Increasing productivity is a tough task.  I’m not an expert on the subject, but I do understand that world shattering changes that increase everyone’s productivity by huge percentages don’t come along every day.  Most productivity gains are small, incremental steps that happen on a daily basis when smart, hard working people keep their minds open and aware of their environment and how they are manipulating it.  That’s why I decided to write about it.  It’s an attempt to keep my mind more aware, more attentive to what I’m doing, to how I’m attacking problems, how I’m using my time, how time is being wasted during my day.  Having a goal to be more productive is not always enough to keep the focus up; maybe having a blog category about it will help.

One of the things that probably adds up to a couple of hours a week in wasted time for me is waiting for emulators to load.  If you work in the mobile industry you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Depending on the manufacturer, I usually end up waiting any where between 20 seconds and a minute plus just while an emulator loads.  If you take into account the fact that I probably have to launch the emulator 15-30 times a day, I’m looking at the possibility of losing up to 10% of a standard 40 hour work week waiting on emulators.

The gut check response is to find a way around loading the emulator every time.  I asked around to see if there was any way we could leave an emulator running and just reload the application each time.  No dice.  Everyone pretty much had the same response.  They had looked into it themselves and came up with no solution; we are stuck with this wasted time.

So I was left with the task of figuring out how I could put this time to use.  The conclusion I came to was simple, a head smacker, something I should have thought of years ago, but didn’t.  I started using this time to cleanup the Javadoc comments in the code.  I’m a big believer in self documenting code, but usually skimp on keeping the Javadocs up to date, if I write them at all.  If I do finally get around to writing them, it’s several months down the road and is usually a tedious, day long process, which results in really lame, uninformative documentation.  Not good.  This is a great solution.  There is nothing else you can do in that time, productive or not.  So you sit there and wait.  Basically, I’m replacing one boring, tedious task – waiting – with another boring, and tedious task – code commenting.  At least the latter is a productive, boring, tedious task.