take breaks, it's ok to relax sometimes.
eat well, not a lot though.
drink more water than coffee.
and last but not least, focus.

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Don't try to always be productive. It's unsustainable.

Keep a "done" list, not just a "todo" list.

Many times motivation can hold you back, you feel like you are making no progress.

Just open up your "done" list and voila, you have a massive confidence and motivation boost seeing a gigantic list of things you have achieved.

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I always said, good developer is a lazy developer. Be selfish, be lazy. Do not hesitate to spend more time to reduce code duplication and better design your code -- it will be huge time saving for you and your team.

Some earlier suggestions on this thread -- work hard. I disagree! Do not work hard -- work smart.

Find the reason to work hard.

that will give you inner motivation to complete the task!

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Mine is specific to those with standing desks, but its pretty straight forward.

Use your standing desk during meetings and after lunch.

This should keep you more focused during meetings, and keep you from feeling the "after lunch crash" after you eat.

Put your phone (far) away.

Go for a walk and do some meditation every day.

Don't stress about deadlines or the importance of the task at hand.
Just sit down and do. At your own pace.
Turning off the stress related to the result of what I do massively helps with my productivity

1. Plan your work yesterday
2. Prioritize your Work-Tasks
3. Take at least one ultra-high focus phase a day.

Means:
Plan your work you'll done tomorrow at the end of today.
Find the Task who is most important AND need most focus (and maybe is the hardest one to solve).
Do this task immediately if you begin to work

• NO Emails
• NO surfing in the Internet
• NO Messenger at least for the 1st hour at this day!

You will be surprised, how much you'll boost your productivity.

There are a few things you can do to avoid stress:

Exercise every day.
Spend time with your friends and family.
Take a short break every hour when you are working.
You can watch the movie.
Listening to songs

You perform better when you are stress-free.

I personally believe that it is important to work diligently so you can be proud of what you have accomplished.

Don't switch contexts. When there's a request to switch a context - delegate.

Make sure you have a 3 hour reflection time, once a sprint. Even if you need to make up that time, Right after sprint review (every 3 weeks), I allocate time to reflect, and it may become a nap, but I'm ready for the next print immediately. Even with improvements.

For myself, if I was granted the PTO for that nap, I'd still make up that time, as I go way overboard in hours. Put in that reflection time. Weakspots and improvements will become more visible, and can be prioritized into the next sprint.

I use those 3 hours to minimize the technical debt.

• Close the email client and forget about emails (of course if your role allows it)
• Disable all PC notifications (Slack, Teams, etc.): you can configure a session "do not disturb" (e.g. from 9 to 11) or disable them manually (I think every application has its own configuration, maybe even the operating system of your machine has this feature);
• Set up a "do not disturb" session on your phone, disabling all intrusive apps like Facebook and Instagram (with Android this is called "Digital Wellbeing" or something similar)
• Depending on your environment, use a good set of earphones/headphones, something that can isolate you from outside noise and distractions
• Music: something without words, such as classical music, video game soundtracks, etc. Personally, I love psy-trance playlists (infected mushrooms, 1200 micrograms, etc.), Combichrist and similar artists.
• short but intense work sessions: classic Pomodoro Time, take a break every 20-30 minutes, have a drink (water, tea, coffee, anything), move around the room. After 5/10 minutes, go back to your work. Repeat.
• Light meals. Take the time to prepare a light but satisfying lunch, so as to "disconnect" your mind from work without wasting too much time (preparing food, washing dishes, etc.). Light meals prevent you from "falling asleep" in the afternoon, even better if after lunch you take a walk of a few minutes (30/40 minutes), just to make a minimum of movement.

The best tip I can give would be to limit your phone usage. All it takes is a few notifications or checking social media and your productivity will go all the way down. Distractions cost you time so if you want to work at 100% efficiency keep your phone out of sight until you are ready to use it again.

Make yourself a work playlist, expand the list with some similar songs once you've identified which songs helps you stay focused.

Mine is here, mostly boom boom-related music.

Listen to music that helps you focus. It makes a huge difference for me.

I usually like to listen to di.fm, especially any of the channels with "chill" in the name, plus melodic progressive, atmospheric breaks, downtempo lounge, and a few others.

