Many of us “formally trained” developers tend to put an engineering mindset to many of the problems in our life, and this is exactly what I did when I took a look back on my own personal productivity issues. I was beginning to notice that much of my day was filled with distractions. Many of them are valid, but a good chunk of them could be managed much, much better. If you’re productivity is anything like mine it comes in spurts: the beginning of the day you’re cruising with two or three cups of coffee in you, and about an hour before lunchtime everything starts to slow down only to pick up at around 3:45pm. For the next two and a half hours you actually get some work done.
I’ve always had a problem with distractions during work. Many people tend to have the problem where they’ll answer personal e-mails, cruise around on Facebook, or tap away on their phone. I do all of that, but it never became a problem where I had reassess my strategy of getting shit done at work. I am a news junkie. And just like any other junkie, my habit can become compulsive and often lead to me wasting a lot of time on lurking. When you give them a medium that literally includes live news feeds from all around the world, well, I make a habit of spending my time reading. Reading. And reading. It could be about sports, politics, jubilation, world turmoil or even the fall (and eventual rise) of orange juice options.
At the time of this writing it is roughly four thirty in the morning and I am cruising news websites because I can’t sleep. But during the hours of work this can absolutely become a problem. One of the ways that I have been able to manage it is by spending a good chunk of time in the morning (and evening) on the bus ride reading news digitally. This gives me my fix for the day and doesn’t affect work productivity. Being of the engineering mindset I’m always looking for that optimum solution for being productive at work. How do you manage your action items? Do you plan your day out on paper, use colored post-it notes based on priority, an old fashioned to-do list, or are you the type of person that doesn’t need a mechanism to get shit done?
For me I’d definitely be in favor of software that allowed me to track to-do items across multiple environments (Windows, iPad, Android, Mac) and have found that Google’s Task API gives me the ability to do this seamlessly. But I haven’t yet found a proper front-end that is clean and intuitive to use. On the Mac side the Things software has been around for awhile, but charges for the application usage on multiple platforms. They seem to have solved the issue elegantly, but I am also looking for integration with my Google services which doesn’t seem to be there yet. And I also have that pesky Windows and Android to think about. Not to mention it is just damn expensive.
Maybe the answer is that there isn’t anything yet that’ll let me organize my priorities digitally, but I have a hard time believing that. What are your experiences?
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