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.
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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, more focused, more fun. You keep wanting to do more, which is a wonderful way to spend your work week.
The biggest danger to flow is distraction. Every “quick question”, every phone call, every little side trip on the web, every email read, kills your flow. If it takes 15 minutes to get it, and 1 minute to lose it, it’s easy to see why most people never really experience flow. They’re like the father in Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron”, who has a state-mandated electric show disrupt his thoughts every few minutes so that he’s officially no smarter than everyone else.
5. Protect Your Flow
Completely avoid distractions while you’re doing creative work.
I always schedule creative work in the mornings, since it’s much easier to get and maintain a flow before I start talking to people. I also avoid checking my email or answering the phone until after my creative timebox is over. I also listen to music to keep my mind from wandering off into the well-worn tracks of yesterday’s to-dos.
Let me underline this dramatically: the single biggest reason for my lost productivity over the last three years is that I didn’t protect my flow. I either answered the phone, checked my email, or did “one quick thing” which opened the door to another lost day.
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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. Stalling your ignore project so you can pay attention to the other isn’t the way to go.
In track cycling there’s a race called the Madison, where you switch riders after a number of laps in a longer race. The first rider has considerable momentum as she comes into the switch. The second rider has none. To keep as much of the momentum going, they grab each other’s arms and do a “hand sling” where the first shoots the second rider forward. This works surprisingly well.
Rule 4: Fool your inertia
Start a project with existing momentum briefly, then switch to another as though it were another task in the first project.
Get started on the project with momentum, doing your usual start of day review, which gets your “passive momentum” activated somewhat, then switch. The trick is to switch before the pull of the first project is to great. To help this, I usually make a mix tape for each project and start each day listening to the same songs. Listening to mix makes me feel like I’m in the momentum project. As I switch, the flow part of me doesn’t even notice because of the power of the music.
This may all seem odd to someone that’s unfamiliar with flow. The quality and productivity you get from maintaining a good coding flow is remarkably better than the usual event-driven fare. More on this later.
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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 was also troubleshooting, but without a debugger. Mostly configuration issues. More than anything though, in the second I had momentum and in the first I had none.
Momentum makes an enormous difference during development. When I’ve got my mojo working, I’m much better at understanding, coding, and testing. There’s a flow that becomes its own reward: line ‘em up and knock ‘em down. The time flies.
So how do you get some flow going when you’re threading needles with boxing gloves? Try warming up first, like we do with physical activity.
3. Warm up your brain
Start work with something small, well-defined, and fun.
Of course, small warm ups can turn into a string of unnecessary tasks (see rule #2). Make sure you limit your time on the warmup if it’s not a priority (see rule #1). And once you get your momentum going, try to insulate yourself from distractions (next rule).
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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 set them up there. “That UPS hasn’t worked in a long time.” So I remove the UPS. Organizing this, and organizing that, and before I know it, almost an hour is gone.
Yes, it was all good stuff to do. Yes, it was marginally related to my current project in a “clear off my desk and check the firewire drives” kind of way. But what should have been 5 minutes turned into 45 minutes and my timebox got smaller.
Even within a project there are many time traps. “I really should do this,” even though it has nothing to do with the task at hand. Some of these unplanned detours can end up taking the better part of an afternoon, or more. While you’re in the flow of coding it can be very hard to remember the big picture, the established priorities as the client understands them. Yes, there are small things that need doing that the client will never understand, but ever exploding “while I’m here” stuff usually goes well beyond what’s strictly necessary.
In the mid-90s, when I was finishing Vienna Estimator, I taped a piece of paper above my desk with the words, “Are You Closing The Hood?” This was my reminder to avoid unplanned improvements.
Put another way, we have:
Rule #2 . . . Log It and Leave It
If a new task isn’t necessary for the task you’re on, log it in your issue tracker and forget about it until later.
This has the added benefit of better documentation of tasks done. It also allows you to review competing tasks to determine if it really is more important than other things.
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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 it’s supposed to read 4 hours. One thing, and the next, and the next, gobbled up the day again.
It’s pretty simple to avoid this from happening. For one thing, I should never check my email or answer my phone before noon. It’s a sure-fire way to switch to an event driven mindset. My routine has long been to do creative work in the morning and event-driven stuff in the afternoon, but in the last three years, this rarely happened.
Rule #1 . . . Don’t Break The Box
Allow nothing to intrude upon scheduled creative time.
This morning it’s 4 hours of the Hawk Mountain raptor identification game. I’ve wanted to work on this for … years.
Now to finish it, one timebox at a time.
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