Mastering your tools improves productivity

Spending time to learn and master your tools, whether it's your IDE or text editor, CMS or framework, or something else that you use regularly like Git, spending time to expand on the basics and learn it more thoroughly is an investment in your future.

I try to keep up to date with the latest additions and changes to Drupal and the PHP language so that I can be more productive and write better and cleaner code.

I invest time to make my development environment and tools work as effectively and efficiently as possible. If I can make it easier and quicker to perform simple tasks like navigating to and creating files, and scaffolding new content within them, that time will be paid back in future time saved.

If I find a new plugin, module, theme or tool that will make future tasks easier - even something as easy as commenting out a line or block of code - putting aside some time to investigate and evaluate it and decide if I want to use it is time well spent.

As someone said in a video recently, "you invest time now to buy back time later".