Can you elaborate on how you learned to be that effective? I’d much rather work less, but I find I can’t get work done in 40 hours, and my coworkers doing the same work can. I often need to put in some extra hours here and there.
I'm also working part-time, although I had a lot of full-time jobs with varying intensity. I noticed for me most time gets eaten by tasks that I'm either stuck on or that progress really slowly for various reasons. E.g. something I do all the time is too slow like the editor, the build/test cycles or finding the reason for an exception because there are no logs. Usually I always make myself time to also optimize these things and also communicate that in meetings. And when planning of tasks happens, I try to get involved, understand what kind of work that would mean and discuss that. (Estimation is undervalued I think) And of course get a deep as possible understanding of the core technologies, that makes work also more fluent in the long-term. This way you also have increased idle times between tickets/pull request and it's possible to put more time into such general optimizations.
At least that's my strategy. It's definitely not a career-booster but the results are good.
Well, I think there's some factors. I can focus really easily into something and get completely absorbed in it. That helps immensely. There's a huge part of your mind that only activates when you're completely shutdown from outer stimuli and completely focused into something. That part of your mind is hundreds of times more powerful and efficient than your normally used part. If I can't focus like that my productivity drops drastically. And that can happen any time for a variety of reasons.
