A time for everything
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. It's Veteran's Day when you're reading this.
I hope you had a good weekend and managed to get a good rest!
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Things I discovered in the past week
- Daylight Computers (DC-1) has started shipping! I've been waiting for mine for a while. They had some delays, so I hope to get mine soon.
- I recently came across this blog post, "Write Code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend." it's old by internet standards, but I found it very thought-provoking and still applicable.
Lately, I was going through the motions of work and wrapping up a large migration, which meant I crashed in the end.
My weekends were primarily spent trying to restore my energy; I started feeling like myself again after a while. I was thinking about how some projects end with a very slow ramp down, especially migrations, where customers might start using the new system, asking for support and training until we slowly adopt the new tool as the status quo. This means the project is "over"; now it's just another tool in our psyche.
Crunch time
Long and large projects will undoubtedly and sadly require crunch time, either because there are blockers, there's nobody else to take on a specific task, there are too many unknowns, you name it.
If you're leading the project, you might be seen as the person who will take on those tasks. In most cases, these are thankless tasks: setting up meetings, consistently poking the teams that are not prioritizing them, etc. Consistently sending meeting notes or project updates is a chore, but it needs to be done if you want to avoid people consistently panicking because they don't know the status of the project.
Focus time
Other times in a project, you'll need time to go deep, focus, and come out the other side with guidelines, a proof-of-concept (POC), a library, or a "map" to get us to our destination.
Regardless, understanding when these are needed and making sure your calendar has them is a skill we all need to learn. I used not to care too much about my calendar, but then I started having more meetings than I could keep under control, and I started thinking deeply about meetings that required my presence.
Rest time
One thing I've learned the hard way is that it's not always possible to run at 110%. You need to set aside time to recover.
Over the years, I've become less structured about work hours. This is mainly because I work from home, so I can go out and come back to pick up some work tasks here and there. It's hard to understand when you've "stopped" working; it's like being always on.
Since then, I've started marking the beginning and end of work days with activities: making coffee at the beginning and going for a walk outside the apartment at the end.
These activities help prime my brain to change activities and instead focus on something else. Catch up on YouTube, read some blogs, a book, etc. But there's also rest at work, taking time off, and clearing up your calendar to change activities. When I'm out of long projects, I switch from meetings to focus more on meeting 1:1 with folks and sort of catching up with the organization. Maybe I'll take the time to present or do an open forum.
Enough time
If you're like me and were raised a certain way, you might always feel there's never enough time. Sometimes because there's a lot to do, but other times because we're unsatisfied with how much is done.
I always think about the latter, like we're doing a new feature, doing tech excellence, setting up requirement gathering for the next project, but I always feel like it's not enough. When I stop to think about it, it's ok to be doing all this and not more. Organizations are slow organisms. You must know how and when to make them move or change direction. It's as much of a science as it is an art.
Your turn!
How do you feel about the time you spend at work? Have you ever thought about it? Maybe you're better at boundaries than I am! Anyway, let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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