4 Tips To Maximise Work Productivity As A Software Dev So You Can Focus On Side-Projects

2 min readApr 23, 2022

You get a maximum of 4 hours of peak focus per day.

Let that sink in. You cannot use all that time for your day job. As a developer, you need to learn to be more productive, so you spend less time at your job. Here are four tips to do that:

#1 Keep actionable tasks near you:

What’s the next action on this task?

Non-descriptive, general tasks will make you procrastinate because you don’t know where to start. With a general task, ask, “What’s the next action on this?” usually it will be:

Research X
Ask somebody
Implement Y

#2 Breakdown big tasks:

Avoid general tasks like “Build dashboard.”

Your brain doesn’t know how to “build a dashboard,” but most likely it knows how to research a design system for the new dashboard or create a Next Js repo for the dashboard.

Break down big general tasks into small and actionable pieces.

#3 Communicate with the team:

The tech world is very dynamic. What was critical yesterday doesn’t matter today.

Always check in with your colleagues and manager/PM to ensure you are working on areas with real impact. Two hours spent on critical issues are more valuable than two days spent on nice-to-haves.

#4 Delegate whenever possible:

Teaching a younger dev to do your job is a win-win.

By doing this you create better people for your company, and you create more time for yourself. Never be the dev that goes to his programming cave and comes out with the final product. Communicate and delegate.

Finally, you’ll get better if you keep working on side-projects.

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