Time Management for Developers: Control Your Life

Max Bessarabov
JetRuby Agency
Published in
7 min readJan 24, 2018

Time management is one of the most critical skills that every developer should possess. Developing software is still one of the challenging careers in our time. It’s software development that requires a lot of developer’s attention. It’s also challenging developers must constantly keep themselves updated with an enormous amount of ever changing information. There are many other challenges that contribute to the difficulty of this profession. How do they cope with them? They just know how to manage their time. Having made a habit of effective time management, you’ll be amazed how productive will be your work.

First of all — Planning

Planning is the most important part of every project. It especially relates to the software development. About 80% of time we spend on researching and the last 20% on implementing the task. There’s a good proverb saying “A stitch in time saves nine”. So if you want to be productive and meet all the deadlines according to your estimates, you should definitely spend some time on planning. This will allow you to avoid some mistakes. At least, you’ll know the big picture of what you actually want to implement.

The pace of our current life is insane. And the only way to make sure that you didn’t forget anything is to document your thoughts and tasks. So if you finally decided to create a list, try to keep your records as detailed as possible. This will help you to get an idea of your current task without losing time. In our society, nearly everyone has a digital device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop. And hopefully, the Internet is full of various time management software. These tools will help you prioritize your tasks, plan your time, organize materials and stay focused. Here are the best time management programs that will significantly simplify your life.

Trello

This app allows you to create several to-do lists as well as set your deadlines. All the items in a list have their own cards where you can find detailed information and various links that you consider as relevant. What is cool about this tool is that it allows you to prioritize your tasks and structure your day. As soon as you’ve completed your task, you may drag a card into a column for finished tasks. And at the end of your day you’ll be able to see how many tasks you’ve finished. It really keeps motivated!

FocusWriter

According to our opinion this is one of the best distraction-blocking software. It provides you with a simple, blank page for your thoughts. There are no formatting tools, no page breaks, and most importantly — no social media notifications or incoming emails. This software allows you to create your custom background (according to your mood). This tool also has a timer with its own style so you don’t have to concern yourself with clock-watching. The other cool feature is a Focus mode that greys out everything except the part you’re working on.

Cold Turkey

This tool is like medicine for social-addicted people. It supplements your willpower by blocking the sites that you consider as time-wasting. This application is smarter than distraction-blocking browser extension. So you won’t be able to circumvent it by using another application. As soon as you turns on this app for a specific amount of time, it can’t be undone.

This tool automatically chooses the most time-distracting websites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. However, it also supports a feature of manually adding various sites.

Prioritization

Now when you’ve made a list of your task for the day, it’s time to prioritize them. To stay focused, keep the golden mean and choose 5–6 major tasks per day and prioritize them from hardest to easiest. Some people do the easiest tasks in the morning but then they have no energy for the hardest ones. Don’t make the same mistakes and do the most important or thought-heavy tasks at the point of your day. Morning is the best time to drill through the tough tasks as it’s the time when we’re the freshest and still have a lot of energy.

The next tip is to divide your large tasks. Do you have some really time-consuming task for 50 hours? Divide the task into the small parts and each day allocate a few hours toward the project. This will help you stay focused and prevent feeling of failure if you won’t be able to finish this task in a shorter timeframe.

Set Your Deadlines

All your tasks should have deadlines. In other way, how you’re just going to measure your forward progress and success. In case you didn’t set a realistic deadline for your project, it may become a source of stress for you and your team. Without having enough time for the project may result in extreme pressure on all parties involved. So try to add some extra time to your tasks. This will help you avoid unnecessary setbacks.

To make your work even more effective and “smarter”, set the smart goals. Here’s how your goals should look like:

  • Specific. If you want to be always motivated and know where to focus your efforts, make your should specific and clear. When setting a goal, try to answer the five “W” questions:

What do you want to accomplish?

Why do you thinks this goal is important?

Whom are you going to involve?

Where is it located?

Which resources are you going to use?

  • Measurable. Measurable tasks are needed to keep track of your progress and stay motivated. Your measurable goal should answer the following questions:

How many?

How much?

How will you know that this task is accomplished?

  • Achievable. Your goal is also needed to be attainable to be successful. In other words, your task should be challenging but at the same time possible. An achievable goal answers on the following questions:

How can you accomplish goals?

How realistic is actually your goal?

  • Relevant. This step is very important to make sure that your goal actually matters to you. If your goal is relevant that means that it can answer the following questions:

Is this the right time?

Is it worth your and your team efforts?

Are you the right person to achieve this goal?

  • Time-bound. Set estimates to your tasks so that you have a deadline to focus on and something to work forward. This SMART goal criteria will allow you to prevent everyday tasks from taking priority over your longer-term goals. Again, make sure that you can answer on the following questions:

When?

What can I do *** weeks from now?

What can I do *** months from now?

What I can do today?

Monitor the Amount of Time you Spent

One of the most important aspects of successful time management is tracking the amount of time you spend on your projects. Fortunately, there are many really cool app that can help you in it. Here’re some of them:

Toggl

With its user-friendly and slick design, this app quickly became a popular choice for time tracking. It also has companion apps such as desktop and mobile one.

This tool gets especially powerful with its desktop application. Desktop app will allow you to monitor your program and desktop activity, as well as use reminders. Having taken all the advantages of all these features, tracking time will become almost automatically. It’s really great for people who forget to turn on or switch a timer between tasks.

Web and mobile apps are also really cool for tracking your time, though you’ll need to manually start the timer.

Hours

This tool is for those people who look for a simple time tracking without an enormous amount of features. With good-looking reports, smart reminders this app makes time tracking really enjoyable.

Your mobile application will automatically sync with your web app, so can move between devices and timers without no efforts. A smart interface allows you to switch timers throughout the day as if you switch between tasks and projects.

Paydirt

This is another web-based solution to time tracking. The big part of this tool is its Chrome extension that parse websites as you visit them for specific keywords. In case the app succeeds in recognizing a keyword, it’ll pop-up on the side of your browser and ask you whether you want it or not to start a timer. It even populates the timer with a project by showing you available tasks for you to select.

The Bottom Line

The big part of time management is actually to know yourself. Become aware of your behavior patterns. As soon as you understand what things are killing your productivity, you’ll know your enemy. As a result, you’ll understand where you need to work on yourself.

All the tips mentioned above are a starting point to your live where everything is under control. But that all depends on you. It’s only you who can help yourself in making your dreams come true. Get rid of chaotic motion, manage and plan your time, be productive and successful.

Published in JetRuby Agency

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