Increasing focus. (For software developers.)

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Productivity insights for software developers. (Probably useful for others too.)

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…the problem-solving nature of programming and testing tasks make them more vulnerable to interruptions compared to architecture and UI design tasks. 1 1 Abad, Z. S. H., Karras, O., Schneider, K., Barker, K., & Bauer, M. (2018). Task Interruption in Software Development Projects (pp. 122–132). Presented at the the 22nd International Conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

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For software development, focus is simply more fragile than other tasks. And focus requires willpower to ignore distractions and stay focused, but…

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You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 2 2 Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 100). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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As the day goes on, it’s naturally more difﬁcult to focus.

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A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted two hour session in a day 3 3 Parnin, C. (2013). Programmer, interrupted (pp. 171–172). Presented at the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), IEEE.

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…for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more. 4 4 Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (p. 100). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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So, really, 1 to 4 hours of productivity per day.

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How can you maximize your productive time to get the most out of each day?

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Disclaimer: You may need manager support and advocacy for some of these tactics.

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Take care of yourself and your team.

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Proper nutrition, sleep and exercise lead to activate a state of optimal mental health, resulting in an enhancement of brain function. 5 5 Altomare, R., Damiano, G., Palumbo, V. D., Buscemi, S., Spinelli, G., & Cacciabaudo, F. (2017). Feeding the brain: the importance of nutrients for brain functions and health. Progress in Nutrition, 19, 1–5.

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…diet alone is not enough to maintain a healthy brain, but it is important that it is accompanied by constant exercise and regular sleep. Proper rest and the benefits of sport further strengthen the brain synapses, greatly improving the cognitive abilities of individuals.6 6 Altomare, R., Damiano, G., Palumbo, V. D., Buscemi, S., Spinelli, G., & Cacciabaudo, F. (2017). Feeding the brain: the importance of nutrients for brain functions and health. Progress in Nutrition, 19, 1–5.

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Get and encourage rest. You need rest to be at your best.

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…we observed a difference of about 44% in the engagement with the task of developers who forewent one night of sleep and developers under normal sleep condition. Moreover, the results showed that sleep-deprived developers performed 54% more fixing addressing syntactic mistakes compared to developers who slept regularly. 7 7 Fucci, D., Scanniello, G., Romano, S., & Juristo, N. (2018). Need for Sleep: the Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1–20.

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Make time to exercise. It’s good for your brain.

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…evidence for the benefits of exercise on both affective experience and cognitive performance points to exercise as an effective, low-cost intervention for improving both affective and cognitive health. 8 8 Hogan, C. L., Mata, J., & Carstensen, L. L. (2013). Exercise holds immediate beneﬁts for affect and cognition in younger and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 28(2), 587–594.

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Take a walking break. Your brain keeps working even if you’re not.

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Walking substantially enhanced creativity by two different measures. For the three alternate uses studies, 81%, 88%, and 100% of participants were more creative walking than sitting. For the BSE, 100% of those who walked outside generated at least one novel high- quality analogy compared with 50% of those seated inside. Walking worked indoors on a treadmill and outdoors at a bustling university. 9 9 Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.

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Work less. Focus on productive time, not hours in your seat.

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When you look at the world’s wealthiest countries, higher productivity correlates closely with working fewer hours. (OECD Data)

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Stay hydrated. Water isn’t just for athletes.

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…mild hypohydration, resulted in an increase in errors during a prolonged, monotonous drive, compared to that observed while performing the same task in a hydrated condition. The magnitude of decrement reported was similar to that observed following the ingestion of alcohol resulting in a blood alcohol content of approximately 0.08 % (the current UK legal driving limit), or while sleep deprived. 10 10 Watson, P., Whale, A., Mears, S. A., Reyner, L. A., & Maughan, R. J. (2015). Mild hypohydration increases the frequency of driver errors during a prolonged, monotonous driving task. Physiology & Behavior, 147, 313–318.

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Eat well. Brain foods are real.

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the brain, which represents 2% of our body weight, consumes about 20% of the calories we eat each day. 11 11 Altomare, R., Damiano, G., Palumbo, V. D., Buscemi, S., Spinelli, G., & Cacciabaudo, F. (2017). Feeding the brain: the importance of nutrients for brain functions and health. Progress in Nutrition, 19(3), 1–5.

