Skip to main content

Increasing Your Day's Productivity

So, there are a couple of chapters in John Sonmez's book, Soft Skills The Software Developer's Life Manual, that covers increasing your productivity.  Now, I consider myself a pretty focused person and pretty productive, but there's always room for improvement right?  Some sections talk about how ALL people procrastinate at some time or the other, but how can you get more focus and less procrastination (and minimize those distractions)?

Well, one of the recommendations is the Pomodoro Technique which is basically setting up blocks of time to focus, then take a break.  Usually in increments of 25 minutes of focused work, then a 5 minute break, then after each 4 small breaks you get a 15 minute break. 

There's a website called KanbanFlow.com that uses this technique and helps you track your time and your tasks, projects, etc.  I've been using it for about one week now and I really like it and I can tell I have become even more productive.  I know exactly what I need to do that day, and I know that I have to focus for those periods of time before I get a small break. 

I think it really helps limit the small distractions like checking email, your phone, etc.  Just set those distractions aside until break time.  The website also show you stats on how many pomodoro's you get each day, how much time you spent on particular tasks and so on.  Give it a try and let me know how it works for you!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Alexa Is Listening, Recording, and Sending!

Check out this story where a couple in Oregon was having a private conversation and Alexa recorded and sent the conversation to one of their contacts!  They were not aware until the contact contacted them about what had happened.  The couple contacted Amazon and they verified the series of events.  But what's even more bizarre is the couple wanted to return their Amazon home devices but Amazon has not agreed to return the costs for the devices! Check out the article here  by Bruce Brown on  Digital Trends

Nonclustered Index in SQL Server

So, I've run into an issue with one of my queries because it takes about 40 seconds to run and according to the Recent Expensive Queries section of the Activity Monitor in SQL Server, there is a section of code taking up about 51% of the query.  First, let me say that I've been writing Transact SQL for quite awhile but have never ventured into the Clustered and NonClustered areas of forming Indexes.  I do use indexes on all my tables but that's just the regular Primary Unique key.  We've been using this query for awhile and it does work but when the result set is about 5K records it takes a little while to run.  So here's the actual query itself SELECT PartNo , SerialNo , HeciCode , ScanDate , OrderType , PoNo , po . IssueDate , SoNo FROM ScanHistory sh WITH ( NOLOCK ) LEFT OUTER JOIN trkRWPOHeader po WITH ( NOLOCK ) ON sh . PoNo = po . PONum WHERE len ( PoNo ) > 2 AND ScanDate >

File Size Upload Limits using Godaddy Hosting

I've been working on a new project for a friend of mine and came across an issue with trying to upload photos using the infamous freeASPUpload code.  I've used the code in the past for some past projects but don't recall having issues with limits on uploading files. I'm posting this on my blog b/c there's nothing on the internet that discusses this (or at least I wasn't able to find any explanations), and hopefully this can be a resource to someone else that comes across the same issue. Now I know there are other options, utilities, etc. for uploading pics/files/etc. but  freeASPUpload  is simple, I've used it in the past, and this project is pretty basic.  So, if you want to change the upload file size limit you will first want to go into your Godaddy's hosting account.  Next go into the Virtual Directories option, then click on Directory Properties.  Towards the bottom there is a section called "Maximum size of entity body of an ASP request