Polish your workflows
There’s a broad consensus that little ergonomic improvements (e.g. using a curved/split keyboard) helps a lot with your physical well-being over time. I think the same is true for your mental well-being.
As engineers, we have the chance to be able to invest in/build our own workflows/tools but don’t do it enough. You can make simple but effective improvements to your mental well being (and overall your work life balance) by removing every little thing that creates friction in your workflows.
I personally recently implemented a newpr shortcut that creates a PR based on the last commit message. This is minor (took me a few minutes to do), afterall how hard is it to go to GitHub’s pull request page and click a few times to create a PR – well after 2 weeks, I can confidently say that I should have done that a few years ago:
- I don’t have to deal with GitHub’s UI being slow/flaky – this has become more and more problematic as GitHub is struggling to scale
- I can switch projects after being done with code changes without having to leave my terminal – once the PR is created, it will start running CI/CD validation, so there’s no need for me to look at it now.
Beyond shortcuts, you can (and should!) fix issues that harm your productivity in general – don’t wait for someone else to schedule it on their roadmap. What little improvements have you recently done to your workflow?