Uncertainty is the currency of every technology company. It fuels growth. Pivots. And sometimes layoffs.


While uncertainty accompanies progress and hiccups, it also represents nearly everything that’s out of your control as a developer. That’s why uncertainty feels paralyzing or difficult to wrap your arms around in the moment.


But you don’t have to be undone by what you can’t get done today. Instead, build a flexible, fluid approach to work centered around a guiding principle: prioritization.


By establishing a clear method for decisions, effectively managing your workload, asking others what they need, writing down what you’ve accomplished, and intentionally structuring your day, you’ll find more certainty and satisfaction at work.


Read on to find out how to know and weigh your priorities as a developer in five distinct steps.


1. Start your planning with a decision-making matrix


Establishing priorities is like trying to win the claw game at the arcade. It looks deceptively simple; but then 30 minutes has gone by and you still haven’t figured out how to get the prize.


Will Larson, the CTO for Calm who runs the blog 

, suggests starting with a clear hierarchy based on the needs of your company.


“Reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third,” 

This outward-in hierarchy forms the framework for how you make decisions. It allows you to assess tasks or obligations to determine which should be tackled first. It also helps you align your work with what directly benefits your company, which may strengthen your case for a promotion or show why you’re indispensable in times of reorganization.


Larson also encourages developers to take a future-oriented view when it comes to balancing obligations in a particular category – whether that’s for your team or yourself – so projects with a longer timeline stay at the forefront of your task list.


“You should always be in the longest-term perspective that you’re certain you can reach,” adds Larson. “But sometimes that’s only next week.”

Add additional weight to projects that can’t be completed immediately; so the implied urgency of today doesn’t strip away your ability to get multi-step projects done in the future. When you convert larger goals into smaller chunks to tackle each day, you’ll gain insight into how you’re doing and be able to communicate your needs more effectively in the moment to your team.


2. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority

It’s not that you can’t get everything done. You probably can. It’s more about what you’re sacrificing and what comes next. As you move into leadership positions, you know what’s at the end of that sprint? Another one.


By trying to do everything all at once, all the time, you’re chipping away at your ability to be reliable and effective in the future. You’re also unconsciously focusing on the action items that are right in front of you.

When we’re stressed we tend to pick the tasks with the shortest timelines. It’s how we cope. In a 

, psychology professors at the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and Peking University discovered that people in moments of stress, like a product deadline, look for tasks with faster payoffs in order to get a sense of accomplishment or find a bit of positivity.

You may be checking off items off your to-do list; but you’re likely not making significant progress on projects with longer-term horizons. You’re using up hours that could be doled out incrementally to achieve those goals.

It’s easy to lose yourself in the work. Without a system for prioritizing, you might find yourself drawn down rabbit holes outside of 

 or feeling like you don’t have enough time for maintenance tasks because of upcoming feature deadlines.

Stop giving all of your tasks equal weight. Find small wins when you’re stressed in different ways. Instead of snacking on the empty calories of email or Slack messages, eliminate the tasks that are eating up time without moving your work forward.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,” 

 the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. “But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

Setting boundaries for yourself will cut down on your stress by reducing your potential workload and enable you to focus on a new habit of prioritization.

3. Ask questions to uncover what’s limiting your team

As you’re building your framework for priorities, you need to think beyond your own limits and discover what is limiting your team members. This is how you tie your work to the needs of others on your team and throughout the company.

Nick Zhu, a senior director of engineering at Affirm, 

 to look at the ways in which tasks are interconnected, to understand whether your work is aligned with your company’s values.

For Zhu, “an engineer isn’t just working on a list of tasks,” but instead is considering the impact of each of those tasks. And that impact is determined by weighing the amount of time and effort that must be invested in relation to the potential for gains.

Reach out to a product manager to understand what a product or feature will look like now and in the future. Start asking managers about what’s on the top of their mind or what they need help achieving.

This is when you might discover that your company’s push to ship a product quickly has created a backlog of code reviews. By jumping in and filling the gaps, you’re now solving issues with bugs or performance that are essential especially when your company is more resource constrained.

The answers to those questions will give you the input you need to transform prioritization from a concept to a process. This is also the moment when you need to make sure you’re not blinded by your experience.

Assaf Stone, senior customer associate at Github, 

 that while experience can help you navigate difficult situations; it also makes it easy to miss rapidly changing circumstances.