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The best studies of the consequences of skipping breakfast have been conducted among children , but the same principles apply to all of us . Hunger at any time has been shown to reduce a child’s ability to pay attention , absorb information , and respond appropriately to the environment. 12 12 Schwartz, Tony. The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance (p. 94). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

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Blueberries Nuts Avacados Salmon 13 13 WebMD: Eat Smart for a Healthier Brain

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Another sore point for the health of the brain is the consumption of junk food, high in saturated fats which are seriously detrimental to the welfare [of the] brain. 14 14 Altomare, R., Damiano, G., Palumbo, V. D., Buscemi, S., Spinelli, G., & Cacciabaudo, F. (2017). Feeding the brain: the importance of nutrients for brain functions and health. Progress in Nutrition, 19(3), 1–5.

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Defend your day. Protect uninterrupted blocks of time.

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You know that feeling at the beginning of a day when you look at your calendar and don’t have any meetings or distractions?

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Group meetings and other day- fragmenting tasks into a single day to save large contiguous blocks of time for deep work the other days.

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Check email or chat less frequently. Dedicate time for checking and responding to email.

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E-mail interruptions have a negative time impact upon employees and show that both interrupt handling and recovery time exist. A typical task takes one third longer than undertaking a task with no e-mail interruptions. 15 15 Marulanda Carter, L., & Jackson, T. W. (2012). Effects of e-mail addiction and interruptions on employees. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 14(1), 82–94.

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Reduce interruptions—reduce stress. Less stress means more happiness.

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…interrupted work is performed faster. We offer an interpretation. When people are constantly interrupted, they develop a mode of working faster (and writing less) to compensate for the time they know they will lose by being interrupted. Yet working faster with interruptions has its cost: people in the interrupted conditions experienced a higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure, and effort. So interrupted work may be done faster, but at a price. 16 16 Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work (pp. 107–110). Presented at the Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

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Value and support happiness. Happiness and productivity go hand-in-hand.

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…our results show that unhappiness makes developers take shortcuts in the process, often leading to low code quality. 17 17 Graziotin, D., Fagerholm, F., Wang, X., & Abrahamsson, P. (2017, January 11). Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, Bad for Process, and Bad for Software Product. arXiv.org. IEEE.

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Reduce your TTF. (Time-to-ﬂow.)

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The faster you can get into the zone, the better.

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Create your ideal focus environment. Many factors inﬂuence your ability to concentrate.

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Private. Quiet. (Or with headphones.) Natural light. (Or not.) Good air quality. Comfortable temperature. Plants. Reduce clutter. Minimize visual distraction.

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Build habits and rituals. These signals can help you start faster.

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Build a strong and consistent ritual for starting your day that helps you work towards getting in the zone faster. Let’s look at an example…

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Get to your development setup quickly. Spend less time open applications and browsing for ﬁles.

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Write scripts and use other tools to reduce the time it takes to get the right applications open. Text editor. Terminal. Version control. Automated tests.

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Start your day with big or challenging tasks. Don’t waste ﬁnite willpower on small or mindless tasks.

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Starting your day with a big task primes your brain so it can continue working on the problem even if you switch to something else.

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Plan a little at the beginning and end of your day. Start focused and prepare yourself for the next day.

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Wrap up your thoughts at the end of the day to help you pick up where you left off when you get started the next day.

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Leave something broken. Give yourself a clear focus to start your next session.

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Our brains don’t like to leave things unﬁnished. Leaving something broken can make it easier to dive right into work when you’re back at your computer.

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Reduce context- switching.

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A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption. 18 18 Parnin, C. (2013). Programmer, interrupted (pp. 171–172). Presented at the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), IEEE.

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Carefully curate and reduce notiﬁcations. They are rarely as important as we like to think they are.

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Studies have shown that responding to notifications impedes the efficient resumption of interrupted tasks and negatively impacts task performance. A proposed solution is to relinquish notifications and allow users to seek for information at their own convenience. 19 19 Iqbal, S. T., & Horvitz, E. (2010). Notiﬁcations and awareness (pp. 27–30). Presented at the the 2010 ACM conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

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Identify and monitor distractions. You can’t reduce what you’re not aware of.

