How to be more productive as a developer
Tags: productivity, devlive
Published: 2019-08-21 14:08:32

As developers, we are always filling our minds with projects and solutions, simple or complex that in most cases end up taking a huge part of our days.

With that in mind, we want to finish our tasks faster, being that task creating a new feature on an existing project or even finishing some new one, or that one that you haven't worked for months (hehe).

And wouldn't be great if we could spend less time to finish each one of these things? The big news is that we can, and that it isn't as complex as it seems.

This article was written with the intention to show you practical solutions to optimize your time, so let's start.

##IDE or text editor

This is your fundamental tool to write code, and it is crucial that you utilize one that is competitive, modern and versatile. There are uncountable editors, both old and modern, choosing the best one for you isn't something I can do, but when you start looking for one, consider checking if it has functionalities like the ones below:

* Allow editing and creating hotkeys
* Allow creating snippets
* Has a big community or huge amount of extensions

If your actual editor or IDE doesn't have any of these functionalities, maybe it's time to check if that isn't killing part of your productivity, and also maybe you should try to transition to a modern, and competitive one that actually helps you.

##Hotkeys

The modern text editors and IDEs are now coming with much more functions that helps your life without the need of extra configuration, these functions helps in small actions that we do often, like selecting all occurences of `margin-right` in a css file.

Learning these hotkeys is fundamental for you to reduce some time spent, sometimes seconds and other times even minutes that could be utilized in another task.

But there are so many hotkeys that is complicated to learn them all at once, maybe even impossible, so my tip is to read through all of them and choose a few that would help you the most and then keep doing it untill you learn them all. You're gonna thank yourself for that.

A problem that can happen is that your editor may have not a hotkey for a specific task, in these cases, think about creating your own hotkey. Most IDEs let you customize their functionalities, VSCode, the editor I use makes it possible by just updating a JSON file. And you can always create a snippet to save you the time to write a repetitive block of code. By the way, let's talk more about snippets now.

##Snippets

Snippets are abstractions of code that you can save to access again later using only a text hotkey, very similar to emmet, and I really like them because you can create snippets of big blocks of code that you utilize often, like react components, for example, and that can and certainly will save your an amazing quantity of time.

Almost all the editors, not to generalize, have this option, then I think you should check it now.

##Extensions

One of the biggest reasons for me to utilize VSCode as my editor, is the huge amount of extensions available to almost anything I want to do, but the modern editors also have their extensions, the point here is, between the extensions made by the community, most of them are there to make processes easier, like highlighting specific points of code, indentation shortcuts, minifiers, the options are endless, and with that, their use can save your and expressive parcel of time that would be taken otherwise.

Bônus tip: if you utilize VSCode, I highly recommend that you check these extensions: Indent Rainbow, Bracket Pair Colorizer, REST Client and Prettie.

##Time and focus

Being focused is one of the characteristics that potencialize your productivity in your projects the most, but being focused for a long time without distractions can be a tough task, and that's why I believe to be extremely important to utilize a strategy to manage your time focused and distracted, there are uncountable of them and a even bigger amount of articles talking about them, but I'm going to just say here two that worked for me:

* Pomodoro Technique
* 10 minutes rule

I also believe that removing possible distractions is a important task to make you do more, letting your phone on the bag or in another room of the house, creating a new user just to work, not opening social media, all these things can impact your productivity extraordinarily.

##Conclusion

All of us would like to have more time, and I believe that optimizing the way we do our tasks is a important step to achieve this goal. And of course you don't need to apply all of this in your life, just the ones that reflected to you.

Thanks for reading through!

If you liked please consider reading my other article:

###[ES6 Destructuring Objects and Arrays](https://dev.to/wllfaria_/es6-destructuring-objects-and-arrays-dc)

You can talk to me on my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/wllfaria_)

I would absolutely love to talk to you