Busy vs. Productive

It's easy to be busy: it simply means that you're doing lots of stuff. Being productive, though, is about delivering value and is much harder: to be productive you have to make sure all the work you're doing is valuable, and minimise waste and unnecessary work.

To put it another way: busy people do many units of work; productive people focus on delivering large amounts of value per unit of work.

So, how can you make sure you're being productive as a software engineer?

• Understand the context of your work. You cannot be productive if you don't know the reason for the work you're doing. You must go further than simply plucking tickets from a queue and doing what they say. Remember, you're not building software for the sake of it; you're building a product and a business. Know your product and you'll make better decisions while you're building it. 
• Design your software. Software development is not primarily about coding; it's about designing software systems. Coding is the bit that happens once you have come up with a high-quality design. If you don't take the time to make plans and get input from your colleagues, you will make errors that introduce bugs and technical debt. Having discussions and writing documentation to capture your plans is not a waste of time. It's a key part of your job of a software engineer. It may not feel like it, but this will save you time in the long run.
• Question everything. Ask "why?" a lot. It's amazing what you'll learn, and the ways in which this will help you do things right the first time. Rigorous scrutiny and debate is a hallmark of a top engineering culture. Always be respectful, but never hesitate to subject things to scrutiny.
• Be lazy. The best way to do a piece of work efficiently is to avoid doing it at all! Is there an existing tool or feature that you can use? Can you reframe the problem so that a much less costly solution does the job? Is this whole thing even worth doing at all? Always ask the questions. 

Your time is a valuable resource, it is your responsibility to make sure it's being used efficiently.