I love the smell of facepalm in the morning

  Wynn Netherland • 2014-02-05

Most of us have a time of day when we're in the groove. If you believe the stereotype, developers work best late at night, fuelled by caffeine in the soft glow of a computer screen.

Not me. I'm a morning person. I'm often up at 5AM and in full stride by 7:30. I think best before noon, as usually evidenced by last night's work.

Early in my career, I would double down on frustrating bugs. Late nights would stretch into the wee hours of the morning. In time, I learned that stepping away from code can be just as productive as stepping through code. Solutions often seem "obvious" when you return to them after a break. For me, that's usually the next morning.

Knowing this, I try to employ a few hacks to my workday.

Create before consuming. Following a tip from Jason Rudolph, I've started setting aside time each morning for creative work. Starting the morning with some writing or other thought-intensive work has yielded better results and put me in a better frame of mind to jump into the tasks of the day.

Batch email, issue triage, and mundane tasks during non-peak hours. Tim Ferris helped make "batching" popular years ago. I try to tackle the bulk of my batch processing in the afternoons and reserve my mornings for tasks that require more focus.

End the day with a failing test. Perhaps the biggest thing I've learned to do is set myself up for the next morning. A failing test can verify a bug or describe how a new feature should behave. I don't have to have the implementation or the impact to the rest of the codebase figured out before I walk away. I can tackle those bigger questions the next day, when I'm fresh.

Wynn Netherland
Wynn Netherland

Engineering Director at Adobe Creative Cloud, team builder, DFW GraphQL meetup organizer, platform nerd, author, and Jesus follower.