“Experience can also give you a false sense of security. You feel secure that you know all of the answers to the relevant questions, that you know the complete context of the problem,” wrote Stone. “If you want to change something, never assume that the current conditions are immutable.”

Talking to different teams will give you insight into the state of your company and which values are shared values. By consistently asking questions, you can evaluate (and re-evaluate) if the solution you’re working toward will have a high impact.

4. Don’t underestimate the importance of writing things down

 when he announced that he would expect weekly updates from engineers. That decision spurred a series of takes on whether that was a reasonable expectation. While many of Musk’s ideas have been controversial, writing weekly updates can be valuable in making clearer the connection between your work and your company’s goals.

Taking the time to write down what you’ve accomplished in advance of weekly stand-up meetings or one-on-ones is a way to find more satisfaction in work and build regular check-ins to ensure your work is still aligned with the needs of your company.

While you may initially list all of the tasks you’ve completed, stick to the most important points when you’re ready to share ideas with someone else. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, emphasizes the importance of narrative when talking about what you’ve worked on.

“When explaining strategies, emphasize stories over patterns,” 

 Clear. “People forget numbers and charts. Everyone remembers a great story.”

You’re building the story of why this is important to you and your team. You’ll also find that the 

 helps bring closure to your work. Feel the satisfaction of what you’ve accomplished and unburden yourself from the weight of thinking about the portions of the tasks you still have to complete.

5. Balance staying in your flow with meeting your team’s needs

Flow is important. But it can’t come at the expense of your relationships with your team. As we seek to optimize our own productivity, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact of prioritizing your teammates’ needs.

We know that change can be difficult. Initially, you may want to keep the shape of your day intact to protect the 

 you’ve spent time building. In that case, find your moments at natural points of transition to add tasks that are new priorities. That might mean scheduling consistent time for 

 after your regular stand-up meetings or right after you return to your desk from lunch.

Make sure you’re not disconnected from what teammates are working on and make it a priority to be there for your teammates who need code reviews or have a question.

 that while he was an excellent coder, in part because he prioritized working in the flow state, he was harming the productivity of his teammates by being unavailable for hours at a time.

 by video software company Panopto showed that employees spend an average of 5 hours every week waiting for others in their organization, who have the information they need, to respond.

“Being a great developer is much more than writing amazing code,” wrote Vidovic. “We are team players, and we must act like it.”

When Vidovic made it a priority to respond to his teammates’ pull requests, his team came to rely on him and he went from being “an unresponsive person who coded in the corner with noise-canceling headphones” to “one of the most valuable people in the company.” His colleagues began to appreciate him more. He was a grounding force, the reason the pipeline kept moving.

He also discovered something unexpected. He was happier at work and he actually began to code faster. The brief context switches enabled him to get unstuck from difficult problems and inspired the people around him.

“Soft skills, if you can focus on them, can improve your career more than your technical skills,” said Vidovic.

Developing a system for prioritizing work is an iterative process. It’s a continual balance of examining and understanding the needs of your company, as well as your capacity and the capacity of your team.

“Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct…will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress,” said Larson.

You have to be committed to establishing priorities; but not so stuck on a given structure that you miss out on the opportunities for creativity that lead to innovation. Uncertainty is part of working in technology; but you can meet the questions or opportunities that arise by embracing the priorities that support you working at a transformative level.

How to prioritize your work as a developer

Jonathan Bender

The right priorities will help you navigate uncertainty and be fulfilled at work

This productivity system will change your life. 

It simply requires you to change your life.

Productivity methodologies are often framed (and seen) as all-or-nothing endeavors. Follow a set of steps. Build a completely new system. But approaching productivity methodologies as absolutes is likely a recipe for failure.


Rigorous routines are intimidating. We’re not perfect. Systems break down. And suddenly the 

 a new organizational structure is crushing your productivity.


At Stashpad, we see productivity methodologies like high fashion. They’re interesting; but not entirely practical. We find inspiration in productivity systems – a unique look here, an innovative design choice there – and then build something new and, more importantly, adaptable.


As we look at the universe of rules in different productivity systems, we’re searching for the small number of basic ideas that are realistic to implement and have an outsized impact. And there’s one that has always stood out to us: capture your ideas in the moment.


If you’re going to be jotting down notes every day, you know it needs to be easy. So, when we see a productivity methodology on the runway, we try to find out how to actually apply it to our daily lives.


