Small Practices
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Every modern OS has its default file explorer, and every file explorer has a common functionality called “Bookmarks”. The name might be different on platforms. In Windows Explorer, it is called as Favorites (See the above image).
I think Bookmarks are very useful. Let’s say you have a shared folder located on some remote machine and you visit the folder from time to time. Also say the path of the folder is a little deep like “\\some-file-server\path\to\folder\you\access\at\times” so it’s not so easy to remember.
Bookmarking for this kind of folder as well as folders more frequently you access are a good idea. And just one click lets you instantly access those folders.
But I see some people who simply ignore this useful feature. Their bookmarks items are as the same as the default. And they just insist on clicking one by one to their destination folder every time. Some people just ignore tiny little time they are wasting.
Talking about file explorers, file explorer of multi-pane might enhance your work efficiency. Q-Dir on Windows is one of those tools. I love it.
When you use Windows Explorerer (default file explorer on Windows), jumping across multiple folders usually consists of extra more clicks but tools like Q-Dir will remove those unnecessary hassles for you. Another tools such as clipboard managers or virtual desktop application may save you a little bit of time at work. Also, doing your jobs with only sequence of shortcut keys without using your mouse (so called mouseless programming) will give you some efficiency. I even have got my fingertips so naturally familiar with pressing combination key sequences such as “Control + Shift + F4” that I don’t have to peek my keyboard.
Do those small practices matter?
You may think “So what? Such small time saving is a big deal?”…
Time saving of each small practice may not be such a big deal. But an aggregate all of each small trick may end up significant time saving. Even if you can save only a few seconds per each small practice, total of them may prevent you from wasting more than 30 minutes a day, and more than 80 hours a year. Still, 80 hours a year may not be a big deal, but nobody knows the otherwise wasted time may be even more bigger than you imagine!
The more important fact is that you don’t have so many other options with which you can save your time at work. Can you recommend other better practices that can easily save you a lot of time at a personal practice level?
Behavioral Practices
Actually, other kinds of practice exist, but they may require you to have some kind of self-discipline.
Steve Maguire introduced a simple useful practice in his book “Debugging the Development Process”. He noticed that some programmers allowed e-mail readers running all the time, which somehow constantly interrupted their work. If you receive every incoming e-mail every 5 minutes in average, that means you get distraction every 5 minutes in average. So he recommends e-mail respondence in batches, that you read mails in the morning, when coming from launch, right before leaving the work. This simple practice may give you a long continuous uninterrupted time frame and eventually, more effectively concentrated time for your job.
I call these kinds of practice Behavioral Practices because they require you to change your habit or behavior or discipline. I think they are useful and worth a try. But distractions for your work efficiency are more than e-mail at your work environment. Also it is sometimes hard to tell which is a mere unnecessary distraction for you, or which is necessary one. And some distractions are what you can’t even deal with your discretion such as regular interrupts from your careless boss.
Practices of organizational or team level
Some organizational level of practices will actually give you (and your team) a lot of work efficiency, but they are absolutely out of your personal boundary.
Agile methodologies, switching to a better source code control system, switching to a better knowledge base system, etc. might be all good and effective and can end up a lot of time saving. But to practice those techniques, many people in your team should agree (especially a powerful person like your boss) and if the culture or situation of your organization simply doesn’t agree with them, they can’t be even started.
Talking about these high level practices here may be off topic (I’m talking about personal level of useful practices in this article), but my point is this:
Really powerful practices usually come with more pain and risk and discipline no matter which level the practices can be categorized.
Once I advocated switching the source code management system for the team from MS SourceSafe to Subversion when I used to work for one of my previous employers long ago. But persuading my boss was so hard even though Subversion was already good proven better software and SourceSafe was already too outdated even at that time. He simply rejected my idea. Maybe my persuading strategy had a problem. Later, another employee joined our team. He hated SourceSafe even so much and pushed his idea of switching to SVN. I didn’t know why but it worked this time!
Anyway we could switch to SVN with our joint effort of him and me. But as usual, the benefit of switching that kind of infrastructural tool doesn’t come at a short time frame. Also some people still would practice their old habits. When we used SourceSafe, nobody wrote commit messages at all! (maybe shocking to some readers…) Even if we switched to a new tool, such habits remained. So I implemented a SVN hook and blocked every commit with no message. Writing commit messages are absolutely necessary for the long term benefits as all of you are well aware, but it might’ve been some trouble or hassle for some people at the team until they finally got into the habit of writing meaningful messages for their commits.
Sometimes organizational level of practices should fight this kind of old habits, biases, or cultural ideas having been rooted for a long time. I always think organizational or team level of practices are usually worth a try and they are potentially the biggest boost in terms of production efficiency. But once again, they come with pain and risk and discipline which some people in your team might be afraid of. But still, worth a try.
Conclusion.
Just leveraging simple small practices(such as bookmarking some folders you visit frequently or at times) usually work even if the positive outcome of each is very small. But I see too many people just ignore them and simply practice nothing. They argue whether or not doing those tiny tricks doesn’t make a big deal (usually, they’re saying that without even trying). At the same time, they may suggest you alternative ways that may produce better results. But we often see their suggestions are powerful enough, but might involve other prerequisites. (e.g. Your team should agree with you, or other additional infra is necessary to do that, etc)
Of course, when you believe there is a more powerful practice to boost your team or yourself, you need to push. It’s always worth a try. I’m not against that idea. But you can’t tell it’s ever going to work especially the practices are out of your personal boundary. While you consider a significant and powerful solution for your job efficiency, considering easy small practices to save your valuable time is also important.
Just do save a few extra seconds you can easily save! It doesn’t matter you stick to some powerful methodologies such as Agile or XP or Functional Programming. While sticking to those good practices, but I recommend you do not ignore other small time saving practices.