Lab 8: Productivity

Productivity (5 min)

In Discord > Everyone

Good developers are productive Links to an external site.. Like in any work, productivity at the individual level means that a person accomplishes important, relevant work for a team in an efficient manner. This means:

• Knowing what's important
• Remembering your responsibilities
• Using time efficiently to meet your responsibilities

Best practices for individual productivity include:

• Tasks
  • Maintaining a single to do list
  • Writing everything you have to do on that list
  • Decomposing big tasks into smaller tasks 
    • (For instance, creating to-do tasks for each of your larger tasks)
  • Reading your to do list every day so you don't forget to do something
• Events
  • Keeping a calendar
  • Putting all scheduled things on the calendar
  • Setting up some form of reminders about when you need to be somewhere

Alas, most of us aren't as productive as we'd like, and don't do many of these things. In fact, many of us are quite aware of how unproductive we are. Today, we interrogate our personal productivity practices and look for opportunities to improve them, both in your teamwork in this class and in the future.

Share your productivity failures (15 min)

In Discord > Random Groups

Take turns sharing the following; 

• Share your best practices for getting work done.
• Share what aspects of these practices you think work for you, and some recent examples of when they were successful.
• Share what aspects of these practices you think are failing you, and some recent examples of how they failed you.

After sharing, brainstorm as a group:

• What's something you think you could do to improve your practices?
• What's a concrete plan for adopting that practice?

Share your productivity ideas with your team (20 min)

In Discord > Teams

With your teammates:

• What's the core behavior you're going to try to address?
• What's your plan for changing that behavior?

Credit (5 min)

Today's lab is worth 2 points. Do two things to get full credit:

• What have you found helpful in staying productive this term, especially now that we're virtual? Post your best productivity pro-tip in the #questions channel on Discord. (1 point)
• Submit a short summary about what you learned today and what you techniques you intend to implement to Canvas. (1 point)