# Productivity skills for programmers

DevFeed: [Productivity skills for programmers](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-secret-skills-of-productive-programmers-20989.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://codewithoutrules.com/2020/04/20/productivity-skills/>)

Author: Itamar Turner-Trauring

Published: 2020-04-20T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Itamar Turner-Trauring](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/itamar-turner-trauring.md>)

Topics: [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [coding](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/coding.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>)

Tags: [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [skills](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/skills.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [writing-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/writing-code.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains that programmers cannot complete every task and should prioritize valuable, high-leverage work. It argues that increasing working hours has diminishing returns and that productivity should be measured by useful problem-solving outcomes rather than lines of code.

## Source excerpt

This article was written during abnormal circumstances, with much of the planet under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents with children at home have far less time, and pretty much everyone is feeling stressed and distracted. Under more normal circumstances there are only so many hours in the day to do your job; now it's even worse. And yet work needs to get done: code needs to get written, features need to be shipped, bugs need to be fixed. Faced with an ever growing list of tasks, how do you get everything done? The short answer is, you can't. You will never get everything done. What you can do, though, is choose the right work, the most valuable work, the most useful work, the work with most leverage. Choose the right work and you can gets orders of magnitude improvement in your output. Let's see how. The goal: increased output Your output as a programmer is based both on your productivity and on how much time you work: Output = Productivity x Time Worked The first thing to notice is that there is a hard limit on how much increasing your working hours can help. After all, there are only 168 hours in a week. If you never slept, ate, or did anything but work--and this will literally kill you--you can work 4.2x as much as a 40-hour workweek, and that's it. And even with smaller increases in work hours, the gains quickly decline. As you work more hours you'll become fatigued and make more mistakes; beyond a certain point those extra work hours will decrease your productivity, canceling out any gains. What is output for a programmer? Since increasing working hours isn't really an option, the key to increasing your output is increasing your productivity. Productivity is the output you produce in each fixed unit of time, for example: Productivity = Output per week If you're going to improve your productivity, you need to understand how to measure output. The obvious measure is how much code you write: the more code, the better. This measure is obvious, popular,