You need those breaks. The space in between. The pauses in what you are doing. The Mindless Time that enables you to stop and think, pull back, think, pause on what you are doing, reconsider what’s next, plan the direction, move forward. Without you’ll always be chasing fires with no goal in mind.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft wrapped up its yearly Ignite Conference and before long, Apple and Google will have their big conferences again. Amazon and Facebook will have theirs. And everything will change again. All that code you wrote will now need to be upgraded to a new platform. That product you were working on was done in half the time by twice as many people. The idea you had is already being worked on and…
No one is born into a role. Everyone wants to a police officer at the age of two, but no one actually is. Just like no one tells you the day you are going to lead a team. It just kind of happens, maybe you had an inkling something was going to change, maybe it was a formal promotion to being a manager but now there it is in front of you – you are…
An Open SLACK Channel. A OneNote shared with everyone. A Basecamp project that everyone can post to. A Google Doc that everyone fills in. A text file that everyone updates. A conference call where people jump on if they have a problem but don’t need to attend if they don’t? There are so many options available to you and your team that can solve the problem you are having with people not attending status meetings…
I live in a city where a certain LRT implementation has gone off the rails. It’s not going well. One day it will recover, but until then, all the problems we are currently encountering will continue as we all hold on for the growing pains that are sure to come with it. That’s where Technical Debt hurts us – not in the code being old, obsolete or hard to maintain – but in the people,…