It’s the time of year to reflect and imagine what could be. In your planning for 2016 consider how your work gets done. With a bit of pause & reflect you might uncover areas where you get stuck.
But what if you could change how you do things, in a way that would boost your productivity?
The Positive Impact Of Progress
In a study published as “The Power Of Small Wins” 238 knowledge workers were surveyed daily for four months to determine factors for positive output. The report that summarized findings from 12,000 journal entries concluded that PROGRESS is the #1 factor contributing to a positive inner work life. Setbacks have a nearly identical negative impact.
Inner work life = the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions over the course of a workday. All these combine either to push you to higher levels of achievement or to drag you down.
Tweaks that help maximize your potential for more and repeated success are essential.
Tips To Peak Your Progress
#1 Use an IDE to develop.
When we asked a customer recently why he enjoyed developing in .NET vs other languages here’s what he said:
I like the .NET environment better: the tooling and language features. Combine that with the tools in Visual Studio and I find I can be very productive, even as I’m learning.
Build in some time to learn a new way of creating – you might love it. The possibilities for greater achievement are endless. Some popular IDE’s for your enjoyment:
- ColdFusion Builder 3 (for CFML)
- Visual Studio (for .NET and more)
- MonoDevelop (Cross platform IDE for C#, F# and more)
- Xcode (IDE for Swift)
- For reference: What the heck is an IDE?
#2 Find A Text Editor That Rocks.
Text editors can be supercharged to behave like an IDE. They can support a whole host of languages. If you’re still using Notepad we highly suggest you try one of these instead.
- TextWrangler (Mac, Free)
- BBEdit (Mac, Paid)
- Notepad++ (Windows, Free)
- Sublime Text (Mac or Windows, Paid)
#3 Embrace Source Control & Tune Your Workflow
This post from Drew McLellan “Stop Building Sites In Subfolders” describes a basic workflow.
Start with these four rules to a simple workflow:
- Be at the top level of a domain
- Create a dev environment, Windows VPS, Linux VPS or LOCAL
- Use Source Control, like Git
- Commit regularly
Then read these tips to help:
- git – the simple guide
- Track schema changes with git
- Planning for multiple environments (based on Perch a PHP CMS, but concept can be adapted)
We hope this helps on your mission to make 2016 the best year ever. To compliment your efforts, we quite a few special offers for Virtual Private Servers. Schedule a consultation for specifics.
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