Reader, productivity is one of the most important qualities for every developer.

If you use the right productivity approach, you can work faster (make more 💸 in less time), build side hustles and have enough time for your personal life.

In this email, I'll break down 3 key things that help me to be a productive developer.

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🎉 1 year of newsletter

It's crazy, but it's been 1 whole year since I started this newsletter.

HUGE THANKS to everyone who has been here since the beginning and to everyone who joined us!

We are at 7000 active readers, which is insane!

I promise to keep being consistent and improving my emails every week! Thanks for being with me ❤️!

Throughout this year I shared almost everything that I know about building a successful IT career and NEVER missed a single weekly email.

That's actually the first productivity tip for today.

BE CONSISTENT.

If you do one thing for long enough you'll automatically become better with it and will be doing it faster.

Initially, those emails were way shorter and were taking me way more time to write.

Now I'm able to share more and faster just because over time I developed a framework for writing emails.

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Use Tools

There are thousands of different productivity apps and tools.

It's hard to choose which ones to use, but as soon as you find 2-5 different apps and learn how to use them, it'll help you to be more productive.

I personally use:

• Claude AI - AI for faster coding
• Jira + Notes - Managing my tasks
• Brain fm - Music for focus
• Loom - recording quick videos instead of meetings
• Notion - database with my plans, ideas, learnings, documentation

I recommend starting with Notion to note down your ideas and new things that you are learning, with time you'll learn how to organise it well.

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Plan

You won't be productive in life or in coding if you don't know what to do.

A clear plan helps you to focus on your goals.

When you don't have a clear plan, or you have it but don't execute it, you'll keep switching between shiny opportunities and won't succeed anywhere.

For example, if you decided that you want to learn React. Then don't switch to another framework until you finish learning React.

It doesn't matter what someone has said on social media, if you decide to do something, DO NOT SWITCH UNTIL YOU FINISH.

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Rest

The very important part of being productive is resting.

You can work on full for a couple of days, but you'll burn out pretty quickly.

If you want to be productive long-term it's essential to take breaks.

What works perfectly for me is:

• Wake up and work with full focus for 2 hours
• Eat breakfast (20-30 min break)
• Full focus work for 3 more hours
• 20-30 min coffee break
• 4 hours work
• 2 hours for sport (ex. gym)
• 2 more hours of work (you should have some energy after sport, but you can skip it if you are tired)
• 3 hours of resting/watching movies
• 7 hours of sleep
• Done!

In total you have 9-11 hours of focused work, while still staying healthy and having some breaks for sport (2 hours), coffee (30 mins), family and resting (3+ hours).

Feel free to adjust it based on your schedule and mood (you don't have to be like a robot every day), but you got the idea.

It's hard to stay super productive for more than 4 hours, so it's better to have two/three 4-hour working blocks combined with resting.

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Conclusion

Productivity is quite simple.

Do not overcomplicate it.

Action tip: wake up tomorrow, write the plan for the day, take small breaks and just CRUSH IT!

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Content

For the last 2 years, I have been building my own business from 0 as a developer.

I tried a lot of different things and made a bunch of mistakes.

Last week I published a new video, FULL GUIDE on how to start a business as a developer, you can watch it by clicking here or by clicking on the image below:

It includes everything I wish I knew about building a business as a full-time developer.

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See ya next week 👋!

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Best regards,

Andrew "Productivity HaCkEr" Zacker

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