How do you determine if you are productive? Lets assume that coding is not a creative role.

Assumptions:

  • Typing speeding is 67wpm (assuming 6 characters a word, this will be ~400 characters a minute)
  • Line length is 80 characters per line of code

This means that an extremely conservative estimate is 5 lines of code a minute. With that in mind, to create 1,000 line piece of code would take 200 minutes, which is only half a day.

How much is 1,000 lines? That is roughly a 20 page document. That is actually alot of code!

Now that it has sunk in, and you would probably agree that:

  1. Your typing speed should be over 67wpm
  2. The average line of code would not have 80 characters

You would see that it is definitely an extremely conservative estimate. At the same time you would agree that 1,000 lines of code in half a day is an insane expectation on a programmer.

So perhaps the best way is this. Don’t spend all your time in an IDE. Your typing speed is quick enough so that it doesn’t matter. Go for a walk, write out a sketch on the pack of an envelope. Make use of a whiteboard. So maybe sometimes the best way to code is not to write code but to take a step back.