Invest into your development environment
Efficient setup makes it possible to produce changes in shortest time. Notice when you become (micro-)bored, distracted, frustrated: this is often because you have to do the same thing over and over or have to wait. Fix it.
Here’s some more specific advice on nurturing your development environment:
- know it better: notice every tool you have to use, and try to study it (read man page, visit site, read docs)
- keep all the things you need running all the time. don’t reboot your laptop if you can avoid it. Starting things up is a major time barrier. Measure uptime in weeks.
- develop a morning routine: commit your changes to branches, pull, build, restart, merge all active prs, build&test them, push what you can.
- get some understanding of bash. if what you do is mechanical (eg visit 3 windows and restart something in all of them) then figure out a way to do it in one command.
- IDE/editor shortcuts. (If you read this far you should be using IDE:). make a systematic study. Know as many shortcuts as you can. try to use something you didn’t before. Try taking notes to keep as a reference. Every time you noticed you could have used a shortcut, stop yourself, go back and do it the right way. Your goal is to become a navigation ninja.
- make sure the setup is perfect: tests pass, linters happy, IDE green. Do not ignore these signals when you work.
- share useful setup if you can in git or document it.