Do Not Fall Through the Cracks: a Programmer’s Productivity Guide
As a programmer, a little loss in productivity means a lot. I bet you’ve been there — you start to write code but you can’t get anything done.
You feel discouraged and annoyed. You are clueless how to get this done, you check email every second, read the web but getting into the flow to starting coding is just not happening.
These unproductive days can last for days or for weeks, and you’ll never be in the zone of productivity. But fear no more, there is a solution for you. Check out a handful of practical methods below to work productively throughout.
Why Productivity Matters
I consider productivity as a measure of the degree by which a team is able to complete features that improve the utility of the software. Productivity is incredibly important. It is defined as the amount of output produced compared to input.
Programmers who are 10 times more productive than others brings a lot of benefits, including higher pay and internal satisfaction. After all, the productive the programmers, the better it is to keep the quality of the work intact.
- Keep Everything Under Control
We all need project management, including programmers. ProofHub is a tool that exactly fits how the programmers work. You can manage your list of things-to-do on ProofHub Kanban boards. For example, you might have several stages to your programming workflow: tasks that are to be done, tasks that are being done, ready for review, and those that are ready to publish.
Create a workflow when you first get a task and as you work just drag it from one list to the next. It gives a very nice and clear visual progress of your workflow.
Sorting your tasks on ProofHub will allow you to promptly find the next thing to be worked on and get started. The best thing is that you get everything under control.
2. Coding Should Be the First Thing in the Morning
I believe that checking your email in the morning is a bit insane. Never read e-mails as the first thing in the morning. You will lose your active creative mode. Checking notifications other than coding in the morning will make you sluggish.
Start programming as soon as you start your workday, you’ll stay focussed. Well, e-mail is not the right way to start a day. If you are doing it; it’s the right time to leave this habit behind and start with coding.
3. Automate Like There Is No Tomorrow
When typing in the code, it can be daunting and can easily break your productivity. For this, write scripts to automate tasks. Automation helps you focus on the bigger tasks by taking care of the monotonous ones. Some processes should be automated to avoid human error that will again cause loss of flow.
This is another important thing that adds to your productivity. Use code generators to automate the process of software development as much as possible. Because humans may fail at some significant tasks, try to automate as many tasks as possible.
4. Continuous Code Documentation
Code documentation helps to improve the overall productivity of your project. You should always try to do for long-term benefit. If there is no code documentation, you wouldn’t know where to begin. There will be plenty of comments on the code that will describe what the code is doing and none describing why it’s doing.
Documentations is all about making your code usable. So go ahead. Make sure you write good documentation, describing the arguments, explaining how things work, and explain what your code is doing.
5. Increase Code Reviews
Code reviews are an important process to identify bugs and defects before the testing phase. In a survey, it is suggested that code review is an important activity that not only increases productivity but also the code quality. Let the team do code reviews more frequently to fix issues early on. With this comes fewer problems for the future, improving the overall productivity.
6. Get Into the Flow
Being in flow is a state that makes programmers be more focused and productive. Here are a few ways that can help you get into a stay of flow.
- Find that time of the day when you are really productive like some can finish work really fast in the morning.
- Listen to the right music — headphones on.
- Clear the distractions including instant messaging, e-mails, requests for status reports, and goofing off.
- Software with time tracking tool to monitor the time you spend on particular tasks.
So, if you are wondering how to ramp up your productivity because you want to become a good programmer, give these ideas a try. This puts everything together, thereby increasing productivity in the long run. And not just this, I’ve got a list of tools for you to help you maintain your productivity levels high. Here is a quick overview of the productivity tools for programmers.
ProofHub makes it easier to share and discuss ideas across the entire team. It gives a quick overview of what the team is working on and how the workflow is made. With ProofHub, programmers (managers and teams) track everything from projects to bugs in the code, which is why it is used by teams at large companies.
To keep control over programmers individually and team’s time expenses actiTIME is also a good work management solution. It is used to record the time spent on work tasks, controlling project progress, analyzing performance and profitability, etc. The tool offers a detailed overview of the work time structure, and an easy way to control work time expenses and productivity.
Because it is said that 25-minute focusing sprints with 5-minute breaks are an efficient way to increase productivity, Strict Workflow uses this idea. You can set up and start the timer, and follow its work-and-break cycles. And you can also use the traditional pomodoro technique to develop concentration and be more productive.
The tool is designed for speed for developers working together. This is a code search tool that will save a significant amount of time of programmer. Also known as Ag, for short, it’s similar in features to the more famous Ack, but it is about 34x faster in displaying results. You can install it on Mac, Linux, Windows and BSD.
What tools do you use for productivity? Recommend below.
Author Bio:
Sandeep Kashyap is the Founder and CEO of ProofHub — a leading project management and collaboration software. He’s one person always on a lookout for innovative ideas about filling the communication gap between groups, teams, and organizations. You’ll find him saying, “Let’s go!” instead of “Go!” many times a day. That’s what makes him write about leadership in a way people are inspired to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more.
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