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8 Developer Habits That Did More for Me Than Any Tool
I use a lot of productivity tools. Obsidian, Jira, Todoist, sticky notes on the monitor. But the things that actually changed how I work can’t be installed or opened in a browser window.
The “developer productivity” conversation is always about tools. The next IDE, the next debugger, the next boilerplate generator, the next AI model. Everyone is selling something. I am not. This is about eight habits that cost nothing and work because they change how I think, not what I use.
1. Writing before coding
Before I open the editor on any problem that is not trivial, I write 3–5 sentences explaining what I am trying to do and what I expect to happen. Not a design document. Not a formal specification. Just a paragraph. I usually do this on my private Teams chat or on paper.
I started this after spending two days refactoring something that looked broken but was actually working as designed. I had misunderstood the problem before I touched a single line of code. Writing it down would have caught that in two minutes.
The habit finds the problems before the code does. It is the cheapest code review that exists. When I skip this step and go straight to the editor, I always regret it within an hour.
