Have you ever been working on a project when a support issue came up? You spend time working on fixing their problem. Five minutes, one hour or even a couple hours you have it solved and fixed. Your customer is happy. You return to your programming project. Now, you can’t even remember where you left off.

Interruptions like support issues, coworkers asking questions or meetings can prevent you from staying focused on your work. What can you do to help concentrate on your work?

You can manage the things you can control like environment, distractions and time management.

Environment

Whether you work from home or in an office, you can control certain things about your workspace.

Chair, desk and computer

You will spend a lot of time sitting at a desk. Your chair and desk should be comfortable for you to work at. If it isn’t, ask for a different one. Consider buying cushions or pillows to help support your back. You can ask for keyboard trays and monitor risers to adjust the height of your computer monitor and keyboard. Or switch to using a standing desk.

Are you warm or cool enough?

Most offices are not comfortable for everyone. Some people are either too cold or too hot. You may want to bring in blankets, sweaters, space heaters or even a fan to make yourself comfortable.

Do you like to listen to music while you work?

Music can help you work. Choose the type of music that inspires and motivates you while you work.

Keep water handy

Water helps you stay alert and hydrated. Dehydration can affect your ability to focus. You want to drink water while you are working.

Distractions

Your phone and emails can affect your productivity. You can manage how you use your phone and how often you check your email.

Your phone

You can make your phone less distracting. Consider putting your phone in silent mode and choose to look at it durning specific times per day. Or install an app that allows you to control how you use your phone.

Emails

Emails can demand your attention. How often to you check your email? If you don’t know the answer, you make be checking it too often. Try these tips for managing your emails.

Time Management

Find a time management strategy that works for you. You can try the Pomodoro technique, Time Blocking or 80/20 rule. Each one of these strategies helps you to manage your time, stay focused on your task and limit distractions.

Staying focus throughout the day can be challenging. By managing your environment, time and distractions like your phone, you can stay focused on your tasks much easier.

Do you manage your time or does it manage you? If you are like a lot of people, time manages you. As a developer, you need to handle distractions, projects and people. It can be difficult to manage distractions, maintain focus and get your work done.

How can you maintain your productivity? You can try these tips below to improve your focus and get things done.

Manage Interruptions and Distractions

You have to deal with distractions like Email, Social Media, notifications and more. Here’s a few things that you can try:

• Decide when you are going to look at Email. You may want to look at email once or twice a day.
• Mute all notifications from Slack and Social Media.
• Put your phone away.
• If you work in an office, close your door. Or put up a sign letting them know that you are working on a project and need to focus.

You don’t have to stay stuck on a problem

When you are coding, you can run into a problem that you can’t solve. No matter what you try it doesn’t fix it. When that happens, you can take a short break. Five to ten minutes away from the problem can really help. If a break doesn’t work, try working on something else. Doing something simple and easy can be the break that you need.

Create a library of code snippets

You’ll find yourself using the same snippet of code over and over again. Instead of searching your repos for it, you can create a library of snippets. By having a library, you can search and use those snippets faster.

Here’s a few ways to store your snippets:

• Use a folder on your hard drive
• If you write code in Visual Studio, you can collect code snippets with Code Snippets Manager
• Use online tools like CodePen and Github.
• CSS-Tricks has a collection of code snippets

Schedule and Take Breaks

When you are in the coding zone, you can forget to take breaks. If you try to push through a project without a break, you could burnout. To avoid forgetting, you can schedule your breaks. When you take a break and how long depends on which productivity method you prefer.

When you take a break, don’t start a new task. Take the time to get away from your computer. Stretch, walk, get some water or coffee.

Plan out your tasks

Why plan out your tasks? Planning helps you to know what you want to do and prevents you from forgetting things. You can use a to-do list, a bullet journal or an app like Trello to plan and track your tasks. Whatever method you use, it can help you get more done.

Pomodoro Techinque

When you have a long list of programming tasks, it can be hard to finish them and meet deadlines. The Pomodoro Techinque helps you to focus on one programming task at a time. The key is to work on one task for a specific time. You can use 25 or 50 minutes. When the time up, take a short break and repeat.