How to Save 10 Hours Per Week as a Developer

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Motivation

Most developers who think they lack talent, actually lack focus. Cheap dopamine is everywhere, and people are easily distracted. The industry is also filled with unnecessary noise that drains energy and motivation.

However, with a bit of practice, we can reclaim our time and significantly boost productivity. Here are five tips to help you save 10 hours per week as a developer.

Avoid Context Switches

A recent Harvard study found that context switches are the biggest productivity killers. Did you know your IQ drops by ~10 points when you do a context switch? And it takes ~30 minutes for your brain to recover. The more you switch, the dumber and slower you become.

This shows it’s not a good idea to:

• Jump between tasks

• Keep social media notifications on

• Have a lot of meetings during the day

The solution: Mute notifications on social media, avoid multitasking, limit your meetings, and always focus on only one thing at a time.

Master the Hotkeys of Your Code Editor

The best developers I work with know the refactoring hotkeys by heart. There is no better feeling than refactoring code with hotkeys and seeing your tests pass in the end. Passing tests are dopamine ✅✅✅

Built-in refactoring tools also make refactoring safer. Here are the most common hotkeys I use daily:

• Rename

• Move line

• Inline variable

• Extract to method

• Introduce variable

• Introduce parameter

• Change function signature

Memorize these hotkeys to save time while coding!

Use Test-Driven Development

TDD is known as a silver bullet in our industry. Why? Because it prevents most of the problems developers face daily. Developers spend countless hours debugging, fixing bugs, and writing testable code.

TDD is one of the best ways to eliminate wasted time. It helps you produce clean and fully tested code. It makes coding safer and more enjoyable. It helps manage complexity and focus only one thing at a time.

I don’t always write code. But when I do, I use Test-Driven Development.

Build Quality to Save Time

There is no trade-off between quality and speed in software development. Never been. Low quality means low speed. Developers try to cut corners, skip testing, and neglect writing clean code. But they won't be faster. They will be much slower.

Sacrificing quality is just a short-term solution that quickly leads to long-term problems. To reduce cost, you need speed. To get speed, you need confidence. To gain confidence, you need quality. Quality and speed go hand in hand, having a high correlation. Remember this next time you plan to sacrifice quality for speed. The only way to go fast is to go well.

Use AI for Inspiration, Not as Replacement for Your Thinking

It's crazy to see many developers blindly relying on ChatGPT and Copilot. What is the problem with AI-generated code?! Trust. You can't trust it. It's even worse than Stack Overflow where the answers are at least community-driven with votes.

Another problem with AI is that it dumbs you down. By using AI, you outsource your thinking, which is the most critical skill for a developer.

Don’t get me wrong, I love AI. I have like five active subscriptions to different AI tools. I use them daily. But we should not blindly rely on them—otherwise, we’ll waste a lot of time fixing the mess it creates.

Conclusion

Saving time boils down to a simple philosophy: optimize, simplify, and focus.

One of the best ways to speed up development is to write clean and testable code. That’s where Test-Driven Development (TDD) comes in—it eliminates wasted time debugging and refactoring, helping you write better code faster.

I recently launched my TDD course, including:

• The fundamentals of Test-Driven Development (TDD)

• 3 real-world TDD examples in C#, TypeScript and Rust

• Using TDD to design high-quality software

• The two schools of testing with the 5 test doubles

• Testing legacy code

• Refactoring best practices

Get instant access by clicking here.