Coding session is an activity that could fill your brain resources pretty quickly. You need to hold a lot of things in your head at one time. I find this tiring and stressful if not being helped by some tools to act as process scheduler and/or swap "device" so my RAM could have lots of space for the micro task.
I use mainly Freemind and JEdit for this (in conceptual level : a Mindmapping and Text Editor application) with pencil and paper ready for emergency. The use of Freemind is basically similar to what I wrote about tracking internet search only in this case it is used to track task, subtasks, subsubtasks, subsubsubtaks while coding. JEdit is handy as a "buffer" for codes, notes and other things that is less hierarchical in nature.
Some trick I find helpful so far :
- Don't branch out too deep. Try to make spawned task as a sibling instead of a child of current task, if possible.
- Try to do one task within one hour or two hour max. Keep subtask/subtask, if any, within 15-20 minutes. I use Activity Timer gadget to help with this.
- Use shortcuts, colors, icons to make the overhead of entering/typing small but still maintaining clarity.
- Attach the elapsed time of a task for evaluation. It's a good source for better estimating later and for better divide-and-conquer skill. Here's my own convention look like :
- Dump code snippets, notes, deleted code to JEdit, it could be useful later. I also find this better, more flexible and more dependable than to rely solely on undo/redo of IDE.
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