I don’t get as much done as I would want when I sit down to program. At least that describes many days in my programming career.
Getting started is always the most difficult part of the day. Or, more often, multiple parts of my day, as I switch tasks, get coffee, eat lunch, or whatever else gets me out of the groove. Even when I get things done, it feels like I should have gotten more done.
To combat this I shamelessly stole a system from Cal Newport called time-block planning and have adapted it slightly. It works like this:
Start the day before, with a blank piece of paper. These details are important. You need to do this at the end of your day because all your problems are going to be fresh in your mind. A piece of paper is important because you ensure that you don’t try to make a convoluted system for this. Keep it simple.
On this piece of paper write out the hours that you are planning to work and organize it as shown in the image below. The hours you are working on the left, with spaces to block out what you are doing in each block. Below you can see a version of my day which doesn’t include sensitive information, but reflects the big picture.
When your plan is inevitably ruined, just cross out the old plan and make a new revised plan for the rest of the day right next to the old plan. You can see this above when I got sick of dumb compliance trainings and went for a walk and got lunch.
Figure out what the most important programming task you have and put that as the first block of your day. Do this before anything so you know you at least accomplished the most important thing. This isn’t always possible as you can see from my day above today, but this is my aspiration.
Bunch up small tasks that aren’t programming together in one block. That way you don’t need to check anything during your real work time, you know you have blocks set aside to do it.
If each programming task is small, make a list on the right and then during your programming block, crank through them. You can see that is my usual strategy above. Feel free to add to this list as you know what your next steps are, that will form the foundation for the next day’s plans.
Then the most important thing is to actually care about what you are working on. If you don’t care, then there is basically no chance that you will keep up with this system. It makes you too productive, and it is hard to want to stay productive when you know you don’t even care if you get the tasks done in the first place.
Follow your gut and work on what you know you should be working on.
If this resonated with you, hit me up on X.com the everything app @joe_sweeney. You’ll make my day.