Improving my productivity as a working programmer (2017)

1.Learn deeply about the psychological mechanism of procrastination, pay good professionals if needed. Any any skill, it takes years to master, but pays off.

1. Do not stop reading HN, just use it as a price, when you complete a difficult task. This is very important, people will usually use HN of whatever as an excuse for procrastination, because it is easier to read (be passive) than create.

It has been extremely useful reading HN over the years, I spend over 20 minutes every day. I do not go deep but use Zotero to store anything interesting. When I need this for my work I just go to zotero and study deeply for days this useful info.

2. Learn how to make the machine program for you. Learn lisp, learn functional programming, learn lisp macros and metaprogramming. Learn grammar systems and how to create your domain specific languages.

Even if you don't use functional programming or lisp, the concepts and ideas you get from understanding it makes you avoid making bugs, or you know how to automate everything, including finding bugs.

This also takes years to master, but your computer can write hundreds of thousands of lines per second. Most people only write 20 or so per day on average.

3. Learn how to manage other people so they do the work for you. Learning psychology will also pay it back here. If you master psychology, people will be able to do things under your management that they are not able to do on their own.

One challenge is that there are some things which should distract us:

1. Pull Requests which we should review to unblock our teammates.

2. Production errors which should be investigated.

3. Slack messages from those 1-3 people we are immediately working with and which they'd want to interrupt us with.

4. Fire alarms which are not weekly tests.

5. Messages from spouse which they intend to inturrupt us with.

For me, one big win has come when I was able to put a Zeroable Inbox of PRs-to-review on my menubar. Instead of searching through github, I could just glance.

Why should I bother about making myself more productive when so many factor outside of my control are doing the opposite?

I've solved concurrency issues I had for weeks by walking for several hours in the forest. Code should not be about productivity. Life should not be about productivity.

This article seems to be written from someone that is addicted to work. Why should we force ourselves to organize our days to improve our coding time ? We should organize our life to improve our reading, playing, resting time. Life is about surprises, unplanned things, meeting new people and breaking some habits.

The machine and the human both do less work.

He empirically discovered test-driven development!

This was a huge problem for me back when I was doing web development and had to support IE6. I write hundreds of lines of code which worked fine in Firefox, but then it would crash in IE with no descriptive error message and I would spend an eternity gradually commenting out more and more of my changes until I found the offending line through a tedious manual brute force bisect/test process. I was able to increase my productivity by testing every individual little change in IE as I made it, so that when I got some vague error, at least I knew there were only 10 lines of code where it could possibly be originating from.

However, these days with all the linters, typecheckers, and good error tracebacks in browsers, I'm much faster if I leave all my testing for the end. In fact, I've spent the last 2 weeks refactoring one of my side projects and only bothered testing right at the end. There was only a handful of simple bugs that TypeScript and Mypy couldn't detect, and the in-browser errors told me exactly where to look to fix them.

As years go by, I realize more and more that productivity is only a small part of the equation. Even more, it's a 'metric' that if increased past a certain threshold, it actually provides diminished returns in the grand scheme of things (basically working more for less results).

What I found to be the perfect (for me) solution is to maintain a stable and consistent productivity but be really REALLY picky about what I'm working on. Trying to improve my productivity was something I was doing in my early 20s and It's often a trap as it's conditioning your mind to be brave about taking on more work. Nowadays, that's something I actively avoid so that I focus all of my energy on stuff that actually matters. Thorough the years this has proved to be a way better way for me to be successful in the work environments I've passed through...

I never applied it to programming before but in hindsight it's really obvious, because it's incredibly effective. I use a tool [0] to record a timelapse of the desktop, because after a while watching the recordings in real time slows me down more than it helps. I find that usually when I focus on the task at hand I tend to lose track of time and of what I'm doing and when I get stuck I end up wasting a ton of time doing trial & error instead of taking a break to think things through properly, or switching to something else. This kind of stuff really adds up in the long term.

[0] https://www.lomakescomics.com/cafe/

Some things that have worked for me:

— learning to type programming symbols accurately and with confidence. I realized when pair-programming that I lose a ton of time to backtracking due to typos. This is particularly bad when working in interactive code consoles where the poor editing capabilities mean typos are more costly. There are web applications out there like typing.io that help with this.

— keeping a "dumb mistake log" where I write up any silly errors that cost me too much time so I'll know to double check these things next time (e.g. "space instead of tab in Makefile > make tabs appear differently", "wrong file but with same name > keep an eye on the folder in the editor when switching files")

My wife and I recently started leaving our phones in another room overnight. It's a big improvement -- previously it was easy to mindlessly scroll through nonsense before sleep and again in the morning when waking up. Now we read and talk more. It's still easy to grab the phone and go back to bed in the morning but overall it has been a very positive change.