Let’s take a look at three productivity methods from the past two decades – professor Cal Newport’s WorkingMemory.txt, productivity consultant David Allen’s 

, and digital designer Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal – to understand different ways for you to get things down and take action based on those notes.

, a prolific author and computer science professor, is hyper-focused on getting you focused. But before he 

 (a book about how to do sustained, in-depth work), Newport was looking for a simple way to cut through the clutter in his brain.


In 2007, he landed on the idea of using a scratchpad that he titled workingmemory.txt.


“It is a way to offload things out of your brain where you can still see them, look at them, organize them, make sense of them without having to keep all of these things in your mind at the same time,” 

: Newport still uses a plaintext file on his phone to get ideas out of his head, what he calls his “organizational super power.”

He suggests entering each individual task or thought on a different line. Once your ideas are down, you group or sort the ideas by project. By writing things down, Newport contends you’re freeing up working memory and reducing the cost of context switching.

“You’re making sense of the information without having to keep track of it all in your head at once,” explained Newport.

The workingmemory.txt file acts as a continuous, running log for information you want to retain. At the end of each day, you can refer back to the file to see what’s left to do and decide what’s next.

: Software developers liking a text editor? You don’t say.


Tech journalist Danny O’Brien coined the phrase, “life hack,” in 2004 and 

 that “all geeks have a todo.txt file.” His point was that simple and effective note taking is how developers (and maybe everyone else should) keep track of the essential pieces in their work and personal lives.


Fast forward to the present and engineer Junji Zhi 

 that typing out thoughts makes ideas clearer and easier to digest. On Gusto’s Engineering Blog, Zhi wrote that a plaintext file “frees my brain from retaining information,” so he can instead focus on debugging or feature development.


: Newport explains it succinctly by asking you to “stop trying to do it all in your head.” Taking digital notes frees up space in your brain and gives you a known place to find ideas when you want them. Embrace the messy flow of ideas rather than burdening your brain with heavy organizational constraints.

: Two decades before Marie Kondo told the world that all of your stuff needs a home, consultant David Allen believed that an avalanche of stuff in our heads was making us anxious.


Allen understood that we were going to be bombarded with stimulus – email dings and (now Slack) alerts – that threatened our focus.


“If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively,” 

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

, to counter the “open loops,” in our brains caused by unresolved ideas. That book and concept resonated with developers and evolved into seminars across the globe.

: GTD is about building a system to take care of your tasks and close the loops, what Wired 

"I don't care what you write it on, you can write it on your arm," Allen 

 to CNN. "But I guarantee that if you write it down and you keep it someplace where you won't lose it and you look at it sooner than later you're going to feel better than if you don't, and you'll be more productive and use less energy."


 is writing things down that can then be 

, whether that’s a physical tray or digital scratchpad. Each idea gets a distinct piece of paper or line.


GTD then functions like a decision tree, helping you cross items off that list based on the amount of time and resources you’ll need. You decide whether to take action, keep a thought for reference, or let it go.


Short stand-alone tasks (anything that takes less than 2 minutes) should be done quickly, while longer tasks like 

 can be delegated or moved to a specific point on your calendar. Under GTD, you also set aside time for ideas with multiple steps (updating a database or launching a feature) to create and revise project plans.


: GTD is about building a process for understanding your ideas.


“I think it became popular in the tech world because the “Getting Things Done” model is a highly enabling model and that’s sort of the purpose of IT is to enable people to get stuff done faster, easier, cooler, classier, in a more elegant way,” 

GTD is a way for developers to automate idea capture. It’s used for everything from everyday tasks to sprints as a way to recognize patterns and create action plans.


: With so many things competing for our attention, it’s important to have a reliable system for taking notes. Build a trusted space and process for translating ideas into action to avoid being overwhelmed. By breaking larger projects into steps, you create clear pathways for action.

 that met the needs of his neurodiverse brain. A digital product designer with ADHD, he craved structure that didn’t stifle creativity.


He found the answer inside his own notebook. While he had been using the 

 for nearly a decade, Caroll introduced the idea to the world with a website in 2013.


“It provided a simple process that helped me capture, filter and channel information in a way that finally felt natural to my hyperactive mind,” 

It quickly expanded with a physical journal, tutorials, and community dedicated to the organizational methodology.

: While it may be an app or software, Bullet Journaling is typically done with a pen and notebook. You jot down your ideas in a list and then make a symbol to the left of each idea to signify whether it is a task, event, or note.


