Productivity and focus – Weapon of optimal performance!

We, programmers, start working on software development out of passion. We are lucky enough to take our passion as a profession! So, our life was expected to be – a dream came true! Image may be NSFW.
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But we don’t see ourselves in that state very often. Instead, many of us are living a life full of stress and frustration! But how the dream became a nightmare?

Common causes of stress in a developer’s life include – overcommitment, procrastination, and failure of maintaining proper focus and productivity.

In this post, we’ll discuss focus and productivity – one key source of stress. I am going to share some proven concepts, tips, and tools that will help to keep us focused and productive.

Let’s take back the happiness of living a life of passion! Image may be NSFW.
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Articles

Here are 5 concepts related to productivity and time management – that you MUST be aware of. Then, you can decide (or design) your very own productivity system based on your need and situation.

1. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
2. The Rule of Three from “Getting Results the Agile Way”.
3. The Pomodoro technique – bring rhythm and agility to your everyday work. 
4. Time Blocking – a simple and essential time management skill.
5. The Eisenhower Matrix – the classic process of prioritising tasks by urgency and importance.

Additionally, the following articles share some useful practices that we, programmers can use to keep us productive and focused:

• 4 Unsexy One-Minute Habits That Save Me 30 Hours Every Week.
• DO NOT do the mistakes that can kill your productivity.
• 8 Effective Tips to Increase Productivity as a Developer.
• Actionable Tips For Developer Productivity.

Tools and techniques

1. Where is all my time going Image may be NSFW.
   Clik here to view.! You’ll never know unless you track. Use a time-tracking tool like toggl, wakatime or rescuetime. 
2. Organize information in a way that you can find them when needed. PARA Method may help.
3. Use tools like Notion, Evernote or keep to keep notes – make them accessible from anywhere, on any device.
4. If you plan to do something later, put it on a to-do list like ticktick or todoist. Otherwise, you may forget them at the right moment.

Fun!

Ending with a bit of fin! How does it feel when you’re trying to dive deeper into a complex issue and someone knocks just for nothing?

Image may be NSFW.
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Stay focused, Stay productive! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

– Anis Uddin Ahmad (@ajaxray)

Hope this post will help you to save some time, to stay more focused and productive while remaining calm and stress-free.

Note: This post was originally written for and posted on {BetweenCurlyBrackets} on Dec 2022.