[Viewpoint] tips for efficient programming

DanielBMarkham once published a blog post "To code quickly, you must quit coding", in which he shared several tips for efficient programming. This article is translated from the IT comments of other journals. The full text is as follows:

Yesterday I did something to double my programming efficiency. Simple and Easy, but it makes great changes in my life.

Some of you may already know how I did it. It sounds crazy for others.

I don't keep working.

Or, I set the timer to 50 minutes, during which I only do one thing-No Email, no chat tools, no games, no distractions. I will take a walk in 50 minutes.

It doubles my efficiency. And as a side effect, it makes my work happier.

I know what many of you are thinking. Whenever this (or other special Pomodoro skills) is raised in time, I will hear a variety of common questions.

Let's look at it one by one:

Will this not make my attention less focused on the difficulties I am trying to solve?It's strange. It's opposite to your intuition. No. When you do other things to relax your nerves, your brain is still thinking about your problems. Many times, the idea suddenly becomes clear and solves many difficult problems that have never been solved. This is because you started to observe the problem from a distance. In the big background, instead of holding on to somewhere.

How did you stop? I never look at tables when programming.Yesterday I used a timer for the microwave oven, but I was shocked by the changes in work efficiency. I bought a stopwatch, which is the one shown above.

In my life, there are too many things that disturb me, emails, chat tools, and text messages. Your method does not work for me.I have a principle: Don't be distracted during my work hours. After I have finished my rest, I will take a few minutes to take care of this distraction: Check the email, reply to the message in the chat software, and call back. I started the timer only after all these tasks were completed.

It seems that it will bring unnecessary pressure to my life.Yes, but it is positive. I found myself eager to know how much work can be done in each work period. I began to refine my work into smaller modules and urged myself to see if I could complete this module during this time period. But there is no pressure. I have a better word to describe the phenomenon of urging myself to finish the work better and more efficiently: Happy. I am very happy. It turns the puzzle into a game.

How long will it take you to relax after work?I don't know. It's hard for me. I will go for a walk-a long enough walk for at least 10 minutes. Sometimes I will go to the balcony and have an orange to listen to the voice of nature. Sometimes I will count down the stopwatch for 10 minutes to avoid coming back too early.

Can I do anything I want during my break?I don't think so. I think you have to do only one activity to let your brain idle. Walking, playing table tennis, playing instruments, Daze, and nap.ConsiderationsActivities that are gentle and target-challenged-especially those outside-work better, but that's just my guess.

What is the secret?The secret, in my personal opinion, is that when you force the brain to release a problem that has been entangled for a long time, the subconscious will make it more closely wound: Your brain strongly hopes to return to the problem. So it will always study it and think about it. The more you drag your brain away from work, the more powerful it returns to work. The more you stop your work, the more you invest in problems. The farther you take your thoughts away from your work, the more you want to go back. This is more efficient than staring at the computer screen/tapping out a pile of junk code. Step back, sea and sky. I can ensure that when you go back to your seat and sit down again, you will have a variety of better ideas. It is like a small program and a design review program. When you are playing, you can run it in the background deep in your brain to help you think about problems.

If you are very smart, how can you think of relying on such an approach?That's it. Here, I want to turn my story to something bad: I used to do things like this, "Play and do things "! In fact, the distribution of my work time and entertainment time is no longer controllable. In the past, programming was like suffering. I decided to change.

Why? I found that when browsers become more friendly and computers become more and more distracted, I began to subconsciously confuse computer entertainment and work functions. After working for a while, I went to read Hacker News, read some interesting articles, work for a while, write a few comments, and then read emails.

What am I doing? Apparently: I am bombing my brain with a variety of exciting things. My brain cannot work on my "Main" problem, because I am busy tossing around dozens of different stimulus factors. Afterwards, you will find that the final result is to turn the situation of focusing only on one programming task into focusing on many things, and these things have nothing to do with programming. If you like to use computers for entertainment, you can enjoy it before work, during lunch, or during work breaks. The more I observe modern computer activities, the more I believe that the nature of computer functions that make entertainment more convenient is already in serious conflict with its use as a machine capable of production. Over the past few years, I even slowly stopped playing the game. The more time I spent, the more time I spent immersed myself in the computer world. This is not a good thing for your brain. Please trust me.

This is a simple task, and it may be hard to imagine its usefulness. But please give yourself a chance-who can predict what you will find?

As a side note, from all these things, I found physical separation of your electronic devices by function may be another good way to improve your work efficiency. (This is a way to prevent you from confusing the boundaries between passive electronic devices and passive devices)

Original article: To code quickly, you must quit coding

Http://www.aqee.net/2010/11/30/to-code-quickly-you-must-quit-coding/.