limit your phone usage. All it takes is a few notifications or checking social media and your productivity will go all the way down. Distractions cost you time so if you want to work at 100% efficiency keep your phone out of sight until you are ready to use it again.

Dennis Tobar • Jul 5 '22

Use pen and paper in your system to manage your tasks. Don't be a slave of your system, and review if it helps to maintain some tasks or if it is time to use other strategies (such as Spring Review Meeting after some weeks)

Try to do some week's review of your victories (and failures), so we can understand our strengths and our weakness.

KJ Richmond • Jul 16 '22

Learn yourself and what works for you. I learned that I work best if I have a set routine. My routine includes:
-Working out for 30 minutes
-Drink a liter of water
-Shower
-Play a random song from my hype playlist

Once I do all of these I am good to go at anytime of the day.

Somtochukwu Nnaji • Jul 9 '22

Try to always be with a positive mindset. You have to be fertile to produce

ϻ • Jul 11 '22 • Edited

Spend sometime thinking about your development environment and what tools could be used to improve it. Do you spend a lot of time switching between projects? How could you do that at a click of a button rather than what you currently do? Reducing the amount of keystrokes/movements to go from A to B can be a huge productivity jump.

Geomar Abreu • Jul 9 '22

Use Time Boxing. We got our To-Do list, with all the tasks that you need to get done today. But sometimes, I just procrastinate till the end of the day, without anything done.

A quick fix is just using any calendar (Like Google Calendar) and create an event in it, with the task that you want to achieve today. Just not use it with All your tasks, it doesn't work so well...

Put for example: "Create HTML for website" and then use your calendar to time box the task. This is very effective for hard tasks, the ones that you're used to procrastinate all the time.

Levin • Jul 5 '22

Learning is most powerful tips for your productivity for now and future.

Maxi Contieri • Jul 5 '22 • Edited

My Best Short Productivity Tips

Maxi Contieri ・ Apr 28 '21 ・ 3 min read

#productivity #tutorial #lifehacks #tips

fredlag • Jul 5 '22

Note a lot of thinks
Every notes at the same place thanks typora and nextcloud
Manage my day with task in prioritary list
Take sport breaks to go cycling