Sometimes I also like to listen to rain sounds on Youtube, especially if it's actually raining outside (or I'll just open the window if it's not too hot or cold outside).

Some people swear by classical music but it doesn't do much for me.

But I think most developers will benefit from some sort of music while coding.

My tip is to embrace your personal & work life schedules (granted that many of us are still working remote). Most people have a regularly set of work scheduled meetings & collaboration times. Given those set factors you can find times to be focused on a given set of tasks.

My goal is to be ready to work between 8:30/9:00am. That means I've showered, feed all the animals, walked the dog, reviewed my personal emails, death scrolled social media and chatted up the fam (if they're up). By the end of catching up on my own personal needs I've already started to drift into what I need to accomplish for the day and narrowed down to what I'd like to accomplish before my first meetings of the day. From there, its about trying to complete my personal set goals for the day and mitigate any other on coming distractions (aka other people's fires).

Alfred! Multi copy paste history and programmable shortcuts etc.

alfredapp.com

A paper and pen. I make notes more or less about any potential tasks or response, or idea, or to do. I review my notes daily, weekly, cross off what is done.

I use a Wacom Bamboo Folio, it is pen and paper but OCR if needed, to migrate notes to digital if needed.

I jump in and out of many projects throughout the day. I have a tmux script that makes sessions for me per project, and can fuzzy jump between them with just a few keystrokes. Without this all the projects blend together and I end up changing the wrong one. There is no BEST workflow, but this works damn well for me.

plan ahead even if you think it is trival or easy to do. Saves way more brain power sometimes to look at a diagram or chicken notes to guide you through your coding. So many times I gave up on a project or got frustrated over a small issue because I had to rethink the entire design in my head trying to just rush.

break your problems down into their smallest components

they seem daunting when you've got the entire image in your mind from start to finish, but most of the time, its just a bunch of simple things working together

For me, having many things to do and rotating around them keeps me productive. Also, having great scenery to look at every 10 minutes is great. My office at home has a very big window that over looks by backyard with palm trees and banana trees. Lot’s of birds around too!

In conjunction with @inhuofficial s comment about "done" list:
Have OKR goals, targets and tasks set up. Keeps you on track, "goal" is something to strive for instead of the "deadline" sword of Damocles, and seeing the percentages towards "target achieved" go up keeps motivation going

Use pen and paper in your system to manage your tasks. Don't be a slave of your system, and review if it helps to maintain some tasks or if it is time to use other strategies (such as Spring Review Meeting after some weeks)

Try to do some week's review of your victories (and failures), so we can understand our strengths and our weakness.

Use Time Boxing. We got our To-Do list, with all the tasks that you need to get done today. But sometimes, I just procrastinate till the end of the day, without anything done.

A quick fix is just using any calendar (Like Google Calendar) and create an event in it, with the task that you want to achieve today. Just not use it with All your tasks, it doesn't work so well...

Put for example: "Create HTML for website" and then use your calendar to time box the task. This is very effective for hard tasks, the ones that you're used to procrastinate all the time.

Drinking more water, Meditating and Journaling <3

I Lately I have found that working from a place other than your desk, a cafe, a cowork helps a lot with productivity, since you don't seek refuge in the everyday things you have around you.
You have to focus on your stuff, it has helped me a lot!

Learning is most powerful tips for your productivity for now and future.

Note a lot of thinks
Every notes at the same place thanks typora and nextcloud
Manage my day with task in prioritary list
Take sport breaks to go cycling

I use it less but I like tomato method.

A time to work, a time for rest.

drink coffee, absolutely ahah

Write wiþ þorn and eð instead of "th".
Saves quite a bit of time once you get used to ðe AltGr combination.

Don't overthink it and take it easy! take a break :)

Don't browse twitter, you'll waste time on reading and the time to re-focus again

Try to always be with a positive mindset. You have to be fertile to produce

Do not read email in the morning and focus on achieving tasks that require reflexion and produce value and satisfaction.

Make a weekly plan and try to do everything consistently, make rewards if everything is resolved and make punishments if ignored.

Pace yourself & take breaks

Keep relax and do breathwork. They help you are maditation and then funny coding time.

Drink your water and take a break at least 5-10 minutes to avoid burn out and frustrations while working.