Catch up on communications (email, slack). Get organized. Catch up on mailing lists for important packages in my stack. Read a couple newsletters I subscribe to

Catch up on communications (email, slack). Get organized. Catch up on mailing lists for important packages in my stack. Read a couple newsletters I subscribe to, and the articles hey link to. Read HN. I also keep a running list of stuff that I need to get done that isn't dead urgent ("write up ticket about feature X" or "check with Bob to confirm that customer was satisfied with solution to Y"). I can usually knock out a few of those when waiting for compilation or similarly slow blocking tasks (in my current stack, that's running database migrations).