Recently I have been helping several other developers in the shop I am consulting at and realized another item for this series: Removing Pain. I am amazed by how many times I see developers repeating the same things over and over again.

Builds/Deployments
Builds should be the simplest and most repeatable thing you do in a day. If you have a checklist on your desk of steps then stop and automate. It is such a time saver to have a script that will do the things you need it to do. Wether it is using a build system like nANT, msBuild, finalBuilder, a batch file, or adding automation to visual studio (pre and post build events can be quite handy in a project). I have even used Auto Hot Key to build a macro to repeat some tasks that I could not automate via code.

Coding
Well I am a huge fan of resharper. I probably owe JetBrains about 400 hours of my life so far. There are lots of great tools to help you be productive in your IDE so try some of them out! I am not a fan of code generators but if you are doing tasks that feel like copy,paste, change 1 or 2 things then you should extract it to a generic way of doing it OR if that will not work then look at code generators

Frameworks
There are lots of great tools out there that enable you to do things faster. Things like ORMs for your data access, logging frameworks to make your life easier, and testing frameworks to help you increase or maintain the quality of your code.

If something is painful to do at work that is the first thing you should address. By removing the things that eat away your time you will have more time to be productive and just get more done.