Productivity as a software engineer isn’t just about cranking out more code—it’s about working smarter, staying focused, and constantly refining how you work. In this post, I want to share six simple yet practical strategies that have genuinely helped me stay productive and balanced. These aren’t abstract ideas or buzzwords, but real habits and approaches that make it easier to deliver good work without burning out along the way.
1. Always work from a list
Have your todo list of tasks ready the day before or every morning. This will help you with a clear roadmap to get your tasks done.
Make sure the list is ordered by priority (highest priority first) and do not pick up a low priority task when a high priority task is incomplete. Exception being if the low priority task takes less than 2 minutes.
Think strategically, act tactically.
Plan like an engineer and then code like a programmer.
2. Track time spent on each tasks
We need to be aware of on which tasks we are spending our time. For this its important to track your time on each task.
You can you a sophisticated time tracker or just add a nested bullet point in your task list with the time spent in sessions and define a session duration for yourself and set a timer, when it goes off increment the session.
- [ ] Write code
- Sessions(25 min): 2
Its pretty simple but effective.
Simplicity scales, complexity fails.
3. Ask questions & doubt upfront
Whenever we are getting a task assigned ask the clarifying questions upfront and do not wait for trying all the approaches and then clarifying your doubts, this will only slow you down.
And if the assigner is busy you have to wait on them to proceed anyway, so why not just ask doubts upfront.
4. Don’t be stuck
Asking for help is a skill and as software engineers its pretty important. We all can figure out a problem given enough time, but thats the luxury we don’t have. We need to ship fast. So if you are stuck for more than 1 session ask for help to some one who knows the technology or the problem.
5. Understanding the code you write
In this age of AI its pretty easy to out source the boring parts to AI, prompt -> copy paste code -> everything works.
But theres a problem, if we have a problem in the future that build on this problem, we won’t be able to figure it out as easily as if we had stoped and took some time to understand the solution from the AI, if the approach was novel enough maybe even took some notes.
We need to think with the bigger picture in mind, we need to grow as a software engineer.
6. Taking notes for concepts that are new to you
Notes will save you a lot of time when you encounter a problem you’ve encountered a similar problem before.
We have all been there, we have a problem, after a lot of research we solve it, after a while we again have the same problem, we know we had found a solution to it but do not remember the solution, now we have to do the entire research process again.
If we are just a bit disciplined in taking notes on things that are new to us and that we can easily forget, we don’t have to worry about such problems.
Bonus: Writing notes help consolidate and clarify our own thoughts.
Conclusion
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are the things that keep me productive throughout the day as a software engineer.