Where does the time go

Introduction

Any action takes some time. Some actions require less time, others more, some often repeat, others, on the contrary, are very rare. Any day of ours consists of many actions, and they take 24 hours of our time. And what do we spend every day on these 24 hours?

Someone has already written about the main time eaters. This article was not found, but you can read the book of Arkhangelsk " Time Drive ". If we talk in a scientific way, the article is devoted to chronophagus.

The main time eaters

Every day we spend time on routine:

• Traffic jams;
• Queues;
• Officials;
• Hospitals.

But this is only some part. During working hours, chronophages also appear. They can be called individuals, as well as inefficient business processes in the enterprise.

Work days

I will try to bring a number of technical issues that take enough time from developers:

• Rar;
• Xml;
• Doc;
• Links;
• Letters;
• Equipment.

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Proprietary archive formats

The use of closed archivers deprives all of those broad integration tools that allow working effectively with archives. Windows supports zip-archives without additional software. JIRA conveniently displays the contents of the archive without having to unpack it:

XML-like data formats

As a developer, I often receive various xml documents. And in what form they are not sent: docx-document (and I can have linux or mac-os) with nested xml with distorted encoding, txt-documents, also with incomprehensible encoding, txt- and doc-files in rar-archive !

Now imagine, this document should be studied by three people. The creator of the document could spend 5 minutes to put the encoding in order and save the document in a file with the xml extension, and now the company loses 15 minutes of time of its high-class specialists to simply convert documents. Imagine if the document has an xml-signature or something else, then you can make a mistake during the conversion. As a result, the creator of the document saw it in one form, and experts see it in another (often different).

Omnipresent doc

In our country, the doc-format has an incomprehensible popularity. But this is a closed format. With docx, it is somewhat better, since this is an xml-like format. The question is why? It has a number of drawbacks: in different versions, complex documents look different, the format is not supported by free software (we put only free software on our computers and, better, open software), versioning is not supported.

The solution is very simple: put yourself a knowledge base based on wiki-technology. We use expensive confluence. The advantages are many, there is version control and document comparison, import from the same doc. Export to pdf and xml, full-text search and "all in one place."

Share links

Incredibly much time is spent searching for information, opening the necessary resource, if there is no direct link. Compare:

• On the “About Us” page of the Horns and Hooves website, the address block has the wrong font;
• On the page http://sample.com/about.htm the wrong font for the address block.

In the first case, you still need to find this site, spend time moving to the page. The probability of entering the wrong resource is very high, which means that the problem cannot be promptly resolved.

The second option allows you to immediately go to the problem resource and make sure \ diagnose \ fix the problem without wasting time.

Letters

When the number of letters per day exceeds a couple of dozen, then it takes a decent time to process them. If the letter came without a subject and the signature of the sender, then this is lack of culture and disrespect to the recipients - such letters can be deleted without reading. The letter should contain the greeting of the recipient and a brief description of the context. It is better to provide all the necessary links so that a colleague does not search for information on the Internet, the knowledge base, in the old correspondence.

A competently written letter excludes a double interpretation, contains all the necessary references and excerpts, does not contain attachments to rar and doc. Transferring archives and documents in letters is bad practice. At some point, it may turn out that all colleagues will have different versions of the same document. What kind of effective work, in this case, can be discussed.

Don't wait for the technique

Techies love gadgets. These are small children of IT and they should be pampered. Provide the fastest hardware, update it in a timely manner, give access to all necessary resources without significant restrictions.

I need to start a glassfish server to raise two contexts in tomcat, run debugging in my IDE, connect mock services, with skype running and a couple of windows in the browser, to deploy a working environment. In this case, the RAM is melting before our eyes and should still be enough. Slowing the reaction of the working machine is a simple job. There is clearly not enough “modern” computer to work in office.

Incidents, when the place on the server ends, because the logs took some 15 gigabytes, etc., I do not even consider. This topic deserves a separate article.

There is something to strive for

As you can see from these examples, there are many distractions in the workplace. We can influence some, we cannot influence others. But to optimize your working time is necessary, otherwise the performance will be extremely low. An excellent example of trying to turn off distractions: " Hire a clapper ."

Conclusion

I did not fundamentally announce spending time on social networks and entertainment portals, because these chronophages should be completely excluded from my work schedule.

You can bring a lot of daily micro-chronophages, getting rid of which, you can devote time to self-development, family, more productive work.

I hope not to distract you from an important project that you had to do yesterday and the customer has already left for you.

Habravopros: And what are you spending time on, habraiser?