Your journal also includes a daily log (appointments and daily tasks), monthly calendar (deadlines and short-term goals), and future log (long-term plans or goals) that is populated with the items from your original list. The goal is this system will help you, like Carroll, “conjure and harness lightning.”


: While the stylish design elements of bullet journals are often highlighted, developers are often drawn to the functionality of the system.


Katie Sylor-Miller, a frontend architect for Etsy, 

 the “simple note-taking practice which anyone can use to help tame the chaos of their life and work.” When building her Bullet Journal, she even incorporated the idea of capturing all her thoughts – one of the core tenets of Allen’s GTD – in a brain dump page.


Now, having a single source where all of her ideas are stored helps her know that she won’t forget an idea or task as her bullet journal “functions almost like an external brain.” The act of writing and the visual of completing tasks are positive reinforcements for her process.


: Get your ideas out of your head. Even if they look nice – and many Bullet Journals are beautiful – notes don’t have to be fancy to be effective. The BuJo Method is also a good reminder to find the way to capture ideas, whether that’s analog or digital, most comfortable for you.


Whichever productivity method speaks to you, we hope you see the value in getting your ideas down. Each of the three methodologies featured above begins with finding a way to get what’s in your head into a digital or written document. Because then you can make space for decisions and actions.


. It’s why we created Stashpad and why we work each day to make it easier for you to capture your thoughts. We believe a great scratchpad is the foundation for great work.


If you stop thinking of productivity methodologies as something that requires complete and total commitment, what could you accomplish?


The value of getting things down

3 productivity methodologies that start with capturing ideas

Get things done

Time sucks loom with every blink of your cursor. A big new feature with unclear parameters. A sticky technical question that stops your progress.

Big open-ended questions steal your focus. Technology hiccups you once tolerated feel like banging your head against a wall as ship deadlines approach.

Technical or design frustrations tend to invite ad hoc solutions. Problems to be solved in or around your work. But by failing to devote dedicated time to solving nonbinary problems, you’re missing out an opportunity to make critical discoveries, share knowledge, and cut down on future risks.

 – author of the Extreme Programming book series – called a “very simple program to explore potential solutions.”

Spikes, which came into vogue during the rise of agile software development (Beck was an original signer of the 

), are still valuable tools two decades later for answering ambiguous or lingering questions.

Read on for insights into the types of spikes, how to effectively structure these “simple programs,” and communicate what you learn to your team.

A spike is a way to set aside time for a developer to try and find possible answers to open-ended questions. If you have multiple options for solving a technical challenge or aren’t certain if a given solution will give you the results you want, a spike might be just what the doctor ordered.

In Microsoft’s Code With Engineering Playbook, they 

Technical spikes are for when your team believes there are a number of answers to an engineering problem or are unfamiliar with technology that might be the answer to that problem. With a tech spike, you might assess the load impact of a particular function or whether to build or buy software.

A functional spike dives into the process around solutions. It’s a deeper look into the steps you need to take, the potential risks, and how implementation could get complicated for your team and the end user.

You may often do a spike before or at the beginning of a sprint. A spike has four distinct parts:

You investigate to try and find the best approach.

A successful spike often doesn’t end with an implemented solution. The outcome is a deep understanding of the problem and, if available, a recommended approach to solve it. Sometimes a spike unveils a deeper challenge that requires a further spike.

 this was an opportunity for “driving a spike through the entire design.” It’s a way to poke holes in your design theory. Others, in turn, have extended that idea to suggest that a spike is a deep – but narrow – dive (akin to an actual metal spike driven into wood) into a topic.

In an effort to back away from such a direct metaphor, Beck suggested “architectural prototype,” as another name for this process of exploration. He saw a spike (in the same fashion as an engineering feasibility spike) as a means to put some parameters in place that might help your team move forward or narrow the scope of pursuit.

“Most spikes are not good enough to keep, so expect to throw it away,” said Beck. “The goal is reducing the risk of a technical problem or increasing the reliability of a user story’s estimate.”

3 Steps for Structuring an Effective Spike

The start of a spike might feel like the expanse of outer space. A moment of exploration and of possibility. But just as you wouldn’t step out of a space shuttle without a tether, you need anchors before you do a spike. Spikes are valuable for what they reveal; but they lose utility without clear constraints in place.

1. Define what you’re looking to answer.

Treat spikes as science experiments. Begin with a clear hypothesis.

“Build the spike to only address the problem under examination and ignore all other concerns,” explained Beck.

