20230701:00 - Work cycles
Intentional task management
I've been playing with scheduling, focus management, and time blocking. Inspired by some work colleagues, I've begun taking more notes in a collection of Markdown files, which I can keep offline for quick lookup. To help me in both, I'm jotting down some quick notes and thoughts here.
Scheduling ahead
Something that I've not really thought about in the past is to plan ahead. I usually free-flow my days and weeks, and this causes a lot of problems for me. So starting a few months ago, I built a year-at-a-glance yearly planner just using an online spreadsheet in the googleplex. I share it between my work and personal accounts so that it covers everything in the same place: work commitments, family milestones, holidays, anniversaries, trips, gigs and all. It's a year planner that I can have in my pocket, and it helps a lot with figuring out when to fit in everything, rather than keeping it in my head and getting it wrong.
Note taking and journaling
In addition to Fieldnote issues, which I've logged about, I've started to keep notes offline using Dendron, a Markdown-based note taking app implemented as a VSCode extension. It's like Obsidian except that it's open-source and because it's in VSCode I have all my favorite editing tools. My notes are offline, backed up to Keybase for now, while I experiment with different methods, but I intend to publish them online, replacing https://milohax.net at some point (though those memes will be migrated in).
The journaling is something new. I've looked at bullet- and five-minute journaling before but I've never stuck it out because I'm not a paper-notes person, and the last time I tried it in a computer was with EMACS Org-mode. I'm also approaching this with new intention: I want to use this to help me see what's important, where I spend my time, and to see trends and improvements. I plan the day and review using a five-minute/bullet journal combo, based on Dendron's template.
Planning the day
I started time-blocking a while back, but it was course-planning:
- 2 hours in the morning for new tickets
- 1 hour for dev work
- 2 hours for existing tickets
- 1 hour lunch
- 2-3 hours with varying: meetings/crush/tickets/dev
I stuck with this, and it helped a lot for me to focus in on the kind of work I'm doing, but it's still easy to be lost: which specific task do I work in this block?
So starting this week, I'm actually blocking out time to specific tickets, MRs, issues, and meetups, with a block at the start to put in blocks of time for each task, and another at the end to review, journal, and migrate tasks.
It means that I have two apps here: GCal to time block with reminders/alerts, and Dendron with my bullet journal to plan/review. It's a bit manual copying things into the calendar, but for now that busywork is part of clearing my head to get the day's priorities arranged. After I've spent the 10-15 minutes to do it, I am free to just work the plan with pop-up prompts about what I should be doing, Pomodoro style.
Working on what is next
I work from the ticket queues in Zendesk, and my ToDos/Issues/MRs in GitLab. I'm not an email person, so I don't see notification emails until maybe every 2nd day when I do look in my inbox.
Adjustments I'm making:
- Convert Zendesk Tickets into Tasks, and set Due Dates for next actions. This way they appear in the queue and I can easily see what next to do on my current tickets
- Clear out my ToDos and then set new ToDos. Be mindful of due dates, and set due dates on next actions in my own issues and MRs.
These views form input into the daily planning, and I can come back to them if I have "spare" time to fill between tasks
1:1s and the weekly logs
I have found that my weekly logs become a bit stale. Mostly I think that is because they need tweaking just a little to become useful again
- I need to review the tasks lists, put them into my notes and keep only this week's priorities instead of a rolling list of doom
- I have found that searching is not easy. I need to review the week more regularly (on a Monday when I'm motivated to do it, instead of Friday/Saturday which does not happen), and add/remove labels, or bookmark the log/link it to my notes.
- Important insights from 1:1s with my manager are really valuable, and it's great to collaborate in the issues. Part of the review here needs to collect those to where I can more readily find them.
7-weeks cycle
This morning I read about the Blanc 8-week work cycle with sabbaticals and felt inspired to try something like it. One of the advantages of being a "manager of one", and indeed one of my responsibilities, is to plan my own time appropriately. This 8-week cycle does not fit my situation exactly, so I'm going to adjust it:
- I'm on call every 7 weeks, currently (except for swaps), so I'd like to make it a 7-week cycle
- Compress the two-week "buffer" and "sabbatical" into one week "buffer", to do on my on-call week
- For the other 6 weeks, my focus work will be on one, or two dev tasks: training, docs, team improvement and other responsibilities besides tickets, that I'd like to do.
Most of my time should still be spent doing tickets, but the other tasks are just as important, and I haven't been making the time for doing these. So starting now I'm going to commit to a task for 6 weeks, to do in the non-tickets parts of my days, and block time out to do them. The "buffer" week is to have space to tie up loose ends, and I feel that doing it in my on-call week makes the most sense: I'm on call for 4 hours a day in those weeks.
The 7-week cadence seems a bit weird but it's in line with the duty roster, which has a bigger impact to my work life than things like months or quarters: months don't mean a lot to me, and quarters are more like company-wide milestones that really only affect me in career planning.
The idea of a "sabbatical" or one-week holiday every 7 weeks seems a bit too much, but I still must plan leave, and I intend to do it in the yearly schedule, which I constantly review anyway. I don't feel that I should schedule time off like clockwork. Clearly it can't happen during my roster, either! It likely will have to fit into the buffer.