Getting Things Done
published on 9/23/2008 6:51:18 PM




Often people email me and ask how do I get so much work done and still enjoy time with my family and friends. In case you are wondering what I do here is the brief list:

Publishing articles on GridViewGuy
Writing blog post for my blog
Creating videos for ScreenCastADay
Occasionally answering questions on www.asp.net forums
Working on a pet project

The list might not be that long but it takes some time to manage all these tasks. Here are few pointers to manage your day and get things done.

1) Don’t multi-task:

This might sounds strange but please don’t multi-tasks. Multitasking sounds like we are getting more work done but the reality is that nothing gets done. If you have assigned a task then finish that task first before proceeding to the next one. Remember, every grain of sand passes one by one in the hour glass.

2) Don’t Listen to Music when performing/Learning a New Thing:

Listening to music is fine when the task you are performing is repetitive and does not require much thinking. A good example will be writing your own data access layer using ADO.NET. When you are learning a new thing or performing an important task then take off your headphones and concentrate 100% on the task. You can even go further and ask yourself questions on how to solve the problem. Don’t ask yourself too loudly or your cube neighbor will think you are a psycho.

3) Get up early:

Time is constant for everyone. No matter how rich or poor you are everyone gets 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. Make use of your time and be more productive. Wake up early start learning new things. You will notice that you can learn much more in the morning than during the whole day. This is because you will be fresh from the last night sleep and there won’t be any disturbances.

4) Exercise:

I cannot emphasize on this more! We program for passion, money, love etc but one important thing that we leave out is health. No matter how good you are in programming and how rich you are if you don’t have heath you don’t have anything. I have started swimming recently and it is the best decision I made. I feel energetic, focused and confident.

5) Outsource:

You cannot learn everything! If you are a developer then it is quite possible that you will be sucky in user interface design. You can spend hours and hours trying to pull off a good interface but it is quite reasonable to outsource the work to someone who knows how to perform the job. I am currently using RentACoder for my new project to perform some of my design work.

6) Close Emails, Chatting, Twitter, FaceBook etc:

When you are working then you are working! Stop wasting time on checking your emails every 10 minutes, chatting with friends while online or sending uninformative messages on Twitter. Email is not supposed to be instant chatting. Try limiting yourself to checking emails 3 times a day. According to a research US losses about 2 billion dollars every year because of this email checking disease.