I would probably go insane, depending on the team. When being polite is paramount but your teammates are deeply, deeply incompetent, there's only so much one can take at once.

Nevertheless, this is solid advice.

As people get older, they realize that you only have the "right" to write a blog on productivity if you've actually found a system that keeps you productive for years on end.

If you do find such a system, it's much more likely to be idiosyncratic, involve a complex set of barely conscious reflections and automatic associations which get you into a certain frame of mind, and also almost impossible to fully describe since you probably don't understand every element of it. Which makes it nearly impossible to write about.

By this I mean productivity becomes part of who you are, so that your "productivity system" becomes barely distinguishable from your personality. That is, to outsiders, you have a productive personality, or you are "just an innately productive person".

This alienates the productivity seeker, because not many people who are not productive currently can imagine becoming innately productive people. So in turn they seek help from people who are not "innately productive", and instead have recently developed some kind of conscious system to deal with productivity. Which is a fragile approach.

The blockage points seem to be identity trade-offs like "are you willing to become less open-minded and curious to become more productive?". Because often what is holding you back is an addiction to a certain frame of mind that is antithetical to completing a specific set of tasks each day. The blockage is that you're not actually willing to become an innately productive person.

I'd say that if you can just sit through a meeting and do nothing, you should really consider if you should be there at all.

I recently moved to a new team and we are having tons of meetings to discuss design, architecture, or the general strategic direction of the team. Some of these meetings involve a lot of discussion, brainstorming and presenting your ideas, and they drain my energy. But I found that the more exhausting the meetings, the more useful they are.

I'm not even gonna mention times when team isn't using formatters, CI is broken and so on, and you can't fix all of that, because it's more important to deliver a feature A or just a team leader doesn't see a value in that changes.

So remember, developer's productivity != team's productivity.

On Windows I used TimeSnapper Classic (free) and later used ffmpeg to convert the GBs of images to videos. Does anyone know a good way to do this on linux?

Making a new file per screenshot wastes tons of space, I think I might as well use ffmpeg for recording a screen vid directly at a low framerate (and maybe somehow add a time display?)

[0] https://wakatime.com/

https://archive.md/nq3wD

Probably the one that would pay off most (for me, at least) would be to 'watch myself'. I bet I could find some areas for improvement. Then again, having the discipline to change based on that knowledge is another thing.

I'm glad I read it. Kudos to the author.

I was skeptical about the article from this first sentence. Productive people hardly ever think about productivity and especially don't have much interest in writing articles about it. This is because productive people (in the sense of value-production; not value-capturing) are not focused on optimizing processes, instead they're focused on following the shortest possible path to reach their goal; processes are not needed; they evolve naturally to fit a purpose and don't need to be 'designed' explicitly.

If you're a founder or CEO, then you do need to think about processes, because you're not a value producer, you're a value capturer. Processes are your bread and butter; they're a tool to keep you in your position; so thinking about productivity and preaching about it is the shortest path for you to maintain control and increase your influence.

They should make a new word, "captitivity" to differentiate productivity in the sense of creating value efficiently versus productivity in the sense of capturing money efficiently.

It might be hard to find the exact time to observe, though. Commit history could be an indicator.

I will definitely try that. Any recommendation for a screen recording tool on Mac?

difficult to do when every organization in the world makes a point of introducing as many as possible.

Becoming more productive at this level makes the programmer environment significantly tougher and it has negative consequences over time to every human being. It’s a fact that many people don’t even think about it. If you optimize yourself to near –let’s say 95% of your actual capability, you are making everyone else optimize themselves to this number over time. This is great on the context of capitalism and economic growth, you produce more in less time, but we are forgetting that we are humans, not machines being optimized. Of course it’s okay to strive in this life to progress and achieve certain goals, but as happens in almost everything in this world, there should be some limits. If you are getting to the point where you have to monitor yourself, schedule every part of the day and establish X number of controls on yourself, you are being a company, not a human being, and you really aren’t understanding the point of life.

This is a common trend I’ve been realizing for years, we have been sold the idea that we should improve more and more and be more competitive, but without any limits, this is going to negatively affect our lives, indeed, it’s happening right now.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that appearing to be busy is less dangerous.

While I agree that it is a good idea to optimize chores, so you can focus on interesting issues, I often hit a wall of processes or humans.

One consequence, after a decade of professional work, is to actively dismiss the idea to optimize every part of my life. On the contrary, I value the time where I do nothing at all. It often allows me to clear my mind to be more creative afterwards.

So what I'm really missing, from this very basic article that does not provide any new information, is: Take your time off and do nothing.