Time management

Time management is vital to becoming an efficient developer, especially in crypto / web3, where there are so many distractions and shiny objects that it is hard to focus on essential tasks.

Planning

Planning your days ahead of time is essential to maximize productivity as a developer, especially if you are a freelancer or don’t have a robust synchronous structure within your organization. Since many web3 developers work remotely and teams coordinate asynchronously using tools like GitHub, Zoom / Google Meets, etc. It is essential to book the times you will spend working on a particular task or area.

I’d recommend planning your day the day before and filling all the necessary tasks as you need them. You will get better at planning the more you do it, as you’ll be able to see how it works for you and what things you need to polish out.

I try to schedule everything, from travels to bookings, personal affairs, periods for exercising, eating, reading, learning, working, events, calls, meetings, etc. I spent way too much time procrastinating and just going through the motions, and if I had a system to use my time efficiently, I would not have lost so much time in vain.

I’ve recently started using Cron, a calendar interface that can hook up to Google accounts. The application aggregates all of your connected Google accounts' calendars. It sends notifications for meetings early, the UI/UX is impressive, booking new events is very intuitive, and it allows you to send invites from any account.

For scheduling meetings, I recommend using Calendly or similar services that allow you to give other people links with pre-filled slots with your availability. The people you want to meet with can use to book a specific time with you; the event will subsequently appear in your calendar app of choice.

To get deeper into planning/scheduling and developing high performance, I recommend reading these two books, which are my personal favorites:

Project management

As a software developer, you’re going to work with many different people when you join a team or try to build a product yourself - from designers, front/back end devs, DevOps, data engineers to lawyers, product managers, etc. There will be systems set in place in the most mature developer environments to coordinate as an organization. Popular methods are Agile and SCRUM. Popular apps for managing all of these processes, tasks, and interactions include tools like Asana, Linear, Jira, Trello, Notion, etc.

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