As a Lead developer, it's important that you help your developers be as productive as possible. In this episode, you will learn about 3 Strategies you can use right now to make your developers' day more productive.

Transcript

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Welcome to episode one of Stack Bites, how to get the most out of your developer's day. I'm going to cover three ways you can make your developers more productive right now. I'm really excited to share these tips with you, so let's get started.

Let's talk about how we can make the most out of your developer's day. This is going to be three ways that you could make your developer's day the most productive. It's important that you help them schedule their day out or give them some guidance and feedback and some working schedules that they can get used to, be comfortable with, and allow them to be as productive as possible, because that's the end goal, is to allow them to be productive, not work harder, but be productive when they are working.

The first thing, and something that is very important, is to batch and cluster meetings. You want to make sure whether it's in the morning or in the afternoons that you batch and cluster your meetings. If you have a meeting at 1:00 at 3:00 at 5:00 at 2:00 and you just keep randomly scattering meetings, the developers aren't going to be able to focus. They're not going to get their work done.

And if they get into a rhythm and they're moving, they're shaking, and then you stop them for a meeting, they have to wind themselves back up again, get into a rhythm, get into a rhythm, and then boom, you cut them off for another meeting. It's not productive.

So the best thing we want to do is to batch the meetings so that they do have a clear understanding that from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM are all their meetings, maybe 11:30. Then they can have the rest of the day to focus on the tasks at hand. It's very important that they can focus and have blocks of time to develop.

Number two is to make sure that they have a priority list. You want to make sure that they have a list of what they should be working on next and it's clearly defined what's the highest priority and whats the lowest priority.

Throughout the day, they might jump from a high priority to a low priority just to get into the swing of things and having a lot of success can help you solve bigger problems, so it's okay for them to be able to say, I'm working on a high priority item, but it's complicated, it's taking a long time, let me just jump on this low priority item real quick and get that done. That can give them a confidence boost and the energy they need to continue working on the high priority item and really get it done.

Knowing though what to work on and any questions that they have, any resources that they need, having that all in one list just allows them to continue to work. Continue to focus.

Before we go over the last item, remember we covered the importance of clustering meetings. We want our developers to have productive days, and part of that is making sure that they can work continuously. So we cluster all the meetings in one block of time.

And have all of your questions answered in one place. All resources, all descriptions, all tasks, all in one place. It keeps them rolling and flowing and getting things done.

Now the next item I think is so important that it gets overlooked a lot, but it's one that will make the other two so much more powerful and that is relaxation. You have to make sure your developers have the chance to relax and breathe. We're being productive. We don't want them to work hard. We want them to work smart. So that means getting up, stretching. It could be yoga classes throughout the day. It can be having a gym in the facility. Or it could just be going out for a walk. You want to encourage your developers to give their brain some time off.

Being productive does not mean working hard. It does not mean working at every point of the day. It doesn't mean working nine or 10 hours straight, no breaks, eating at your desk. No. Being productive is about completing your tasks and doing your work in a effective manner for the time that you're working. Encourage it. You must encourage it as a lead, as a CTO. You must encourage that your developers take some time to walk stretch your legs, get comfortable.

We are at a desk for a long majority of the day. If you can, get them standing desks so they can switch between standing and sitting and being comfortable and going out. It's important that they relax because once your brain relaxes, if you ever watch somebody who is tense all the time, they're just like… Their body reacts to that. Your body stays tense. But once you relax and you just breathe, your flow, your energy, your critical thinking skills are amplified when your body can just relax.

A lot of these more productive, not just big, but productive companies, they bring in people to help their developers. They bring in masseuse to make sure that they have massages throughout the day just to relax their body and get them in a calm and more relaxed state. They bring in yoga instructors, which I've done that a lot, have the yoga instructors. Although I'm a little tight, my muscles need a little more stretching. Having that moment where you can take 40 minutes and just go through some breathing exercises and have just some stretching.

They're still going to be thinking. Your mind is still going to be racing. But we're going to slow it down and your critical thinking is going to go up and in that relaxed state, your developers are going to be able to be a lot more effective, which is going to amplify their ability to focus and get their questions answered during meetings. So the meetings are more productive. It's going to allow them to be able to focus on whatever high priority, or low priority, tasks they are currently working on, and get the most out of that particular time.

Relaxation is very key and it's important that, once again, that you push it as their lead. As the senior developers or even as a CTO, you have to push the importance of relaxing. It amplifies the other ones.

I have so much more information for you to help you support your developers, and the best way to do that is to join our weekly newsletter. In that newsletter, I'm going to give you insights and strategies to help promote better health for your developers, productivity, and industry insights on all the newest trends, techniques, and strategies to help your team stay on top of the evolving industry that we're in. The best way to do that is to check out the newsletter in the description below.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Stack Bites. Subscribe now on your favorite podcasting platform to get instant access to our weekly episodes. Looking for even more content and a community of like-minded individuals? Check out edithsonabelard.com/community. That's edithsonabelard.com/community.

More Resources

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