Discipline and Education for Coders: The Importance of Continuous Improvement

Discipline and education are integral to your ability to achieve the type of success necessary for true wealth and independence. Your strength of character has everything to do with your ability to succeed as an indepen- dent businessperson.

There is no company to hide behind and no anonymity when dealing with clients. Your presentation, your ability to understand and be understood, to act professionally, and to execute on tasks all depend on your character, and your character is made directly from your education and your self-discipline.

Discipline

A strong discipline gives you the framework within which to learn, deliver, grow professionally, and achieve your goals.

There are both physical steps to be taken and metaphysical thought patterns to be established to allow this discipline to take shape and impact your professional life.

This dualistic combination of concrete and abstract approaches will allow you to set yourself apart from others who are in the same profession, and will enable to you build yourself into someone who is able to act at the highest level and step away from the mundane, everyday existence of mediocrity.

8 Steps for Professional Discipline

The following steps can be practiced to acquire the basic professional discipline you’ll need to be successful with the concrete aspects of your work.

1. Rise early.

As a developer, you can code at any time. As a businessperson who also happens to be a developer, you will find your days are often consumed with high-level discussions, sales, meetings, design sessions, and so on.

As your success and the number of opportunities you engage in increase, the time that you will have for delivery work will decrease—during business hours. You must set aside a period of time during which you can get your work done—uninterrupted development time.

2. Dedicate time.

No matter where you are working—a home office, an office downtown, a shared space with col- leagues—there will be distractions and items calling for your attention. In general, business hours should be spent at business activities, even when things may be slow.

Your ability to force yourself to be dedicated to your work will determine your ability to attain the types of wealth and independence available to you. If you have no development work to do, consider it a rare opportunity to focus completely on marketing and generating new business. There should never be downtime at the office, especially when there is no billable work.

3. Dedicate space.

Your office is your space. Don’t think you can achieve independence and wealth without an area dedicated solely to your work. You can dedicate virtually any space, but it must be professional and conducive to work.

A basement corner with stale air, bad lighting, and constant background noise, or a corner of a bedroom is not appropriate working space. If you are going to work out of your house, you must have a room used solely for work—one that is separate from all your living activities and one that allows for professionalism (no background noise during calls, for example).

If you are going to work from an office apart from your home, ensure your commute is short and your expenses are minimal. Don’t waste time getting to and from work. You are independent and free; don’t add a commute to it.

4. Respond promptly.

When an e-mail arrives, respond to it. If it is going to take a while to complete the tasks outlined in the e-mail, let the person or group know you are working on them and specify the general time you’ll deliver.

When a call comes in, respond to it as quickly as possible. There should never be a time when an e-mail or a call is not responded to promptly—usually within a few hours or at least during the same day. Only in rare cases is it appropriate not to respond immediately.

5. Work efficiently.

Make sure your working environment and equipment supports your ability to work on multiple tasks and projects at once. For example, many of your clients will require that you VPN onto their network.

In most cases, you can only connect to one VPN session at a time on a single machine, which means you are limited to a single task. Work with multiple computers and surround yourself with a desk setup that allows you to turn quickly from one computer to the next.

Dual monitors, multiple computers, wraparound desks, and good phones (you need both landline and cell) will ensure your hardware and environment will support your need for multitasking. You must learn to be able to bounce between projects rapidly, doing a deployment on one while updating and compiling code on another.

6. Set priorities.

Naturally, your clients will always consider their work the highest priority. You have to be able to determine for yourself, across all the work on the table, what is the highest priority at any given moment.

You want always to deliver on time or ahead of schedule on all your tasks, which means you must be able to look at all the aspects of the various projects and understand what takes precedence.

By communicating expectations with your clients, you will have a great deal of flexibility in how you deliver, and will be able to juggle multiple high-priority tasks.

7. Stay positive.

There are many things that can bring negative reactions: too little work in the pipeline, too much work in the pipeline, difficult client relations, difficult project work.

There are endless opportunities for complaint and discouragement. It is your challenge to put stressful situations in their place and maintain a good attitude regardless of what is occurring.

There will always be times for stress, and there is only so much you can do about difficult situations, but you do have control over your view of things and the words you speak.

8. Keep code simple.

In business programming, you are working to get tasks done, not to write the best algorithm or the most efficient process. You always want to develop the best architecture you can, but you must be able to figure out how to deliver things in the most sim-plistic manner possible.

Not only will this allow you to get things done more quickly, it also allows you to hand it off more easily to the next person. Forcing yourself to keep things simple is an important discipline for the business developer.