Track Coding Session with Freemind and JEdit

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.
  

This setup of tools and tricks help me work in flow, tackling one small task after another without worrying too much about other things at the same time.