It's 3:30AM and I'm working.

If you work at night, no one can interrupt you.
If you sleep during the day, you can't attend any zoom meetings.

Also, at night you can work naked, and drink on the job without any judgement.

All problems solved.

- Go to sleep early
- Get up at 5-6
- Drink quality coffee
- Work at your desk not from the bed or couch
- Don't start new projects until the last one is done
- Have a good and healthy diet
- Excercise frequently

Essentially don't be like me... Be like anyone else but me and you'll do fine...

Don't do like my work supervisor:

Step 1:
*gives task*
Me, starts working on task early in the morning
*task requires his interfering, and is stalled without it*
Me, messages supervisor

Step 2:
*supervisor takes the whole work day to reply, saying that he didn't have time to look into it*

Step 3:
Me, does almost nothing at work the whole day; closes laptop upon seeing the message of the supervisor

Step 4:
Profit: go home early

The more at home you feel on your battle station the better. So fucking put a *.cmd on autorun, alias every last goddamn command you don't like the name of and set the terminal's colors to something you actually enjoy. Then add a little flavour, make it feel truly personal.

... well, I might have gone too far in a few places...

Get the best noise cancelling headphones, and a long playlist of favourite musics

Someone put a fucking \b in this dataset I'm working with, which just so happens to be an illegal character for xml.
FUCKING HOW. FUCKING WHY. FUCKING WHERE ARE YOU AND WHY DO YOU WANT TO SEE ME SUFFER THIS MUCH

Overdosing on caffeine every 1-3 days

Maybe nicotine too but that's up to you

At the end of each day, work out exactly what you need to do next, and then...

...don't do it. Seriously. Make a note of it, save it, then walk away. Then you know *exactly* what you're getting started with the next day, and by the time you've done that you're in the swing of things. (Especially helpful if you're not a morning person like me. Much, much easier to get started if you know exactly what you're doing.)

Motivation lost!
Anyone seen it?
It's a battered old thing, smells a little bit like sunshine and redemption, been in decline for a long while.
Last seen 2017, small reward.

Just don't open it...

Will definitely not pretend to be productive 24/7. But the below help me reach a satisfactory 8/5 most day's.
- Exercise in the morning
- Eat breakfast
- Listen to good music
- Make sure to have fun moments throughout the workday (++ for initiating)
- Catch air, have a walk, take a break
- Minimize interactions with toxic people
- Be open in sharing knowledge, thoughts, work , good people will repay you
- Get in the kitchen, cook nice healthy meals
- Set concrete and reachable targets
- Remain eager to learn
- Celebrate successes
- Spent time with friends and family
- Catch enough sleep

And above all, DON'T open devRant!!!

I didn't just yet, although I probably found my kink while programming.
Turns out I'm masochistic as I enjoy suffering induced by programming stuff.

Do the things you love. If you do that for a living, it won't feel like work. Nobody can beat that with with work mentality.

If you have daily stand ups, don't let participants choose who speaks - we seem to spend 5 minutes of the 15 with people saying "no you go first".

devRant as worklog.

Personally, coding standing up instead of sitting for hours ..

Bring back the ducks, you fucks.

Don't ask me... I forgot what that word even means anymore.

Never stop

I read once "productivity is elimination of distractions" or something like that.
And honestly, it has worked so far.

Motivation is even better tho. But if I'm really unmotivated, or anxious, I subconsciously create distractions; then I have to deal with me inner child. Point is, motivation has a direct line to productivity, so I usually don't do what I can't bring yourself to do.

Why would I strive to be productive if 90% of my work consists of me waiting for approvals, access, credentials, attending meetings about meetings?

I literally handcuff myself to my desk sometimes. Also helps with my trichotillomania. Double win.

Wouldn't you like to know, devBoy?!

Understandable, me too

Why?
Get paid the same anyways...

I am addicted to work so don't really need any hack as such, need hacks for other parts of my life. But I use a focus app when I have a whole day to myself and I wanna make it a super ultra productive one. It just allows breaks for like 15 secs, apart from a few scheduled long breaks. And if you take more breaks, your focus grade drops and that kind of punishment works well for me.

Also, it measures time according to the various activities so I'm able to measure how much of my actual hours go into productive work vs. pretend work, and how long each activity took so I can understand where I have room for improvement.

My focus times have improved greatly from focusing 1 hours straight to 4+ hours straight in a sitting before I need to take a break, sometimes I just take it for the sake of it. And it's pretty addictive so you could easily spend the whole day doing it, only taking breaks for food and loo.

Plus, you can compare yourself to other people who are focusing. And my God, some on these Asians are robots even focusing for 21+hrs a day. So you always have someone to feel bad about yourself in comparison to. I can be pretty competitive when feeling petty so this hack works great for me. But it's also a great way to burn yourself out so I use it with caution.

Right now, I started with this other app, a pomodoro one. But it's not working out that well for me. I'll give it one more try.

Create your own deadlines.

With your deadline, you work more hard and if you end early, you get that free time (or you have time for emergencies).

Freelancing

Crank up the music!

Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:

1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.

2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.

3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.

4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.

5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.

6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.

7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.

8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.

9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.

10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.

My 10 cents.

On-call

• 10mg diazepam for handling with unreasonable
requests and people
• 200mg of pure coffeine for energy and killing unwanted side-effects of first

Repeat 2x per day. Works wonders and everyone is happy.

Org-mode
I didn't expect it to be this addictive