Ask HN: What are the most used productivity tools in your tech job? - calpas
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itamarst
Figuring out goals, identifying underlying problems, coming up with efficient
solutions, focusing on the critical path...

A so-called "productivity tool" will save you 15 minutes a day. Asking
questions and thinking will save you weeks of work.

More on productivity here:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)

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tmaly
I have a Do Not Disturb button on my phone that allows the phone to ring once
then it goes directly to voicemail.

That is probably my number one productivity tool.

The next most important tool is moving everyone to an established process
where all requests/bugs/tasks have to come through a single channel. In this
case, the channel is Jira for me. Before this, things could come from many
different channels. Having things all in one place ensures things do not fall
through the cracks. It gives you the ability to see a big picture view of what
is going on.

For smaller teams, it might not make sense to use something big like Jira, but
none the less, having a process in place really helps.

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TurboHaskal
If you are asking for things that increase my productivity:

\- Computing power of course.

\- magit: I cannot imagine using git without it. This and org-mode are still
the reasons why I use Emacs.

\- IntelliJ: My younger, stupid self always felt proud of using spartan tools
(spartan, as in "emacs is too bloated and the only thing I need are ed or mg
and how dare you using a mouse"). Fortunately I grew up and abandoned all sort
of tribalistic or elitist thoughts. IDEs are an invaluable tool and I feel
sorry for the suckers that are still trapped on the "programmers that use IDEs
are inherently stupid" narrative.

\- TOAD SQL & Winmerge: I don't work with Windows anymore but miss these two
daily. Let me know if you know of tools that are similar for macOS / Linux.

\- cwm: I rarely use it anymore as I don't boot my OpenBSD box as much as I'd
like but it has this thing where you press M-/ (I think?) so you can query
windows by name. It's really useful. So are groups.

\- Ctrl-up & Ctrl-down in macOS. Win+tab in Windows.

\- Windowmaker's Dockapps. I miss those.

\- ACME: You don't know what you're talking about when you say "UNIX as IDE"
if you haven't tried this.

\- vi keybindings.

\- A internal wiki: 1/4 of my time is spent writing or reading it.

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kusmi
Five years into emacs and I'm only now getting into org-mode. I have about 6k
lines of bash code which tangles into a series of startup scripts I use to
bring a fresh boot system into production (that includes everything from db
config, to raid setup). There is a block of code on top that holds all the
configuration details which instructs which blocks to tangle, and to which
destination. And since it's org mode, all the code is annotated and exports to
HTML and PDF format documentation. The best part, in my project folder where I
used to keep these things, now sits one org file.

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roryisok
Visual Studio 2015, Vscode, git, SQL Management Studio, Remote Desktop and
Vivaldi

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calpas
Cool, i´m using vivaldi too. Pretty good browser by the way.

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yen223
Regex, because most of our work involves manipulating text.

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calpas
so your basic stack are some regex? sounds interesting ..

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bsvalley
Our coffee machine

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itamarst
Getting a full night's sleep is better than stimulants, but well-played
nonetheless.

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spcelzrd
For some definitions of "better"

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wikiwatchme
Sublime Text, iTerm2, DBeaver, MacDown, TaskWarrior

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richardknop
Command line, git, github, atom, chrome console.

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ameister14
Basecamp and Slack are probably the most used.

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parvatzar
Winmerge , notepad++, JIRA,ServiceNow

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abijango
I have seriously never heard someone say ServiceNow is productive :)

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mod
tmux, vim

