For programmers, there are several tools that can help improve your ability to write high quality pieces of code.

Here are a few of my favorite tools, so we have to start with the main tool that we as programmers use when we code, which is our text editors or I d.

And for me personally, I mostly used text editors when I work because I love the simplicity of them.

So therefore, the first productivity tool is your mind.

No, I'm just kidding.

Who uses their mind when they code?

Answer No.

One.

Okay, so the first tool is extensions for your text Editor of choice.

This is something that you may not consider at first, but it's very important to improve productivity.

For instance, extensions like prettify in sublime helps format Jason properly for you, meaning that it makes it a lot easier for you to work with Jason file.

And it saves you the time of having to format it yourself.

Extensions or packages for a text editor is highly individual, and it kind of depends on what framework?

In language.

You working mostly.

I will leave links to the extensions that I use, just in case you're interested in that.

But if you don't write code and dart, then you don't really need dart extensions for your text editor.

And same goes for java, python, et cetera.

This is one of those things that I recommend spending some time on looking at what you use and figuring out what would be useful for you, which for me, is something that I really enjoy and is one of the reasons why I choose to work in text editors instead of I d.

S.

Because you get a very bare shell that you can set up how you like it instead of getting a heavier program with tons of features that you never really use.

The second rule is manual time tracking.

This is something that's very useful for most people, time tracking is a good practice because it will help you gain a better understanding of where you spend your time and having a good understanding.

This is key to be unable to improve your productivity.

A lot of times we overestimate how much time we've worked on a project while also underestimating how much time things will take.

The two seem contradictory, but that's kind of how our brain works.

So tracking your time will help bridge the gap between the two, which means you get better at estimating time commitments of projects while also gaining better insights into how much time you spend on work.

Tracking time is, of course, especially useful for someone who does freelancing.

It's actually necessary for most freelancers because without it, you don't really know what to charge for your work.

My favorite tools for manually tracking time or clock if I and time to where clock, if I really is the better choice, because it's easy to use and it works on all platforms compared to time to which only works on apple platforms.

And to be honest, I'm not quite sure why I'm persisting with recommending time, too it's not actually that good.

It's just that I kind of like the color scheme of it and just a general feel.

Okay, I kind of hear how this sounds.

So let's just drop time, too, and say that clock.

If I is my recommendation from manually tracking time, you can create projects and start tracking your time.

One thing that clock, if I allows, which is super important for me personally, is setting colors for different projects, and this means that I can color coordinate it with Michael Calendar.

I already have a system for my Google calendar, where each color represents a certain task, and that is a really good way of getting a good overview of your projects.

At a glance.

Green is programming read issue, too, and blue is exercise.

This is something that is especially important for me when it comes to time tracking because at the end of the week, when you get the bar chart for the entire week, I want to be able to add a glance.

Tell how much time I spent on each task throughout each day, which color coordinating allows.

But there's another app out there called Total.

That's really popular, and that doesn't allow color coordinating.

And that means that at the end of the week, when you look at the bar chart for that week, you can't really tell how much time was spent on each task easily.

So you kind of have to go into the tasks and then read through them to figure out how much time was spent on each task throughout that week, which is a huge part of the user experience for me, and it's really important to me.

So therefore, clock, if I is my recommendation, give it a go.

The third tool is a task manager.

Something that I believe very strongly in is task management.

It's very important not only for you and your own productivity, but also for keeping track of bigger projects.

If you're working in a team, there are a couple of different categories.

This, though there's Project Task Management and there's personal test management for project management.

I like to use get hubs Project boards, since get up is the most popular platform for version control.

It makes sense to use it for your project management as well.

A lot of people recommend using sites like Trela, which I've used in the past, but in my opinion it offers the same basic features that getup dust, and it add some extra features as well.

But I've personally never really missed any of those.

And with get up connecting issues and tasks to mergers and commits is a lot more seamless.

So for project management, I recommend using get Tub and the project boards on Get Tub.

I think that get lab also has something like this, so I'd probably recommend that as well.

If you're working with get Lab.

The second type is personal task management.

This means keeping track of your daily tasks, which includes, but is not limited to coding tasks that you're working on.

And this can also be things like clean the house research Voodoo dolls Look into money laundering, et cetera.

For these sides of task manager's, I tend to all for simplicity over more features because I find that the more features something like this has, the more time I spend on it.

So therefore, my task manager of choice is Google tasks.

This is a super simple app that can also be installed as an extension to Google chrome.

You can create different lists at tasks and check off tasks.

I feel like right now this is the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality.

So if you used other things in the past, then I definitely recommend giving this one a try.

Super simple, super clean.

The fourth hole is an automatic contractors, so we've talked about manual time tracking.

But there's something else here that can give you even Maur insight into how you spend your time.

And that is automatic time Frackers in the main to ones that stand out here that I've also used our rescue time and walk a time where for programmers, I think that walk a time is more useful because it's more dialed in for programming.

So we'll give you stats on things like how much time you spend in what I d e and what language and even what Os, which to me is really exciting being able to see that I spent 30% of my time in python and 40% in dark.

30% Java is, to me really interesting.

It's not a standalone tool, but in combination with manual time tracking, it could give you some really interesting insights into your coding.

Rescue time, on the other hand, is a more broad automatic time tracker.

It takes more of a bird's eye view of your time, but it gives you insight into all of your own screen time.

And it does also categories your time based on what program you are using and tries to give you an idea of where your time went.

So you don't get the same detail for coding as you would with Walker time, but you get more information regarding your overall time spending.

The last tool I want to mention is get so this may be a little bit of a given, but if you think about it, get really It's the main productivity tool for programmers, because what else do you spend so much time interacting with on such a daily basis?

For most of us, I think it's comparable to our text editor or I D.

Learning Gift can help me save a lot of time.

It's also really good for organizing of projects.

It allows you to try things out and then go back.

If what you did turned out not to work, I could make an entire video just talking about the advantages of using gift because it's such a big part of most software developers life today.

It allows multiple people to work on the same code all at once and provides a great system for dealing with projects of this kind.

So I would say that it is almost like the king of all productivity tools for programmers.

So if you've been putting off learning git and stop that, just give it a go and you will not regret it.

All right, so that's it for this one.

I hope you enjoyed it.

And I also want to mention something that I've created called Clean Code Friday, which is a short email that I sent out once every week.

So every Friday.

That contains a few of the most interesting things that are found throughout that week.

And this would be things like books, some reading articles.

I've read topics I'm diving into productivity tips, coding tips and tricks and really just anything that I think you might enjoy.

So if that sounds interesting to you than you can sign up by going thio caltech dot com slash clean code or there will be a link in the description as well, but yeah, that's it for this one.

I hope you enjoyed it on a whole posse in next.