While it’s important to define why you’re doing the spike, you don’t need all the answers before you start the process. In a 

 about sizing spikes, Daniel Wilhite, a manager of software engineering at health insurer Bright Health, stressed the importance of not being paralyzed by choice.

“A spike’s purpose is to learn more about something in order for it to become ready for a sprint,” wrote Wilhite. “But you should always be willing to move forward on things with a bit of uncertainty because you will never know everything before you start.”

While a spike affords you the freedom of time to try and address an ambiguous problem, you need to decide the amount of time and resources you’re going to commit before you dive into the unknown. For Andrew Fuqua, the SVP of Products at ConnectALL (a value stream management company), a time box – a predetermined amount of time – eliminated one of the main variables that could derail your exploration.

“Setting a small time-box limit is another way to encourage clarity,” 

 Fuqua. “I like to set explicit policy for them…no vague spikes with vague results.”

The structure of a time box follows the same parameters as productivity techniques like the 

 (30-minute blocks divided into delineated moments of work and rest). It sets expectations for how a spike fits into workflow and when you’ll reconnect as a team to determine next steps.

3. Take notes to document what you discover.

With every spike, you’ll find interesting and unexpected pathways that aren’t on task. It’s easy to get carried away with details that don’t matter. But if you don’t document what you discover, you’ll find it’s harder to come back later and remember all of the details.

 without getting derailed. Hold your focus and build a written record in real-time. Don’t get 

. Instead, look to capture your ideas quickly to keep moving forward and make sure you’re staying on the path to answer the question that launched a spike.

Tell the story of your spike through a presentation.

After a spike, you know a lot that your team doesn’t know. And now, it’s up to you to decide how to summarize your discovery.

If you’re briefly sharing what you’ve learned in a stand-up meeting or Slack, hone in on the key point and the big steps that led you to your finding. Use bullet points or organize your ideas in a similar fashion to draw a clear line through what you’ve uncovered.

Some spikes will require a more thorough discussion. But how do you distill 48 hours of research into a 20-minute presentation?

Take a page from Google software engineer Addy Osmani, who 

 for how to communicate effectively as a technical lead on LeadDev.

“Shorter messages are more likely to be interpreted in their entirety,” said Osmani. “Don’t stray from the core point of the message.”

You’re telling a story and your team needs to be able to follow alongside. Pick the most important point of discovery (what Osmani calls the core point) and then take your team on the path.

Briefly restate the problem you examined. This is why you did the spike. Set the expectations for what you’re going to cover in your presentation to keep your team focused on the task at hand. This also helps you maintain focus, similar to the start of your spike.

Explain how you arrived at your conclusion(s). Let everybody into your moment of discovery first. Show how a given piece of software or feature can address the problem. Then, go back to the beginning and be specific in outlining the potential benefits or reasons you’ve landed on a given pursuit. Don’t get hung up on branches of inquiry that didn’t yield fruit. That’s why you took notes for an appendix (see below).

Offer an idea of what might come next. Frame the next steps as a recommendation, leaving time and space for your team to pick up the thread of what you’ve started. With a clear grasp of how long a project may realistically take, your project manager can work with you on planning and establishing timelines.

Use your notes as the foundation for a written appendix.

There’s always more to the story than what you can share in a presentation. That’s why a written appendix ensures a spike has utility beyond the moment of exploration.

“Having full results detailed somewhere will help the team trust the results,” explained Microsoft’s Code With Engineering Playbook. “Data can be interpreted lots of different ways, and it may be necessary to go back to the original data for a new interpretation.”

We’re all wired differently. While some of us may want the story around a solution, others want to be able to come to their own conclusion with a thorough look at the source material.

Once the spike is completed, the creation of an appendix gives you the opportunity to reconsider and organize those spontaneous thoughts. A written record also serves as a handy reference in the likely event that you want to revisit an idea.

Spikes rarely offer a singular path forward, instead giving you valuable insight into the unknown. They’re an efficient way to pursue open-ended questions, share knowledge, and shine light on potential solutions.

Make time for spikes to save your team time in the long run.

Spikes are your answer to open-ended questions

Focused sessions cut down on risk and clear up product timelines

 - Navigate through the cursor's position history

 - Newline without having to be at the end of the line

Middle click - Go to definition / Show usages

This shortcut opens the "Search everywhere" modal, which you can think of as a sort of Swiss Army knife for your keyboard. From this modal you can find anything and perform just about any action that WebStorm is capable of performing simply by typing what you want.

