How to Improve Your Productivity as a Working Programmer
Michael Malis (via Dan Luu):
I now schedule meetings specifically at the times of the day when I’m least productive. It doesn’t take a ton of energy to sit through a meeting, and scheduling my day this way allows me to work when I’m most productive. Think of it this way. If I can move a single 30 minute meeting from the time when I’m most productive to the time of the time at which I’m the least productive, I just added 30 minutes of productive time to my day.
[…]
After watching a recording of myself writing code, I realized I was spending about a quarter of the total time implementing the feature tracking down which functions the bugs were in! This was completely non-obvious to me and I wouldn’t have found it out without recording myself. Now that I’m aware that I spent so much time isolating which function a bugs are in, I now test each function as I write it to make sure they work. This allows me to write code a lot faster as it dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to debug my code.
[…]
At the end of every day, I spend 15 minutes thinking about my day. I think about what went right, as well as what went wrong and how I could have done better. At the end of the 15 minutes, I’ll write up my thoughts. Every Saturday, I’ll reread what I wrote for the week and implement changes based on any patterns I noticed.
I wish people who don't view meetings as work would just not attend any meetings.