Musings of a software engineer, dad, and geek at heart.

Eliminate this Hidden Procrastination to improve your developer efficiency

If you want to kick up your efficiency, you need to become aware of the friction developers create for themselves.

After working to level-up hundreds of engineers over dozens of companies, I've found common patterns and habits across the 10x devs and those that strive to be one. So in keeping with the theme of developer productivity is as much about not wasting time on the wrong things as it is efficiently doing the right things, let's take a look at one of the main activities we do to procrastinate without even realizing it.

Bikeshedding over minute details

This shows up at all levels of the stack. Nit picking at the name of a function before writing the logic, playing with the thickness of a button border when you should be making the button do something, or stressing over the speed of your loops before you know whether they work are prime examples of the phrase “missing the forest for the trees”.

For me, it often shows up indirectly. As developers, we love making the drudge work go away through automation.

I regularly catch myself trying to automate a task before I've finished solving it the first time. No, I don't need to write a shell script to save 1 minute of future mouse clicking before I've shipped the feature.

If you find yourself with code that doesn't yet do the job it is supposed to, but you're more concerned about whether the variable names are short/long/explicit enough, hit pause. Make it work, then make it pretty.

This #ship30for30 #atomicEssay was shipped with this twitter thread:

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed the article subscribe via RSS feed or enter your email in the box below 👇