Along the top of the "Search everywhere" modal there are six tabs indicating categories of items that can be used to narrow your search. The first tab, and the one you're thrown into when you first open the modal, is "All". As you type what you're looking for in this tab, the list will populate with a grab-bag of anything and everything from your project that matches or comes close to matching your query — classes, variables, files, directories — it's all there. In my own work, I most frequently use this to navigate between files; rather than reaching for my mouse to dig through my project tree for a file, I'll tap 

, start typing out the filename, and typically within three or four characters my file (or the class/function/etc. that I'm looking for within that file) is selected at the top and hitting 

If you're looking for classes, files, or symbols specifically, you can use 

 to switch between the tabs and narrow your search according to type. I like to use the "Actions" tab when I don't know or simply can't remember a keyboard shortcut. In that tab you can find any action that the IDE is capable of performing. Actions are displayed along with their keyboard shortcuts, if assigned, and conveniently you can even assign shortcuts without ever leaving the "Search everywhere" modal.

As you're working, WebStorm keeps track of everywhere the cursor goes in a really convenient navigable history, and you can use 

 to jump back and forth through that history. For example, you place the cursor in a new file and create a class. You then open an existing file, make some changes to the imports at the top, then scroll way down to the bottom and add a new function. If you wanted to quickly get back to the new file you created, you could tap 

 twice and WebStorm would bring you right back to where you left off in that file, reopening it if necessary. Two more quick taps of 

 and you'd be right back at the bottom of the other file where you created the function.

WebStorm does a really good job of differentiating between useful locations and individual cursor positions; so as you type, the cursor position after each character is not added to the history, nor are short cursor movements from the arrow keys. I find this to be extremely useful as I'm working on a task that touches a few different locations among a few different files, particularly if don't have the screen real estate to display everything at once.

. A common scenario in my work is that I've edited some code, leaving my cursor somewhere in the middle of the line, and I want to add a new line. Rather than jumping to the end of the line and pressing 

 will add a newline and move the cursor down all at once.

 the current line and move the cursor there. Though I use it less frequently, this is a particularly useful one in cases where I decide I want to add a comment or documentation line to the code I've just written or edited.

This one overlaps a bit with "Search everywhere" in functionality, as many things can be found using either method, but there are two key differences when deciding which to use. First, 

 is essentially a powerful string search over your entire project; so if you're looking for a named variable or specific piece of text that lives in a comment or an actual string variable, this is what you'll need to use, since it likely won't show up in the "Search everywhere" results. Second, the modal interface is a split view where the top half shows a list of results and the bottom half is an editor opened to the file containing the currently selected result, highlighting the line that contains the matched text. Having the additional context of the surrounding ~20 lines of code can be extremely useful in locating exactly what you're looking for, and since the bottom half is a full-fledged editor, making quick changes is a breeze.

While not technically a keyboard shortcut, I've included the middle click in this list because I use it almost as much as my actual keyboard shortcuts, and it's one of the main reasons I'll actually reach for the mouse. Middle clicking (clicking the mouse wheel), e.g. a variable name, in WebStorm will either take you to that variable's definition or if you've middle-clicked on the variable definition, a list of places where that variable is used will pop up. If the variable is only used in one place, WebStorm will just take you there rather than pop up the list.

. So if you come across a variable/string/function call/class instantiation/library import/etc. and you're not sure what it is, middle-clicking on it is always a good place to start digging for more information.

In my work, I get a lot of use combing middle-click with the 

 navigation shortcuts. A typical use case is that I middle click a couple times to get to the few files I need to reference, use 

 to navigate back to my starting point, and I'm off to the races.

Blog | From the Stashpad team and community

How to prioritize your work as a developer

The value of getting things down

Spikes are your answer to open-ended questions

My top 5 WebStorm shortcuts

Attention residue is eroding your focus

How to build a good code review culture

A deep dive into flow

When to Prioritize Code Quality at a Startup

Introducing Stashpad

Setting slack status for remote work

Maximize creativity with planned group brainstorming sessions

Find Meaning In The Gritty Work

How we minimize deep work interruptions at Stashpad

Why the pomodoro method is more useful than you might think

Embrace the reality of zoom meetings and make them work for you

You probably don't need a knowledge garden

5 strategies for self-care when working from home

How to maximize deep work when working remotely

Status dumps for software engineers

Start stashing today.