I will go out on a little bit of a limb and say that the single most important and beneficial step that you can take to improve your code is to test first. Yes, I know. I hate testing, too.
I picked up a few books on Extreme Programming several months ago. There are far more useful tidbits of knowledge in there than I can explain in a short article, but one of the most simple and useful is to take what you *hate* and do it *more*. The premise to this unusual practice is that the more you perform this task, the more you choose to automate it, because you loathe to spend so much time on it. This dove-tails nicely with the old axiom that programmers are among the world's laziest people.
