Focus
From Productiveprogrammer
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[edit] Noise Canceling Headphones
I use the Etymotic Research ER-4 headphones for both travel and isolation in noisy environments (Etymotic Research ER-4). These are very pricey, but I care a lot about sound quality, and they last for years. Highly recommended.
[edit] Ambient Sound
The iPhone has a new application called "Ambiance" (commercial, $0.99 at this time) that provides background noise played through your iPhone (or iPod touch) earphones. A great way to drown out annoying distractions.
[edit] Pandora
Pandora is an excellent website that allows you to create your own Internet radio stations to play the types of music that you like. It also recently added an iPhone application that allows you to access and use your Pandora account while mobile.
[edit] Code highlight
It's a good idea to turn on syntax highlighting in your IDE. In Java it's very important to outline autoboxing and method variables.
In Eclipse you can tune styles in Window > Prefences > Java > Editor > Syntax Coloring.
[edit] Clipboard History Utilities
I talk about this in the Focus chapter of the book; here is an open source one for Windows: ditto. It allows you to keep multiple computer's clipboards in sync. Pretty cool!
[edit] More Multiply Your Monitors
Having multiple computers and multiple monitors in ones work area is a force multiplier. It allows you to do several things in parallel. But, especially if one has multiple computers, don't work with more than one keyboard and mouse. There is a nice open source utility called Synergy that's easy to setup and allows one to use one keyboard and mouse between several computers. After configuration, one can run the mouse cursor off the edge of one screen and the cursor will then run onto the screen of a separate computer. Whatever computer's screen the mouse cursor is active in is also the computer that receives keyboard input.
