Improving Programmer Productivity (Mind Map)

I would like to share with you my long term observations on how to improve programmer productivity as a mind map.

Here is the clickable picture, below there is the mind map in a form of nested lists:

Improving Programmer Productivity

• Short-Term
  • General
    • Caffeine
      • Adjust to your blood pressure and blood vessel elasticity
      • Only green tea after 6pm if you have insomnia
      • Green tea
      • Black tea
      • Coffee
    • Sugar
      • Can lead to weight gain, most effective if consumed not very often in small amounts
  • Getting into the flow
    • No short attention span activities
      • At least in the morning
      • No news
      • No fun content sites
      • No tweets
    • Enjoyable long attention span activity
      • Reading a book
      • Playing a computer game that requires deep concentration
        • Only if you can stop after a reasonable amount of time
    • Doing nothing AKA Meditation
      • At least for 10 minutes
      • Really nothing, no thinking, no starring at the screen
  • Solving an inobvious problem
    • Moving away from computer
    • A walk
    • Playing drums, guitar
    • Shower
• Long-Term
  • "Hardware"
    • Regular walks/ physical exercises
      • Expecially in the morning
    • Spine exercises
      • Warm-up from yoga (Surya Namaskara)
        • Can take only 10 minutes a day
    • Medicines improving blood flow in the brain

      • "Increases brain RAM"

        Details are hidden to avoid harm for light-headed people. Those who really care will find it and use wisely.

  • "Software"
    • Studing new programming languages and approaches.
      • Don't beleive popular opinions blindly, check them
    • Looking for good programmer resources (books, communities)
    • Mastering google queires
      • Know at least "site:", "~" operators, sorting by discussion type, limiting results by past year
    • Organizing
      • "Improves brain swapping"
      • TODO notes

        • Good with a paper and a pen

          TODO item must be possible to write down in a few seconds in order not to lose the main context in which you are.

          Rule of thumb: if a task requires more than half an hour it deserves to be written as TODO item

      • Leaving clues, marks when switching topics/ projects
        • TODO notes
        • Browser sessions
          • "Session Buddy" Chrome plugin
        • IDE sessions/ "project groups"/ "working sets"
        • Virtual machines
          • Con: Requires a lot of RAM
          • Pro: Remembers open programs and cursor placement in the code
  • "OS kernel"
    • Switch projects/ activities if you feel an upcoming burnout
    • Good psychotherapy for motivation problems and "unclear" states of the mind
      • Very underestimated
      • Easy to run up against inefficient or even harmful psychotherapy approaches
      • "Core Transformation" technique by Connirae Andreas
        • Great long tested first-hand and second-hand results
        • Requires a few evenings to study or visiting a workshop
        • Sharply contrasts with a lot of inefficient NLP techniques
        • Universal, leads to improvements in other life parts