Effective development can be achieved by learning more skills, but also by improving the daily routine for you as a developer. Creating consistency in your daily flow will bring efficiency and higher productivity.
Close your mail app for example at 10 AM and see what it does. Do you really have to answer incoming emails within a few minutes?
My vision on the role of CI in mobile developmentIs Xcode Cloud ready for adoption? How do I solve flaky tests? I’ve shared this all in this podcast by Bitrise. Listen here.
Wake up for breakfast
Don’t check your email as soon as you wake up. You’re still in bed and you can’t do anything with those emails other than start stressing and thinking about it over and over again. Wake up for breakfast, go to the office and start with those tasks there.
Set a clear goal for the day
Often when you feel bad at the end of the day it’s because you didn’t finish that one feature or bug fix. You might even leave the office with an idea of not being productive enough. This can be a result of a bad planning. You might have done a lot already, but it’s just not visible enough.
Start your day by setting a clear goal. Trust yourself to be happy as soon as you delivered that goal and take any additional results as extra for that day. You’ll see that this makes you feel happier than before resulting in a much better motivation for the next day at the office.
Make yourself feel happy as soon as possible
Starting your day with a quick satisfaction can help you to get in your flow. Start your day with:
- Fixing a small bug
- Improving a small piece of code
- Share a short tip with colleagues or followers on Twitter
These things will give you the feeling that you’ve achieved something already that day. This is a perfect example of effective development, makes you feel happy and brings you in your flow to quickly deliver more.
Disable badges and notifications
Swift compile times are getting better but are still often long enough to get distracted by opening another app which is triggering you by a badge or a notification. Disabling notifications for apps you often use is a great way to reduce this distraction. My list of apps for which I disabled notifications as they often distracted me:
- Tweetbot for Twitter
- Slack
- GIT Client
Close apps you don’t really need at 10 AM
As a developer, you’re not always required to focus on anything else than programming. Try to figure out the things you really need to do. Close your mail app for example at 10 AM and see what it does. Do you really have to answer incoming emails within a few minutes?
Schedule meetings on one or two specific days only
Nothing’s more frustrating than leaving a flow in which you almost fixed a bug for attending a scheduled meeting. Try to define one or two days for meetings and try to schedule all meetings on those days. It can be hard to achieve but if done right it will give you three full days of effective development.