I think it's befitting I talk about productivity on a day when we're supposed to be kicking back and relaxing (for some of us). I recently learnt about a quote from Peter Drucker that says "What gets measured get managed" and the preciseness of this quote struck me as it affects the average person. A lot of times as professionals, developers especially, we don't exactly quantify our time. Burnout is largely a consequence of poor time management which occurs as a result of the inability to measure how much time we spend doing things that are very important to us and things that are somewhat less important.
THE BIG REALIZATION
I was able to get better at writing the day I realized that it takes me an average of one hour to make a post on Hashnode. Prior to that realization, I ran with the assumption that it took me twenty minutes! and it cost me in many ways that I couldn't exactly put a finger on. Because of that realization, I was able to properly plan my time in such a way that I carve out an entire hour to doing this. It improved my work and it helped reduce the pressure on me which was as a result of overbooking my time around the period when I write. This realization also led me to question how much time I spend doing other things that I think I'm able to do instantly, such as brushing my teeth, taking a shower, grabbing a meal, deciding on what to wear and other seemingly insignificant activities that require some level of thought, time and action.
TIME MANAGEMENT HELPS US BREAK DOWN UNCERTAIN CODING CHALLENGES
There's a lot of talk about being money conscious, I also feel there should be more talk on being time conscious. Being able to accurately account for our time can help us properly optimize our productivity as we're able to understand how much time it takes us to do certain activities and properly assign those activities to a specific time period. As developers, debugging software solutions and learning are two activities that can take us between 2 minutes and 2 months and it's hard to tell how long it'll take at the start of said activities when we're about to start. With better time quantification plans, one can break down activities into time chunks and insert them at different periods of our day depending on our schedule.
FINALLY...
I also learnt about our fluctuating productivity cycle; depending on whether or not one is a morning person or a night owl, we have periods when we're at peak efficiency. By being able to measure our time properly, it becomes easier to allocate our toughest tasks to periods in time when our efficiency is at its highest. A lot of issues from procrastination to burnout would be greatly reduced if we understand our time and are able to properly measure what we do. Luckily, developers have applications that help us track how much time we spend writing code. It doesn't however cover how much time we spend making research, which is why we need to consciously monitor these things as time flies really fast when we get into a deep work state.