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Use Rescuetime to learn your distraction triggers and quantify productivity. Pay attention to what does and doesn’t work. What creates problems? Can you make changes?

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Don’t keep your phone in your work area. Or at least turn it off.

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Don’t distract yourself. You can be your own worst enemy.

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We also found that individuals seated in open office environments self- interrupted at a substantially higher rate. 20 20 Dabbish, L., Mark, G., & Gonzalez, V. M. (2011). Why do i keep interrupting myself? (pp. 3127–3130). Presented at the the 2011 annual conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

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Clear your mind of other tasks. It’s difﬁcult to concentrate with other tasks nagging your brain.

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Your mind only has so much working space. This is why one of the main goals of GTD (Getting Things Done) is recording things to get them out of your head so you can focus.

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Do fewer simultaneous projects. Less bouncing between projects.

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Context-switching within a project or to a similar type of task on a different project can work, but minimize switching frequently between signiﬁcantly different projects by working on few projects at any given time.

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Do less. Don’t spread yourself thin.

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It’s easier said than done, but simply saying no to projects is the best way to reduce context- switching.

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Automate more. Reduce the need to switch tasks at all.

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You’re not automating a 15 second task. You’re reducing the 15 minutes of context-switching overhead for each time you perform the task.

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Automate tasks that are painful. Reducing unhappiness is a productivity win.

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Get better at context- switching.

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You can’t remove 100% of interruptions or distractions, so get good at handling them efﬁciently.

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In only a small percentage of sessions did developers resume coding in less than a minute. Developers consistently spend a significant portion of their time doing non-editing activities before making their first edit in a session. During this time period, developers are performing a variety of activities that relate to rebuilding their task context. 21 21 Parnin, C., & Rugaber, S. (2010). Resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks. Software Quality Journal, 19(1), 5– 34.

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Switch strategically. Sometimes you just need to switch gears.

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Sometimes you hit walls. Recognize when switching gears to a different or related task can help you see things from a fresh perspective and ﬁnd the solution to a problem. Your brain will still work on the problem in the background.

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Break large tasks into smaller, related tasks. Your brain likes completing tasks. So completing a higher number of small tasks helps.

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The feeling of accomplishment encourages you to keep going, and you have more natural stopping points to recharge. Your brain is also less overwhelmed and thus less inclined to need a break at the wrong time.

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Avoid switching to cognitively different tasks. Try to keep your work on the same type of task or a closely related task.

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e.g. Don’t switch between writing code and manual testing. Or don’t switch between writing documentation and coding.

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Be slower to switch. Take a few moments to collect your thoughts and mentally save your working state.

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…a brief interruption lag of a few seconds can facilitate resumption, by allowing an opportunity to lay the cognitive groundwork for returning to the primary task later. 22 22 Trafton, J. G., Altmann, E. M., Brock, D. P., & Mintz, F. E. (2003). Preparing to resume an interrupted task: effects of prospective goal encoding and retrospective rehearsal. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(5), 583–603.

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Reduce error- based distractions.

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You can’t avoid every mistake, but making fewer mistakes and/or recovering faster can give you more productive time.

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Slow down. Working faster increases mistakes.

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Add automated tests. Catch mistakes while your mind is still thinking about the problem.

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There’s simply some things computers are really good at, and automatically checking for errors on your behalf is one of them. Writing tests also helps you analyze your code. Then the computer can do the tedious part.

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Don’t deploy on a Friday. Weekends are for recharging. Don’t risk losing that.

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It’s bad enough having to ﬁx a broken deploy on the weekend, but this is also cutting into your rest that you need to be at your best. Take rest seriously and maximize your chances of getting enough by not deploying before time off.

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Get good at debugging. Build context faster and ﬁnd the problem faster.

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Avoiding mistakes is great, but ﬁxing them quickly and seamlessly is the next best thing. The better you are at debugging, the less time you’ll spend searching for answers when something breaks.

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Always be refactoring. Cleaner and more readable code beneﬁts everyone’s productivity.

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While refactoring can slow you down in the short-term, if you’re in the middle of work and notice a meaningful opportunity for refactoring, set aside some time after you complete your task to make improvements.

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Make the most of tools.

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Make tools earn their keep. Just because a tool is supposed to increase productivity doesn’t mean it is.

