Time Management for Developers and Testers
What quadrant were you in this morning? In what quadrant do you spend most of your time? Whether you are a CEO or on a software development team, you need to understand the lessons of space and time in your week.
We all have the same amount of time—and in that way, we are all equal. However, some people are more productive than others. How? Watch Dr. Darryl Cross give a presentation on Stephen Covey’s time matrix in the first video below.
The time quadrant is one of the best time management tools out there. Here is a good, quick review of the time matrix. Apply this to your software development work, and you might see how important it is to put at least 10 percent of your time in Quadrant II. What would those tasks be for a software developer or QA analyst?
If you are in a firefight now, decide if you still want to be in a firefight three, six, or twelve months from now. If you don’t, then spend time in Quadrant II doing tasks like architecture reviews, process improvement, adopting agile, iterative processes, etc. How about code reviews and how to build quality into your system design, implementation, or documentation—to name a few strategic tasks.
Here is a good article on time management for developers by Alexander Fedorenko. The two most important points I can highlight from the article are planning and prioritizing.
Planning is never wasted because putting time aside to think about what obstacles could lie ahead allows you to figure out how to mitigate them.
Prioritize carefully. There will be many tasks in any project. Do the hard tasks first because they always take longer than you think. Leaving difficult tasks to the end is a recipe for blowing deadlines. If you take time to think about what those difficult tasks are, working collaboratively if necessary, you will save yourself grief at the end of the project.
If you need help with your time management and tasks, you can look for tools to help you do that. There are lots of them out there. Even the task feature in Outlook can help you with this. The Gtdagenda tool is free for a single user and can be used on your smartphone. And finally, you can watch the "Secrets of Time Management" video below, which has some excellent points.
Ask yourself—how is your time management?
