Ask HN: What's your biggest productivity killer as a developer?

1 x1MA-EGT85 4 7/23/2025, 10:42:27 PM
Is it context switching between tools? Unclear requirements? LLMs being dumb? Meeting overload? Something else entirely?

What productivity tools have you tried that either saved your sanity or completely failed you?

Comments (4)

mcflubbins · 1d ago
Currently my biggest productivity killer is being pulled into meetings with a customer. I'm working on project that needs extremely deep and focused work but my week is littered with external meetings with customers and that context switch is much harder than an internal meeting I have to not only drop all the context of what I was working on but also "reset" my brain to go into customer mode. Why? Because my company is a nuclear garbage fire among other things...

Just one of these meetings can nuke my productivity for an entire day depending on the meeting context and just one per-week is a combo-breaker for multi-day deep work productivity.

Proofread0592 · 1d ago
Having to wait for things to load, or having to click through multiple buttons to get to a dashboard or something. I have a very short attention span, and having to wait even a few seconds leads me to think about something else, snd i get sidetracked with other work.
JohnFen · 22h ago
My top three: Having to work in a cube farm, meetings, and missing/misleading internal documentation.
sds357 · 1d ago
HN and yt