After reading several books (6 Books Every Programmer Should Own) for programmers on increasing productivity, you start to realize that a lot of it is common sense.
You even to notice a common theme amongst blogs about productivity.
- How to Stay Productive During the Winter Holidays
- How To Be Productive without Becoming a Productivity Freak
- 27 Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized
Whether you are a programmer or not, here are 5 common-sense ways to remain productive:
1. Ignore Distractions
Whatever is keeping you from doing your work: e-mail, instant message, phone calls, loud co-workers, etc.
Find a way to stop these things from disturbing you:
- close e-mail and instant message applications
- put your phone on Do Not Disturb (DND)
- wear headphones (you don’t need to listen to music)
- move to another location to work
2. Organize
Look around at your desk. Are there papers thrown everywhere, food, or other junk laying around?
How about your desktop on your computer? Do you have 100 icons that you don’t know what half of them do?
Keeping items in a easy to reach location makes sense if you use them frequently, but having too many items defeats the purpose.
Start organizing both our physical paper and computer files in a logical location. Only keep those that you use very frequently out in the open.
3. Record Your Thoughts
Have you ever had a great idea or thought come to mind, but you didn’t have anywhere to record it?
With the technology that is available today, you should have no excuse. Most cell phones will have some of voice memo application that you can use. If not, you can purchase an inexpensive audio recorder (similar to Norm MacDonald “Note to Self”).
If you are old school, you can even carry with you a small notebook and a pen or pencil.
Have you found yourself in a meeting where you scribbled a bunch of information on a whiteboard?
I would still recommend recopying your notes to paper or computer, but before you erase the board make sure you take a picture with a digital camera or your camera phone – you never know when you might need to refer to it.
4. Whiteboard Long-Term Goals
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you think of things that you need to do over the long-term (over 1 week deadline).
Don’t stress yourself our by constantly saying to yourself “I’ve got a ton of things to do.” Get a whiteboard at work and/or home and start to write down your long-term goals. Things always seem much more manageable once you write them down.
You can even use different color markers to indicate priority (e.g. Red-High, Green-Low).
5. Daily Task List
Similar to having whiteboard for long-term goals, start writing down your short-term goals (less than 1 week deadline) on a piece of paper or post-it note – keep it next to you.
Over the week as you accomplish tasks, cross them out!
The sense of accomplishment that you feel by completing goals will motivate you complete the others.
None of these items are products of intense scientific research or even that expensive to implement – just common sense.
Get Hired By Solving Programming Puzzles
When it comes to down to it practice makes perfect. In order to become a successful programmer you need to keep your skills up-to-date and work on problems outside of those faced at work.
Luckily, there are numerous websites that provide the opportunity to practice. The following blogs comprehensively list most of the puzzle websites that are available to help you practice your skills.
There is one other website that is absent from the lists above that provides programming puzzles.
ITA Software is a company based out of Cambridge, MA that specializes in the development of airline and travel software. They use programming puzzles to attract and recruit new employees.
They won’t grade your solution if aren’t considering working for them, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t at least try implementing a solution. The puzzles are designed for those looking for a challenge.
If you are ready for the challenge, ITA has two sets of puzzles:
If you have attempted these problems or have been hired as a result of completing one of the problems, please share your experiences.