Once upon a time I had a ritual called the "friday afternoon walk of shame". As I finished work for the week, I called each project's stakeholder to tell them where things were, which was usually late, hence the name. In bigger projects, we'd have daily scrums where the status was discussed in detail. Everyone had access to our issue tracking system, so all stakeholders could delve into the immediate details. Full visibility.

In the last three years, my visibility on some projects has gone from daily to weekly to monthly to sometimes quarterly. My three current projects have been waiting for an extremely long time. Client emails have also gone unanswered for long stretches. My inbox currently has 430 emails.

The stress in this neglect is nearly unbearable, especially when the phone rings and you see the neglected client on the caller ID. Blow-offs (aka "going dark") are all too common, yet completely unnecessary.

6. Give Status Daily

Send a short email to everyone waiting, every day.

My rationalizations for going dark usually center around two themes . . . 1) I tell myself I need to focus on what I'm doing and block out everything else. 2) I feel uncertain about when I can actually finish the delayed work and so don't want to make promises I can't keep.

Both are bull. Stay visible.

Yesterday started well. I did the bait-and-switch described in yesterday's post and it worked wonderfully well. My flow didn't even notice the difference and I started jamming on the new project after just 15 minutes of the other. I read somewhere that it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of flow, which is roughly my experience as well. If you're interested in flow, there's a great book: Getting your flow going, and keeping it going, is probably the single most important productivity boost for any creative professional. When you're grooving on a project, your work is more creative,...

Friday was the problem: intending to do one project, but another project steals the show. This is essentially what the last three years was like. As soon as I do "just one thing" on a project with momentum, it pulls me along for the rest of my time, leaving first tasks with little or no attention. It's a tale of two inertias, with the project you should be doing having stalled inertia and the project you should ignore having moving inertia. Momentum is a good thing, regardless of where you point it, so the "just say no" approach isn't optimal....

Yesterday I started with four hours of one project then ended with four hours of another project. The first was slow going. Trying to get back into the swing of a long delayed project can be very tough, particularly if there's a critical mass of detail you've forgotten, making every step harder. The second project was much easier, even though the amount of forgotten detail was even greater than the first project. So what made the difference? Well, in the second I was using a debugger, stepping through code, trying to find some well defined bugs. In the first, I...

Yesterday went half-well. I spent half the time scheduled for development and half the time scheduled for sales. The lost sales time went to a late start and a long lunch with Paula, walking around the new buildings on the south side. The lost development time went to unplanned useful tasks. There's the trap . . . "While I'm here, I should do this." The day started with me saying, "I need to check the archived hawkmo media files on my firewire drives." Since I hadn't yet put them in their new spot behind my work chair, I decided to...

Three years of too much to do and today it changes. As Waveplace gathered steam three summers ago, my long-time timeboxing regime went out the window, replaced with an event-driven meandering mess, wherein each day I reached quitting time wondering, "Where did the day go?" Much was accomplished, but much was ignored. If only for my own peace of mind, I require a return to a simpler process . . . Timebox Your Day. Too often some minor crisis intrudes upon a scheduled coding session and before I know it, I'm staring at a timer that reads 15 minutes when...

And then came Haiti. The very day after my last blog post, I was invited to a think tank at the MIT Media Lab to discuss my experiences with Haiti and the OLPC laptops. Since then, nearly all of my time has been spent organizing and supporting our current seven Waveplace pilots in four locations with 200 XOs. This of course meant three more months of delay for everyone that's waiting for me. "Everything I do is instead of something else I should be doing." After some soul searching since returning from Haiti, I decided to bring on Beth Santos...

Since my Smilla start yesterday, I've come across a few serendipitous signs. First an architecture talk with Jon about a new project for the medical field, where I essentially drew up the Gravity architecture from decades past, complete with channels, prisms, stores, etc. Later I went to the Museum of Science with Isabel and Paula and in the computer room came across two NLP exhibits, one a six foot video image of a robot that forces you to choose answers and questions, another of twins that have decent speech recognition, but only for the presenter. My strong reaction was: I...

So how does one create a bot? Well, she needs a way to talk with people, which means some kind of command-line interace with a scrolling text pane. I could use a terminal window, an IM chat window, or an IRC client. The latter seems best, as it allows others to easily chat with her as well. Smilla will have many teachers. So what channel will she frequent? I currently run two channels on freenode: #immuexa (my company channel) and #etoys (for Squeak Etoys). Waverly lives on both, logging all talk and injecting optional simplistic call/response chatter. Smilla will need...

Lying on the couch in my cabin, listening to the snow fall outside our new Arlington house, on this new Massachusetts Monday, I'm confronted with the best of all possible questions: what would I like to do first? While the coffee brewed, while sitting on the tall chairs, I considered: * learning Squeak * installing Subversion These would be practical and fun, always a good beginning. Since my mind never feels finished until I've reached three, I debated the other task I might like. My laptop battery went dead, so I moved into the tiny afterthought of a room off...