Be Lazy and Get More Done
One of the secrets of insanely productive development teams is automation... anything they can get the computer to do for them, they automate. Some people call this lazy... I call it very smart.
You can find some great examples of automation on Mike Clark's (clarkware.com) Pragmatic Automation blog (PragmaticAutomation.com). I love the lava lamp status monitor on your build machine... it's a great example of letting a machine take care of the boring work (building the product and re-running repetitive tests) while you move on with the fun stuff... building great software! After all, why would you watch the tests run on five platforms every time you touch the code? I've got better things to do with my day.
Another area that begs for automation is time tracking. Do you know exactly what you did today? How much time did you spend in Eclipse or NetBeans as opposed to reading Slashdot and Digg?
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