The most wonderful topic for a small Friday-Wednesday feuilleton (well, if you start writing it on Friday, when nothing else comes to mind, and finish it on Wednesday, when the cerebral forces are maximally activated there) is the productivity of knowledge workers, and us programmers in particular.

So, about productivity. Let’s consider the factors that directly or indirectly influence it and order them in order of importance.

Firstly, perhaps, the productivity of programmers is directly proportional to the efficiency of higher management. This includes competent setting of tasks, monitoring their implementation, motivation, rewards, and a whole host of other things that are called management. If the fish’s head is in order, the rest will also swim in the right direction and at the right speed. This is certain.

If you look a few more heads above – or simply ask the immediate manager the rhetorical question “why?” – you can see another level that affects performance. There are internal and external projects, necessary and seemingly not very necessary. Making a project that will turn into a new product, be it a website, a mobile application or a box with light bulbs and motors, which will be used by millions of people, is much more interesting and exciting than supporting a long-term bearded project that, according to rumors, is used by someone in your accounting department A new product can be improved, or you can start from scratch, taking into account your accumulated and other experience. However, this is another fine line of that same motivation.

When everything is in order with motivation and management, physical limitations of the workplace may emerge, such as a small monitor, slow Internet for connecting to the customer’s servers via VPN, and lack of memory or processor speed. Perhaps, eliminating some of these limitations is quite an expensive, but really effective measure: moving your gaze to another monitor takes disproportionately less time than switching applications; a test that runs for five minutes instead of a couple of hours obviously doesn’t give social media a chance to take over you.

YouTube, FB, VK, coub.com, Lurkmore, and all sorts of things. What to do about it? To ban or not? Each employer resolves this issue in its own way, but, based on my own experience, I will say that prohibiting access to social networks negatively affects the atmosphere in the company, no matter what management says about this. If a developer has a task and there are no obstacles outlined above, he works on it, regardless of his news feed. If there is a task, but he does not complete it, this is a completely different question, also not related to social networks.

The next point is how long can a person work productively on a task, being fully motivated and equipped with everything necessary? It turns out that not all 8 hours a day, as the employment contract naively suggests. The human brain needs rest, periodic changes in activity. Here I envy the workers of large factories a little, who have to clock up kilometers of workshops and staircases every day. Smokers also benefit here by making their hourly walks to and from the smoking area.

But what should we, ordinary programmers, do, to maintain the desired pace? Several very simple measures have proven effective:

• Regular ventilation of the room. Hang a chart on the wall to ventilate every hour or so. Even if someone forgets, someone else will definitely remember and raise up everyone else!
• Kitchen. You can go there to get some fresh air, or you can just relax and talk with colleagues. A fantastic place – it has been noticed that after returning to the workplace you usually want to work, and you work, and well!
• Sports breaks. If you have a tennis table, it’s just a godsend! A fifteen-minute break will give you a boost of energy for the next couple of hours – verified!
• “Pomodoro technique” – cutting working time into pieces of 25 minutes. Helps, but can also be distracting if you’re in a flow state; In this case, the time can be cut into larger pieces.

Flow state. For some this is reality, for others, it is simply a term denoting a mythical state of super-working ability that occurs under some miraculous circumstances. Be that as it may, this phenomenon exists, and perhaps some of your colleagues may be experiencing it. Our task is to try not to “tear” them out of this state; seeing that they are completely immersed in the task, do not ask them verbally about something very important, but, for example, use Skype.

By the way, there is another catastrophic distraction from work matters, which is turned on for most unsuspecting victims – these are sound or pop-up reminders about incoming mail, turned on by default in every email client. Turn it off – and may your life be easier and calmer. By the way, if you haven’t heard about Maxim Dorofeev’s Jedi techniques– it’s time to do it! Don’t turn Outlook into Skype!🙂

Dependence of productivity on time of day . It is believed that, all other things being equal, the most productive time is before noon. Accordingly, the requirement to start the working day no later than 9..10 am is due, among other things, to physiological reasons.

Do you feel like your productivity is inexorably declining? Drink a cup of freshly ground aromatic coffee in the company of your colleagues in the kitchen! By the way, did you know that by drinking moderate amounts of coffee (up to five cups a day), you strengthen your circulatory system?

What about vacation? How much does your productivity drop before you go on vacation? How well do you work immediately after it? It turns out that according to a study , the amount of unproductive time spent doubles two months before the start of vacation. On the contrary, after going back to work, the share of unproductive time spent in the first month or two turns out to be 20..30% less than usual… But, alas, you can make everyone happy by replacing visas with vouchers to a departmental sanatorium only after returning for thirty years -forty ago.. And what kind of IT outsourcers could there be in our country then?.. So, you will have to come to terms with this – or, perhaps, open your own branch in the Dominican Republic, with mandatory annual business trips.

Finally, we should not forget about banal sleep, proper nutrition, and room lighting. I can recommend the interesting post “ From the point of view of science: what to do to think normally“- I agree with absolutely everything in it, except for the thesis about the usefulness of palm oil. However, that’s a completely different story.!🙂