DEV Community: Anurag

How Codifying your life can increase your productivity

Anurag — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:08:47 +0000

Every person on this earth desires productivity, essence of any growing business.
If you are working on any solo project you can relate to this. We strive to be productive all the time. This is our weapon against big competitors as we ship features fast.

In his book MAKE, Pieter Levels says:

While working alone in my underwear on the side of my hotel bed with my MacBook and my coffee, I was able to outcompete million-dollar VC-funded teams of 30+ people.

In short, he was being more productive as compared to a company with many employees.

My everyday struggle

As a developer and maker myself I strive to finish more tasks everyday. I usually work on my side-project Curatemails after work hours, ( I have a full-time job) and on weekends.
I always end up wishing for more time to work on Curatemails. I guess everyone with a side project has this wish.
I don’t want to quit my job, I love my job. I just want more time or may be increase my productivity.

Aytekin Tank (founder of Jotforms ) in his article writes:

The key to better long-term productivity is the same as it was 100 years ago. It’s so simple: building good habits.

I started inspecting my daily activities and realised I can increase my productivity by adjusting few of my habits.

I decided to make small tweaks and not ground breaking changes. The first thing I decided to do was to minimize decision fatigue.

What is decision fatigue?
It is basically the deterioration of our abilities to make wise decisions. This usually happens after a long session of continuous decision making. Our brain decides to take shortcuts instead of taking a rational one.

It turned out that just by reducing the decision making on un-important tasks I was able to conserve brain power and therefore increase productivity. Here’s how:

Codify your least important tasks

The first task was to figure out things that are not important and repeat them everyday. Create a routine for them.

I started waking up at the same time everyday.

Consumed same breakfast everyday.

Wore the same set of clothes to work everyday.

Basically I was set to codify my least important tasks, so that I don’t have to think much about them. Preserve my brain power for important tasks. I created a script and followed it everyday without giving it a thought.

The next logical step in this direction was to shift all my non-creative and robotic tasks to the end of the day. Non-creative tasks like answering emails, data-entry works or may be washing dishes.

And it works, having a routined codified life helps you achieve goals, big or small. Basically you remove the decision making fatigue that comes with randomness.

This article was originally published on my Medium

^{^{Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash}}

Why I like my desk unorganised and messy

Anurag — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 05:01:45 +0000

There are tons of articles on the internet which boasts about how a clean desk can increase productivity. As a developer I never gave any serious thoughts about organising my workplace. As a matter of fact I like to keep my desk unorganised and messy. Surprised? Well, here’s what I think.

Different opinions

When I look around me, I find people putting great efforts to keep their desk organised and clean. Minimal objects on surface, all accessories in proper place or maybe within one hand distance. I have even read articles where some people go long distances to completely renovate their entire study room, just to create their optimum work-space. All of these so that they can concentrate and focus entirely on their task.

When I get to my desk I just sit and start working. I don’t care what’s lying around, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t need a clean desk to start my work, I just need my laptop.

Ok. But still Why unorganised?

Now, you may say I can clean my desk sometimes, right ?

Well, for starters ever since I have started working with a desk, I have kept it cluttered and since then it has become more of a habit. Even if I or my girlfriend manages to clean it, I end up putting stuff around my machine and make it messy again. Somehow, whenever I see empty spots on my desk I want to fill it immediately.

Another reason being, as a developer we tend to figure out our programming codes by staring into blankness. I have a habit of staring and fiddling with stuff kept around.

Clean desk != productivity

No matter what others preach, at the end of the day it really comes down to every individual’s interests. There’s no strict rule that you will only be productive if your desk is organised and clean. I spend much less time on cleaning and get straight to work. This has been working well since last 6 years or so.

I am also not used to working with extra monitors, just one laptop works for me. My macbook air works super fine no matter where I work. As I said I just need a laptop to start my coding.

Are you a developer or writer? How do you keep your desk?

This article was originally published on my Medium

As a Developer we need to stop multi tasking today.

Anurag — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:08:06 +0000

As humans we all have 24 hours to live and complete our activities daily. Quite often we don’t get time to complete everything we had originally planned. As a developer multiTasking always lure us subconsciously. What we actually need is mastering the art of completing one task at a time.

Of late I have gained interest in podcasts and I have a long list of episodes to go through. The first thought will be to combine it with tasks that I am already doing, for example writing code. We developers have a habit of playing music in the background when we code. But this time I decided to play podcast in the background instead of music, just to save time and complete all the pending episodes.

However I should tell you that the whole experience was not at all productive. And I advice against the idea of multi-tasking.

Multitasking does not improves your productivity

The result from my experiment was that I was not able to follow what the podcast was all about. At any given point of time either I was too involved in writing code or I was listening to the podcast.

Takuya Matsuyama recently in one of his article quotes :

Human beings are, essentially, single-core processors.
We can’t effectively check our email, listen to someone asking us for feedback on a project, and take notes simultaneously. We can do it, sure, but everything suffers. Juggling tasks divides your attention, increases the time spent refocusing on important tasks (making you less productive)

and I completely agree with him. I don’t know about others but if you are falling behind in completing your daily chores, you need to reprioritise.

Focus on one thing at a time

First of all we need to understand the difference between acting busy and actually being busy. Just because you engage yourself in many activities does not mean your productivity increases. You will end up in doing chunks of every task but not completing anything.

What are you willing to give up in order to become the person you are meant to be? Jim Kwik

Focus on things that really require your attention and leave out everything else. We need to accept the fact that something will be left out of our calendar and it is completely fine. This brings me to the next point which is very crucial.

Master the art of letting things go

In today's world where we surround ourselves with social media, mastering the art of letting go becomes very essential, why? I will tell you.

You might have witnessed this too, no matter how much time you devote to social media, you can never watch/read/click every social media post. It’s a never ending circle and ultimately it just drains the energy out of you. Juggling social media while you are working will only add to your stress level. Stop it.We think checking out a bit of news feed or stories or posts will probably just take 5 minutes but before you realise, you end up spending more than 30 minutes. The 30 minutes you lost is not that crucial.

The crucial part is the time you require to go back in the zone where you were before those 30 minutes. Getting my point?

To simplify, I would like to conclude that multi-tasking may sound cool but in reality you tend to hinder your productivity and are more prone to make mistakes. Your focus is diverted and you require more energy to concentrate. Give it a thought.

This article was originally published on my Medium

Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring the idea of creative writing for developers . Come say hi on Twitter If you’re interested in learning more about how creative writing can help you excel as a developer