Over my admittedly not that long career, I've found that minimizing the overhead that the daily grind creates in your productivity is by itself an art form. The

Over my admittedly not that long career, I've found that minimizing the overhead that the daily grind creates in your productivity is by itself an art form. The grind isn't avoidable, but you can be more or less productive despite it. As an example, I recently had a project where most of the drudgery was changing one line, testing the whole thing (including manual tests), realizing another one-liner was needed, doing it all again, etc. Automating testing wasn't a good idea at the time (high risk code, so you don't want to pile a refactor on top of a risky change), but I figured out approximately how long the builds would take, so I started setting timers on my phone. Kick off a build, switch tracks, come back when the alarm hit. By doing that I was able to context switch more efficiently to an unrelated project rather than twiddling my thumbs for twenty minutes every time I needed to wait for the build.