How to Hack Productivity to Have More Time for Coding

Life’s become a bit hectic, we’re always on the go, running from home to work, to school, glued to our smartphones & bombarding our minds with an onslaught of useless facts when at the same time suffering from a continuous fragmented attention span. We are truly convinced that it’s next to impossible to find 5 minutes a day to put our feet up and relax, let alone find time for a coding bootcamp! Nothing’s further from the truth, we’ll show you a few simple ways that will inevitably boost your productivity and save you time. Once you follow our general tips, the sky’s the limit!

We’ve come up with a cheat sheet of 5 smart tips that will save you at least an hour a day, in some cases even more.

One of the first steps is to define what day to day tasks are the most important to you. Write a list and take a closer look, you will be shocked to find out that about 70% of your time is wasted on unimportant tasks.

1. Get a Timer and Measure which Task is Taking up Most of Your Time

This is the most basic tip. At first, it might seem like a chore but you will quickly notice the benefits. Write down each task you have to complete each day and time it. You can simply note down every 15 minutes what you’d been doing for the past quarter of an hour. You’re probably asking yourself if it’s worth it. You’ll end up with a list of activities that can be broken down into different categories i.e. household chores, time-wasters, work, study time, commuting, entertainment etc. You can put it in excel, even create a graph, if you feel particularly creative, to clearly see which activity is taking the majority of your time. This is one of the first steps towards a positive change.

2. Which Activities are Pure Time-Wasters and Should Be Taken out of Your Daily Routine?

The easiest step would be to eliminate an activity that takes up the most time. The problem that might crop up is that you deem that activity way too important. What should we do in case we find out that we’re spending most of our spare time on private meetups, does that mean that we should totally abandon our friends and become a recluse?

You don’t have to go to the extreme by erasing your friends’ numbers from your phone, locking yourself in your room for the duration of the bootcamp, nothing of that sort :)! You can adapt and change your habits, reach a compromise by changing the frequency of your night outs, seeing your friends once a fortnight instead of once a week. The best way is to focus on time-wasters like Netflix, social media apps, aimlessly browsing through YouTube videos at 1 am in the morning, rather than trying to eliminate an activity that is way too important for your wellbeing.

3. Organise Your Chores at Home and Save 70 Hours Per Year

Once you’re done with the exercise from the point number 1, you will realise that the household chores will usually occupy a big chunk of your spare time. This includes all the activities you can’t really run away from (well, we definitely don’t advise that) like taking a shower, having dinner, cleaning or doing shopping. Is there a way to save time on your household chores you would ask? Absolutely!

When it comes to grocery shopping, you can simply do it online, making sure the retailer can deliver them to your doorstep. You could also create a shopping list and do your weekly shop at the weekend. That might easily save you up to 1h 45m per week, which means around 6 hours per month and 70 hours per year!

What about cooking? Some prefer to eat out, others prefer to order takeaway online, it’ll definitely save you time but your wallet will cry! If you prefer to make your own meals, check out some simple recipes & bulk prepare your food during the weekends so that you don’t have to rack your brains every day trying to figure out what to make for dinner. It’ll save you heaps of time. Once you get into the habit of cooking and shopping once a week you will be astounded at the amount of time that you can save.

4. Commuting Doesn’t Have to Be Boring, Think Strategically!

If you’re one of our Students you will definitely find online studying quite convenient. You don’t have to commute anywhere and you can simply avoid getting stuck in traffic wasting precious minutes of your hectic 24-hour schedule.

However, it’s not that straightforward when it comes to getting into your work day in, day out. It’s true that it might be hard to change where you live, but you could take into account moving houses, next to your office, to cut the commuting time if that’s an option for you. The rule of thumb is, try to do most of the things locally. You can scan the area to find the closest shops, gyms, pubs, restaurants, that might save you multiple trips to the city centre.

If commuting is the only option, don’t waste it! There is still a lot we could do to save time when stuck on the bus or tram trying to get from A to B. You can check and answer emails for work, read a book about programming, listen to music to get some headspace and recharge your batteries or simply chat to a friend on your phone. You could also combine exercise with commuting, simply hop on a bike and ride to work or google the quickest route when walking. If you’re a driver you can listen to ebooks or various podcasts.

If there is a way to cut the commuting time in your schedule this could potentially be one of the main tasks you could eliminate from the list in order to gain more time, so focus on being more strategic about your daily commute.

5. Avoid Multitasking to Get More Done in Less Amount of Time

We tend to think that multitasking is a great time-saver when in fact it’s been reported that it’s not really that good for our brains. It’s not possible to give the same amount of focus to two different tasks, hence sometimes multitasking is called ‘task switching’ as we’re switching from one activity to another. Multitasking can result in sloppy results as we’re not paying full attention to either of the task.

To test yourself and prove that multitasking can be a waste of time, get a sheet of paper, a pen and a timer. Prepare to write two sets of lines. In the first line write C from ‘Coding Bootcamps Are Awesome’ and underneath C write 1, go back to the first line and write o, then 2 underneath, finish writing the sentence. Note down the time from the timer to find out how long it took you to write both lines. Now time yourself writing each line separately, I bet you will come up with much shorter time when compared to the first exercise!

Time-saving techniques can vary, the most important is to focus on what really matters and identify time-wasters. There is always a way to find more time for coding. We’ve made our own list of daily activities and we found out that we could potentially save 112 minutes on time-wasters and 82 minutes on other tasks! Don’t waste another minute, get a pen and start measuring what takes up the most of your time. You’ll be shocked how much you could save in a day and dedicate that saved time to your passion. Don’t hesitate to share your own time-saving tips in the comments below :)

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