Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of developers. I’m talking about products like the Amazon marketplace, AutoCAD, or any operating system. These products take a very long time to release new features or fix bugs, considering the amount of engineers they employ.

Do you ever feel like a million tasks are looming over you at any given moment? How about that you can’t concentrate because it feels like you should be doing something more important? I used to have these feelings all the time. I call this “brain clutter”, though I’m sure there are many other names for it. That’s a problem that hurts work productivity more than you might realize. Not to mention your peace of mind.

The more I work in software development, the more I love working with the command line. I notice I’m becoming increasingly productive with it. When dealing with Git, for example, I used to do almost everything in a GUI program, whereas now I use the command line for 90% of the actions. But the command line will make you more productive with everything, not just source control. There are several reasons why it’s so efficient.