Time Management : Tips and Techniques for Developers

As developers, Time management qualities are required on the fields of our practice, 
due to the nature of business and tech world. High production rates, fast development, better efficiency methods, these are ones of many traits of this demanding world and from here, comes the necessity of such qualities. As a freelancer or working for some tech company, you come, sooner or later, to the conclusion that you need some time management skills !
In this article we offer some common techniques that may help.

Set Goals :

Nothing troubles and exhausts the mind more than being aimless ! The mind expresses that through getting bored, distracted or feeling unmotivated to do the job just because we don't know why should we anyway ! To handle this state of mind; we, usually, set goals. Setting goals help us know where are we going, understand the engagement we're going through and get ourselves to achieve more in a shorter amount of time. Yes, that create time shortcuts, because you always know what to do next !

Set deadlines :

This is an important technique that is generally used by project managers to determine the needed amount of time to finish a project (milestones). Knowing when you have to finish up a task, keeps you motivated and well oriented, whether working as a freelancer or within a team following certain team management methods. Nothing is more compelling than being fast and efficient; that shows commitment and great work ethics, especially, in dealing with clients.

Prioritize :

We do many tasks a day, times and times more per week; and, sometimes, we end up doing unnecessary ones while we have more important ones to do !

This is a common problem and the best thing to do to avoid that is to either create your own system, depending on the way you handle your tasks, especially, when it comes to certain constraints to be satisfied like: importance, deadline related or …etc.

Many people use techniques that may help like delegation when possible, for me : I am using Eisenhower box with some customization which helped me a lot.

Eisenhower classifies tasks according to their urgency and importance, that would quietly be helpful, yet, sometimes you need to compare between two important and urgent tasks, and that is a hard decision to make. So, I added some importance levels to easily handle their classification.

Create the habit of planning :

Learning about habits, creating good ones or replacing old ones, is an essential knowledge for everyone who wants to enhance his/her life quality, or to become more productive at his or her job. I am going to talk here about what is probably a cornerstone habit for every high performance developer, which is doing a planning session whether on every weekend, month or year. Successful entrepreneurs and great managers base their achievements on their daily routines and more on planning.

Don't plan lazy :

Do not procrastinate, do not let tasks get stacked up ! I read a lot of articles about time management and I find some people saying that not feeling like planning is not that bad ! You can do it later. For me : that is bad, that is seriously bad, the worst enemy of every developer is laziness. It is about discipline, you need to keep doing the best practices over and over to become better !

Planning helps a dev to be more productive, faster and keeps his mind clearer about what to be done. And those are important qualities for every developer.

Plan for breaks :

Many studies had  brought us interesting stats about highly productive people, businessmen and influential personalities and they suggest that one of the main reasons to their exploits is that they give too much quality time for resting ! They cherish weekends and vacations.

As for developers, there is a high possibility of getting a burnout when trying to raise productivity rate ! Because the common logic proposes that by doing more, we achieve more, but, according to many studies and experiences, every person has his own optimal rate at which he is most productive and that is by keeping balance between work and rest. So you need to plan for breaks, give yourself time to enjoy family, a snack with friends … just have fun !

Split tasks into smaller ones :

Sometimes , when trying to get some task done like creating a class with couple of functions and you don't know where or when to start doing that, what function to start building or what is that class supposed to be doing exactly ! That is usually due to a bad task definition. A task should be atomic have a starting date and a deadline, if that task includes achieving many goals or takes long, then it is better to break that task down to little ones that we may call "sub-tasks". This allows you to track time and task accomplishment percentage, and, of course, take more control of the flow of your work; whether working alone or with a team.

Many professionals use certain proven methods like SMART.

Good is better than perfect :

Mark Twain says "Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection". That is pretty much true. Reaching perfection when writing a piece of code, for example, is one of the most time consuming issues, while having a deadline to deliver by ! Because you are, probably, going to keep making changes endlessly which would push other tasks to be done later !

Doing tasks fast is more important than perfection, because excellence can only be reached through continuous practice and accumulated experience.

Conclusion :

In the end, there are many tips and tricks to invest better in time; there are many desktop apps (for windows and Mac) and mobile apps (for android and IOS) to help you do that ! There are many other techniques too, it's all about the choice you make.