How to be organized

As a software engineer this theme turns out to be one of the most important for me, why? It's the only way i can improve my skills the most while at the same time wasting less energy. 

On a more serious note, if we want to get anywhere we need some organization and to apply routines or we would dive into chaos.

 

Below i leave some points and my idea is to keep upgrading this post. 

Getting enough sleep and nutrients 

This first point is a powerful remainder, but one of the most important ones. It can be easily neglected. 

In regards to sleep, we can stay up till late in the night for many reasons: we're watching that late show we like, playing a video-game, finishing some kind of task.

For almost every person there are enough reasons that can lead this path. 

But this is not an healthy path, it can mean we were not productive during the day and we're trying to compensate at the end of it. 

In some cases we simply cannot sleep well due to health issues and they can be psychologically. 

However the case may be, studies have shown that the quality of our sleep, makes a big difference on our cognitive performance during the day.

I'm sure, that a good night of sleep is proportional to my capacity to learn, to be collaborative, to be attentious, to have good reflexes, all of these in turn will help me spend energy in being organized.

It's worth mentioning that physical and mental exercises can help us through the day and especially the food we eat makes a great difference, because in the end that's what will give energy to the brain.

I can say from experience that while some protein and energetic snacks help me doing better on work/training, drinking beers while helping me being more relaxed certainly don't help with my concentration and memory. 

Defining goals

When defining our time, defining goals must be a priority. 

Whether it is about personal or work life, they are a starting point for us to focus our energy and serve as a starting point for identifying what needs to be done. 

The goals can be categorized as short, medium or long term goals, depending on how much time it will take for them to be accomplished. 

Once they are identified, it's time to start working and prioritizing them. 

Sometimes the goals can be worked sequentially, other times they can be interleaved, which will happen most of the time. 

To accomplish them we will need to subdivide each goal into tasks, smaller units of work to get the final objective, our goal tangible. 

A long term goal in our personal life can be owning a well furnitured house. 

This may not be hard for a few humans, but for most people it involves years of building savings while at the same time getting an idea of what we want.

Then when the opportunity arises and we have enough savings for a loan, we can finally buy the house and it's time to get the furniture and everything's needed to call it a home. 

On work, a goal may be working and finalizing a complex project. 

To start doing it, we need to start somewhere, it may be by the skeleton of the application, and then we keep adding functionality, always having in mind the bigger picture. 

Removing distractions and tracking time

When it's time to work, it's important to pick one topic and staying on it for some time without distractions.

For a burst of productivity, it helps to remove all distractions from the workplace. 

A cluttered desk is not helpful and if there is a lot of talking where we work it might be smart to find ways to tell our teammates about our intentions. Having the headphones on the ears is a clear signal of the time alone we seek. 

Estimating and tracking time is a great habit, not only for us to have an idea of the time the tasks take, but for teammates and superiors to adjust their expectations while we gain credibility. 

Taking time each day to review the progress of the work, helps to constantly evaluate how the overall work is going. 

It's important for us to remember that we need to stay some time on a task without constant distractions to be productive.

Multitasking is bad

No one really does multi-tasking, we do switch tasks and when we do that we're losing our line of thinking. 

We need to understand what needs to be done on a new task before we do it and when we go back to our last task we need to remember again what was done and were we left it.

The more switch tasks we do the more we increase the loss of productivity. 

When there are many tasks to do, it's really important to set priorities, like we previously talked. After that, starting with the one with highest priority is a must.

Using the right tools 

To track time of tasks, to place the remainders, to organize the tasks and prioritize them, take our daily notes, archive credentials and many more, we will need good tools for that. 

This point is crucial, maybe the most important for our organization depending on the tools and the usage we do from them. 

If the company already provides us tools, we better give good use to them, if some tools are not good enough then let's find alternatives. 

To summarize, we need good and reliable tools, not junk that we will never use. 

Stressful situation can happen

Studies confirm that a great percentage of workers say that one of the things that make them dislike the job the most is having to constantly put out fires, or in other words to fix urgent problems that otherwise would cause havoc. These are one of the moments that cause more stress to developer's. But this is out of the employees control and only gets better with how each one of us deals with these moments, maturity and experience helps solving the problems in a competent way.

In extreme cases, of many unjustified stressful situations, it's probably better to find another job.

Having lighthouses to guide us 

Programming notifications to notify us before an event actually happens, prepares our mind before we go into it while at the same time it prevents us from forgetting, which if it happens, will surely not only stress us but everyone involved. 

When there is not much control of the tasks we have to do, it helps to set deadlines and to track the progress.

Telling some colleague about these deadlines and having them, talking to us about it can help us meet the deadlines. They will be, on some sense a lighthouse for us and we should be the same for them. 

I can say from experience, that when there is no clear goals, we can be left without motivation. 

On a previous work i was working alone on the software of the company, no one really cared about it, no one would review the quality of my work, no one would do pair programming with me. 

I got into the trap of demotivation. 

As a last point, i would like to say that even applying all of this points, we need to like what we're doing and to tolerate the people that surround us. If everything is cool, it means we have the minimum conditions to keep doing more and better and being organized is ONE of the things that matters most to accomplish our objectives. 

Sources

https://www.workfront.com/blog/work-organization-tips-30-to-take-you-from-mess-to-master

https://www.the1thing.com/blog/productivity/how-to-get-organized-at-work

Software suggestions 

Many software tool choices are dependent on the flavor of each person. I can say what I actually use at work and what i use on my personal life. But in the end each one of us should use reliable and useful tools.

Email

• Outlook (work) 
• Gmail

Calendarization 

• Microsoft teams (work) 
• Google calendar

Tracking time

• Harvest (work) 
• Clockify 

Meetings and channels

• Microsoft teams (work)
• Zoom 
• Slack 

Notes 

• Office documents (work) 
• Evernote 
• Notepad 

Media cloud repository

• Google drive 
• One drive

Code repository

• Github

Task management and backlog

• Jira attlassian (work) 

Staff management

• Clan HR (work) 

In progress…