DEV Community

Cover image for Two Little Tricks To Improve Your Productivity
Yann
Yann

Posted on

Two Little Tricks To Improve Your Productivity

Introduction

This is a short article where I share 2 little tricks I find powerfull to improve productivity. Let's discover them !

1) Micro-naps

I define as micro-nap a 10-20 min break you spent lying in a quiet environment.
Basically.

The exact duration of the nap depends on your preferences, but I recommend to not exceed 20 min because you can enter a kind of cycle which it will be really unpleasant to leave.

For me, this type of break is much more effective than a coffee break, discussing with others or listening podcasts and musics. It gives a real space to your brain and allows him to rearrange all the stuff you work on. It's also a good way for your body to rest.

By the way, you can't take a nap anywhere. Obviously, there's probably no bed in your office and even if that was the case, it would be embarrassing to sleep in front of your colleagues and boss. So I consider it like a luxury that I can afford to when I work at home. Even if that just concern the end of the afternoon after the workday or the moments when you work at home, I invite you to try micro-naps. Same for people who take lunch at home.

2) The 5s technique

This is a very tiny trick but I love it for its simplicity. Anyway, don't attend to get huge benefits with it.
The principle is just to count from 5 to 0 (the order is important) just before engage in a task or a period of time where you want to be concentrated.
That's just a way to emerge and put away all the thoughts that hold you to act.

Conclusion

I really invite you to test these 2 tricks. Schedule notifications for a week or two and fix yourself to apply one of these techniques. Despite what you might think during this week, don't stop and take a moment to wonder if that was usefull AFTER the period of test.
If that works for you in some ways, I would be happy that I could help you in your dev journey ;) !
If not, you would get some experience in testing things and that's fine too.

That's all for this article. Thanks for your time and attention. I hope that you enjoy reading it and for sure, give me your feedback in the comments or contact me on Twitter!

Top comments (0)