bradleyjoyce [dot] com

Today I spent 4 hours straight trying to figure out a single issue with the code for Freshie, the FreshBooks iPad client that I’m building. Generally in my experience with software development, 4 hours is about the maximum number of productive coding hours that can be accomplished in a reasonable/normal work day. As you might imagine, by the end of the 4 hours I was pretty much bashing my head against my desk for lack of progress. So I decided to take a break… and water the lawn.

The benefits were two fold.

1. My eyes got a much needed break from staring at my laptop’s screen.
2. Watering the lawn is pretty much a brainless activity, which I performed in a zombie-like state while taking a little brain-nap.

When I came back to the code, I fixed my problem in just a few minutes and was able to move on to new (and numerous) challenges. I think mental clarity is particularly important in software development as, in order to write great code, you need to be thinking well ahead of the code you’re actually writing. So know when to take a break, it will help you be extremely more productive when you get back to work!