When I'm working I feel like most of the time I'm not doing actual work. For example after making a change to the code in order to test it, I have to first build the project, and start the server(say JBoss). Upon testing, I find that there is another small issue. So I bring down the server, make the changes, build again and start up the server again.The building and bringing the server up/down is not very useful work.

Also, the IDE (lets say Eclipse) does things such as updating Maven indexes and building the workspace which take some more time to get things done.

Have you come across this kind of situation? Do you have tips on how to overcome/bypass this? Any features on the IDE/build tools that can be helpful? Any architecture/application design/technology that attempts to overcome this?