• Limit News Intake to twice a day, Including Google Reader & News Sites.
• Leave Yourself a Place to Start (or: Leave work with something small broken).
• Draw it Out & Research First.
• Architect Your Perfect Distraction-Eliminating Work Environment.
• Eliminate IM during productive hours.
• Only Respond to Emergency Emails during productive hours.
• Limit Meetings to once a week (or less).
• Get out, and be social every 2 weeks.
• Take evenings off most days.
• Get 20 minutes of exercise in the morning, 3 times a week - but use that time.

Yeah my news intake needed to be brought under control, so I installed a proxy on my server, and only allow access to news sites, forums \ facebook and wikipedia outside the hours of 9:30 - 17:00.

It was a free download (freeproxy, for a small org it does the trick) so when I try to access such sites during business hours (in my moments of weakness) I get the lovely access denied message, and there is nothing I can do to get around it... (Well there is but it involves to much work...)

A few other tips:

Use AideRSS to filter out the best posts from your RSS feeds, instead of reading every one

Use DemonFeed to automatically filter out categorised posts, based on keyword themes

Use Rescuetime to monitor which applications/sites you are using every day. Assign productivity indicators to each activity to analyse daily/weekly trends

I've used XP-like agile methodologies in my past 2 projects, and found them to be much better techniques, some of them opposite to the suggestions in the article. So, my version would be:

- News? Why have news feed at all if it has nothing to do with the project?

- Never go home with a broken build from the repository. That means always run all tests locally and make sure they pass before checking in. Other teammates will appreciate not having to stay back to fix up your mess.

- Prototype and research are important, but no where near as important as getting customer feedback ASAP.

- Architect Your Perfect Pair Programming and Collaboration environment. Ideally, big table, huge screen, one PC/mouse/keyboard per pair. Customer sits on next table in open plan environment.

During core hours e.g. 9am to 5pm, when pairing :

- IM not allowed unless its to remote managers, customers, stakeholders.

- Emails only from team members, customers or the build integration machine.

- No music, unless its the sound of the integration build passing or failing.

- Brief stand up meeting every day so everyone's on the same page. A retrospective meeting every week or fortnight.

- Work 8 hours/day, 5 days a week. Take every evening off to spend time with family or pets. And exercise every morning.

Gee No Music??? I work much better if I have some music. I find it to be a good motivation (at least some songs are) and it relaxes the working environment.

We're not robots, limiting the distractions is important, but it's equally as important to take 5 every so often and get a coffee with your co-workers, do visit news sites every so often.

Find the balance where you feel refreshed and are able to work at 100% rather than trying to act like a robot. That works for the first few days and then your productivity will suffer.

Good one that. Always good to leave on a high note.

Forget the Great Leopard career programmers - who secretly want to be Project Managers for better money and more career prospects.

I reprazent those of us who have spent years of our youth coding C, working on someone else's brain fart, 3000 line routines, just vi, a C compiler and a copy of kernigan and ritchie. And a lot of coffee and cigarettes.

8 hours without moving from your seat. Just coding, debugging, trying to understand what the f*ck does this code DO? Gaining more understanding then scrapping what you've done and trying again.

Then ... Oh sh1t, everything i've done in the last hour is total madness-getting new insight into the problem and your programming style.

Many, many nights spent doing this.

Oh Brownie again of great confuse. Dozens project manager of no matter compare to top skill developer. Brownie not with degree knows not for such comment. When educate best realise fire and lightening in Sydney sky when leopard code. To know for great power and wise.

Great Leopard

Midnight coder king technicals