What's your favorite productivity tip/hack

Learn all the keyboard shortcuts that you can. Taking your hand off the keyboard to put it on the mouse and click on something probably wastes more time than anything else I can think of. Like me having to click on the "Post Your Answer" button instead of there being a hotkey for it.

Mastering a Text Editor I use vim, but it doesn't matter which you use as long as you pick a powerful one and stick with it. Being able to jump around and edit anything in a source file without touching the mouse is great -- even better is when it becomes automatic, and you don't have to think about it. Syntax highlighting makes it much easier to visually scan a file, and find-and-replace makes refactoring much easier. I can't believe I used to think that Notepad was a "text editor."

Talk your problem with a fellow programmer Sometimes you can get really great ideas that get you going.

Whiteboard with user story cards on it We use the Agile methodology at work, and having those user story cards stuck to the whiteboard provides a great boost to productivity. That is because we can see what is being worked on by our team, and other teams as we wander by their desks. This promotes conversations about their work that introduce commonality and cool new designs that others have come up with. These then get shared into our projects (if appropriate) and overall productivity is boosted.

A quiet room or a great set of headphones and music... My productivity increases big time if I can tune people out. I try never to complain though since I might be the one making the noise next time. In our office we have a nice big side room where anyone that wants to work in peace can go to concentrate. In that room we also have a projector that can be used for team programming. Its like the escape zone to get things done.

Books Read good books on programming, software development process, and project management. This way you pick up useful tricks from smart people. For instance, I have recently read "Clean Code" which, among other things, talks about how functions should be very small. If you have logical sections in your function that you can describe with a comment, you should make them into separate functions with descriptive names, even if they are only a few lines long and you only use them once. Keeping functions small seems like an obvious thing that every programmer knows. However, this rule is often ignored, and it is almost never taken to such extreme. I tried doing that, and it has worked wonders for code readability, maintainability, and testability.

Close Outlook, log out of IM.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html And it's even better as most of them are free: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ (for coding) + http://orgmode.org/ (for tasks) + http://www.gnus.org/ (for e-mails) + other modes (for everything else) http://www.eclipse.org/ (for analyzing code and refactoring) http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ (for charting ideas and brainstorms) http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ (for issue-tracking) http://calendar.google.com/ (for time management, reminders, TODO-lits) http://www.virtualbox.org/ (to have specialized environments... and seamless VMs are great!) http://awesome.naquadah.org/ (as your tiling window manager) NOTE: you can use these full-screen to behave more or less like zero-distraction software and stay focused, as long as you don't tweak them too much to make coffee for you, read out loud your RSS feeds and so on, considering all the stuff you can do with emacs and eclipse... Awesome WM helps with that as well, or tiling windows managers in general. A good pair of head-phones or earphones (preferably headphones for long-term use) is also a good help. A private or semi-private office also helps (which is also a point mentioned in the link).

Copy, Paste & RegExp I think it's really the best way to create most of a code you planned before and to fix bugs. Some examples: To quickly find a place in already existing code you should search for a part of a message like "You've got 13 new messages" → search for "ve got .* new mess". When you create code that is bean-like you can usually copy a part (or whole) class and then simply replace some words. You can even write some transform macros. When you write HTML it is very useful to be able to quickly change your structure decisions like say remove all style attributes from span elements ("<span style.*?>" → "<span>" for simple cases or a macro/function for advanced). That is why I think mastering RegExp gives you a significant productivity boost. That and probably learning to type fast :-).