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Always question the net productivity of your tools over the long-term. (But don’t confuse a learning curve with a lack of productivity.)

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Cut tools ruthlessly. Fewer tools means fewer areas for issues.

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While you can’t always be switching tools, removing tools can reduce the surface area for things to break. You're never adding just one thing to your stack but all of the dependencies as well.

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Move up the chain. Higher-level tools can save you from plumbing distractions so you can get more done.

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Just like a high-level programming language can be more efﬁcient than Assembly, taking the time to migrate to and learn higher-level tools can improve efﬁciency as well.

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Fix or ﬁre unreliable tools. Be honest about whether a tool might be harming your productivity more than helping.

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…developers found especially unpleasant those interrupts caused by failure or insufficient knowledge of development tools. Even though few such interrupts occurred, the developers spent much effort handling them. Therefore, they suggested focusing special attention on keeping the tool environment running and providing adequate tool training. 23 23 van Solingen, R., Berghout, E., & van Latum, F. (1998). Interrupts: just a minute never is. IEEE Software, 15(5), 97–103.

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Learn your tools forwards and backwards. When you use a tool regularly, the more second nature it is, the less distracting it will be.

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If you are a heavy user of a given tool, make time to watch tutorials and learn more about how you can use the tool better with less effort.

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Use tools to improve efﬁciency. Get thing things done faster and with fewer keystrokes.

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Creating convenient bookmarks for frequently-accessed URLs and tools, and use tools like textexpander and Alfred to improve efﬁciency and reduce the need to look up frequently used resources.

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Use tools to help with focus. Tools can help build and strengthen habits.

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Tools like Focus and tools that support the Pomodoro technique can help alternate between intense focus and short breaks.

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Improve communication.

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Go asynchronous. Chat is the anti-productivity tool.

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Be slow to rely on chat. It's more productive for you in the moment, but it's likely counter-productive for the recipient of the chat.

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Turn to email instead of chat or phone calls whenever possible. This frees the recipient to handle and respond at a time that doesn’t break their concentration.

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Respect each other. Strive to reduce distractions for your team members.

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Don’t slide into someone’s DM’s with “hey.” Provide a detailed description of what you need so they can decide whether it’s urgent relative to what they’re working on.

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Could you send an email and switch to a different, but still productive, task while you wait for the answer?

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We found that external interruptions experienced in the previous hour significantly increase the incidence of self interruption in the subsequent hour. 24 24 Dabbish, L., Mark, G., & Gonzalez, V. M. (2011). Why do i keep interrupting myself? (pp. 3127–3130). Presented at the the 2011 annual conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.

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Extensively document your question or challenge. You’ll often answer your own question.

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Frequently, the process of documenting and explaining your question will help you uncover the answer without interrupting someone else.

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Improve documentation. When documentation answers questions, people don’t have to interrupt others.

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…approximately 25 percent of all interrupts were caused by issues related to knowledge or experience, such as discussing program structures or explaining technical details. Further, 20 percent were caused by documentation issues, such as documentation review and inadequate or nonexistent documentation. 25 25 van Solingen, R., Berghout, E., & van Latum, F. (1998). Interrupts: just a minute never is. IEEE Software, 15(5), 97–103.

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Shorten, consolidate, and reduce meetings. Meetings are multipliers since they involve multiple people.

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Fewer meetings means fewer instances of “What do I do with this 15 minutes before a meeting?” (Multiplied by the number of attendees.)

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Encourage a default of 15 minutes for meetings instead of an hour, and require that everyone seriously prepare for meetings ahead of time.

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Take care with commit messages and revision histories. More informative histories serve as key documentation down the road.

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Version control commit messages and histories are their own form of historic documentation that can great increase understanding when team members need to make modiﬁcations in the future.

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In summary…

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Take care of yourself. You can’t focus if you can’t function.

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Focus faster. Take steps to reduce friction for getting into the zone.

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Reduce context-switching. The less you switch, the easier it is to focus.

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Get better at context-switching. You can’t eliminate it, but you can be better at it.

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Reduce error-based distractions. The more you can focus, the less you’ll have to ﬁx.

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Become one with your tools. Ditch the counter-productive ones and get great with the important ones.

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Improve communication. Become more efﬁcient, and minimize interrupting each other.