Developer Productivity Systems Course — updated.
TLDR; Developers think of productivity as learning their IDE and the command line — but maybe they don’t think of personal project management. Affiliate link to a course I wrote in this post. Coupon code of “jamesbowen” for 30% off a membership of your chosen length. But until May 10th, you can use a coupon code of ‘TEACHER60’ for a 60% discount.
Intro
During lockdown in Melbourne, I took the time to publish an audio course for the company Listenable, who specialise in bite-sized audio courses for the time-poor. I have been trying to get the message out there, and found it easier to use an existing platform and see what the uptake is.
About Listenable
The idea is that you listen when you commute/talk a stroll, or whatever works for you, and the courses range from philosophy to business networking to speech writing. It’s no secret that I think soft-skills play a large part in a developers career, hence I produced a course with developers specifically in mind. If you use the above link with a coupon code of “jamesbowen” you’ll get 30% off the entire membership, not just off my course.
Aside: a subscription also covers other career skills
I included a screen grab of the number of courses available. The reason being that on my own blog, I make a point of supplementing my own hard technical skills with general career skills — so there’s heaps to choose from.
So why do you need a productivity system?
My experience of other developers view on productivity is as mostly restricted to using the command line and knowing IDE shortcuts. Hardly surprising, I suppose, when we have very technical backgrounds and focused work.
But a good developer productivity systems cover much more than just avoiding the mouse and automating repetitive work, as important as those things are. In fact precisely because we are are so focused on technical work we often don’t consider:
- Gatekeeping commitments — saying no to things without looking like we’re being difficult, and rather that we’re adding value.
- How to focus — Slack is my current kryptonite to my productivity,and work insists we use it.
- Having a way of offloading project planning and actions from your brain and freeing you up for actual coding. Somewhere to come back to.
- Related to the above, how productivity systems such as GTD can be implemented.
- The power of mind-mapping.
- How to track deadlines and see what’s in the pipeline — otherwise development tends to fall into reacting and putting out fires.
- How to manage ‘me-time’ for self-improvement.
In short, a lot of developers tend to be reactive rather than pro-active but only because they’ve never been shown any different way.
The course I put together therefore covers tips for all the above.
So, I thought, the best way to get the message out there was to put it on a larger platform and start promoting that. It took me years to refine a system for my own career advancement, and I think you could really benefit from at least some of the elements I advocate!
A final word
If you have any questions on developer productivity (there are many facets after all), I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.
