How to reduce stress as a programmer

Being a software developer can often be very exhausting and demanding, we are always running against time to meet the assigned deadlines, also we constantly have to face problems or tasks that we have never done before, and this makes work more difficult. For these reasons it is very important to know how to reduce stress at work, we do not want to end up burnout.

Have hourly deadlines for your progress through the day:

One of the aspects that I least like is feeling that I am progressing very slowly in a task, this often happens because the task is very large or complex, and I want to advance a lot, I even intend to finish it in one day, but I am very unrealistic in wanting to achieve this. So in order to avoid this situation, having goals of what I must progress in each hour helps me a lot to reduce stress, because that way I can see how I progress in the task, and in this way, I do not get discouraged.

Focus on today’s problems:

As software developers, we have a lot of work to do, and because of this, it is very common to lose focus on the task we are doing and to think about how we are going to solve a bug that the client has just reported, or how we can do the task that follows the one we are currently doing. Due to being distracted by other responsibilities that we must carry out later, this wears us mentally and at the same time, we waste time on something that is not yet time. That is why we must live more in the present and use all our energy appropriately.

Ask for help:

There are quite a few reasons why we don’t ask for much help, probably because we want to feel proud of having achieved something alone, or because we feel we don’t know anything about programming and that is why we avoid asking for help. It is very common for this scenario to generate a lot of stress because, in addition to being stuck for a long time, we realize that this was not the best decision and it is too late to ask because we have already invested a lot of time. The truth is that although it is too late to ask, it is best to do it, the longer we are stuck, the more pressure and stress will increase. The moment we ask someone for help, we will feel a release because we know is the right path.

Sometimes responsibility is out of our hands:

I have had to deal with tasks that cannot be done because we did not have everything necessary to finish it, or because the client requested something that was outside of my capabilities as a software developer. The simple fact of not being able to perform the task even though it was not my fault, added more stress to the work. To avoid this, good communication with the team is important, so that everyone will understand that the problem cannot be solved in a reasonable time and this can help to understand that the fault is not ours.