Staying Focused and Slashing Feedback Sure Ways to Get Productive

What is the key to a seamless thought process? Take control of your committed development time. It’s no surprise that anyone will increase productivity by reducing distractions. And what’s the major difference between average developers and those who really stand out? In a word: productivity. Developers who excel have learned to get the most out of their coding time. They’ve mastered techniques enabling them to continuously focus on delivering working software.

In the same way, you can increase your productivity by recognizing and reducing interruptions. Some are obvious and easy to eliminate. For instance, email and instant messaging interrupts your thought process each time you get a new message. While these communication mediums may seem innocent, they require much more than a quick alt-tab out and then back into your favorite IDE. More critically, interruptions of this sort require a change in thinking. They force you to stop concentrating on the algorithm currently under development and start thinking about responding to the communication. Even after changing focus for only a couple seconds, you must reintroduce yourself to the problem at hand.

What is the easiest way to deal with these distractions? Just get rid of them. Set aside dedicated development times with no email, phone or instant messaging interruptions and your productivity will improve exponentially. Try setting aside one hour blocks of time with your phone, email, and instant messenger turned off. After an hour, spend a few minutes catching up on any critical communication and then get back to productive development!

Other interruptions may not be so obvious, and many are often regarded as critical parts of the development process. Perhaps the best example involves testing an application or algorithm. Learn to develop without having to start the entire application to receive feedback regarding your most recent coding changes. Waiting for an application or server to restart interrupts the development rhythm and wastes significant time.

Another way to boost productivity is to slash feedback time. First, test driven development and continuous unit testing practices provide excellent ways for testing coding changes in mere milliseconds. Additionally, developers should simply learn to code with confidence. It sounds straightforward enough, but seriously -- work through a solution with unit test feedback until you have completed a significant amount of work. Only then should you fire up the application and see if it all fits together. When testing does require an application server to be started, take the time to setup hot deployment and other development features that will reduce the amount of time you spend waiting to receive test feedback.

Leveraging these basic, but often ignored, practices will increase your productivity. While they take time to create and self discipline to implement, they will undoubtedly help you to stand out from the crowd.