Ask HN: What tool, process or habits have boosted your productivity most? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tool, process or habits have boosted your productivity most?

10 pointsericb13 comments

The recent thread "The road to faster tests" inspires me to ask--what "silver bullets" you have found that markedly improved in your productivity.

For me, autotest was a huge win. It keeps me focused and aligns the discovery of an error within moments of having caused that error.

We all know there are no silver bullets, but I want to know what yours are anyway. :-)

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Writing down what I just did and what I need to do next before every break has been a HUGE productivity boost for me at virtually no added effort. Heck, doing it just before every context switch is worth the minor inconvenience because it completely eliminates the ? "where was I?" from my mental vocabulary and lets me focus entirely on whatever the new problem I have to face is. It's literally a game-changer. Write it down.

I've gotten into a habit of summarizing my work after a programming binge, and lately I've been modifying the way that I write comments (using different symbols to indicate different things) to facilitate automated documentation generation for my code. It's saved a ton of time.

Keyboard shortcuts. This isn't a big deal for the vim/emacs folks (what other choice do they have?), but for those of us who use Eclipse, they can be a huge win. For me it's not so much the speed of the keys vs mouse; it's the cognative context switch for digging into menus which shortcuts allow ms to bypass.

The one thing that really improved my productivity was actually really simple. First of all, eliminate objects in your neighborhood; physical as well as virtual objects. Next to this, you should plan ahead. Planning is essential to any organizing process. You will always know what you did and what you should do next, which will certainly improve productivity. As bartonfink notes, write things down on paper. Then make a plan out of it and subsequently extract specific tasks.

Of course, one main requirement is that you should be passionate about your work and focus on your core tasks. Then again, you should plan clearly and write down your short and long time goals. I reckon this works for almost everyone.

Only working when I'm feeling alert and clear. I find it's far more productive over time to stop working every day as soon as I start having trouble concentrating. I don't push myself to get in another few hours of work, I just stop.

The second part of that is making sure I get a good full night of rest, so I can maximize the time I can concentrate per day.

I realized that for many years I spent a lot of the time being groggy and sleep deprived. Only in the past few years have I learned to control my sleep and concentration.

At the beginning of the year I uninstalled the Twitter desktop client and my gmail notifier. Without those 2 items lighting up my menu bar, I find myself way less distracted throughout the day. This keeps me from breaking my programming concentration and I end up spending more time on work.

For me it was switching the development environment to emacs -nw (terminal mode) and GNU screen a few years ago. This lets me work from anywhere using just ssh and a decent terminal emulator.

the "3 stones a day" approach. Choose your 3 most important things to do, and focus on them, do no divert on firefighting or unimportant matters.

Also taking my computer offline from the internet when I want to code ,if I need a reference lookup I use my 2nd machine for that.

Quit coffee and eliminated caffeine from my diet. Although I might add green tea back in.

Groovy/grails + Extjs + Netbeans + Customer Development (Four Steps to the Epiphany)

The Pomodoro Technique

Emacs + Org-mode.

Getting well.

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