Stack Bytes Edithson Abelard

Welcome to the Stack Bytes podcast. This episode we're going to talk about decreasing complexity to increase productivity with systems and frameworks. It's really important that as you're building your teams that you understand that the sooner you have systems and frameworks in place, the easier it will be for them to function and to work at a higher level. You want to have these systems and frameworks to guide them as they go through their day-to-day development and to give them clarity on how to work and function within a group.

As a Lead developer, it's important that you help your developers be as productive as possible. In this episode, you will learn about 3 Strategies you can use right now to make your developers' day more productive.



Transcript



Welcome to Stack Bites your source for industry news, insights and strategies to level up your software engineering and leadership skills. These strategies and approaches will give you a fast track into building better teams, becoming a better leader, and leveraging emerging technology to impact your business bite by bite. Let's ride.



Welcome to episode one of Stack Bites, how to get the most out of your developer's day. I'm going to cover three ways you can make your developers more productive right now. I'm really excited to share these tips with you, so let's get started.



Let's talk about how we can make the most out of your developer's day. This is going to be three ways that you could make your developer's day the most productive. It's important that you help them schedule their day out or give them some guidance and feedback and some working schedules that they can get used to, be comfortable with, and allow them to be as productive as possible, because that's the end goal, is to allow them to be productive, not work harder, but be productive when they are working.



The first thing, and something that is very important, is to batch and cluster meetings. You want to make sure whether it's in the morning or in the afternoons that you batch and cluster your meetings. If you have a meeting at 1:00 at 3:00 at 5:00 at 2:00 and you just keep randomly scattering meetings, the developers aren't going to be able to focus. They're not going to get their work done.



And if they get into a rhythm and they're moving, they're shaking, and then you stop them for a meeting, they have to wind themselves back up again, get into a rhythm, get into a rhythm, and then boom, you cut them off for another meeting. It's not productive.



So the best thing we want to do is to batch the meetings so that they do have a clear understanding that from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM are all their meetings, maybe 11:30. Then they can have the rest of the day to focus on the tasks at hand. It's very important that they can focus and have blocks of time to develop.



Number two is to make sure that they have a priority list. You want to make sure that they have a list of what they should be working on next and it's clearly defined what's the highest priority and whats the lowest priority.



Throughout the day, they might jump from a high priority to a low priority just to get into the swing of things and having a lot of success can help you solve bigger problems, so it's okay for them to be able to say, I'm working on a high priority item, but it's complicated, it's taking a long time, let me just jump on this low priority item real quick and get that done. That can give them a confidence boost and the energy they need to continue working on the high priority item and really get it done.



Knowing though what to work on and any questions that they have, any resources that they need, having that all in one list just allows them to continue to work. Continue to focus.



Before we go over the last item, remember we covered the importance of clustering meetings. We want our developers to have productive days, and part of that is making sure that they can work continuously. So we cluster all the meetings in one block of time.



And have all of your questions answered in one place. All resources, all descriptions, all tasks, all in one place. It keeps them rolling and flowing and getting things done.



Now the next item I think is so important that it gets overlooked a lot, but it's one that will make the other two so much more powerful and that is relaxation. You have to make sure your developers have the chance to relax and breathe. We're being productive. We don't want them to work hard. We want them to work smart. So tha