Keep Moving Forward
Sometimes, when things feel impossible... or I don't know how to finish something... or I'm just tired of talking about everything, ceaselessly. Then, I just try to find something that definitely needs to be done. Something interesting... maybe even fun. It doesn't have to be important. It doesn't have to have a deliverable. It doesn't even have to be work. It just has to move things in a forwardish direction...
Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim!
Finding Nemo
I say forwardish, because I'm tired of planning everything... planning for days, weeks, hours... whatever... it gets old. If we don't have the project completely planned, we can't be sure we're moving down the best possible path. However, as long as we are moving forwardish, we can't be said to be completely wasting our time.
This plays into another thing that I say, a lot... let's work on what we know. When we get done with that, we may know more about the things we don't know... we also, may not... who knows? We're not really worse off for having done the work.
The First Law of Mentat
A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
Dune
I don't know... I know that planning is important for the business. It's important for budgeting and getting headcount and launch projections and whatever... but, I get tired of it. Pretty often, I'm wrong about what's going to be happening next week. How can I know with anything close to certainty what's going to be happening in the 3 - 6 months that it's going to take to finish this project?
Besides, it seems that, more often than not, as we move along the the projected work, some of the planned work becomes not important anymore, some unplanned work needs to be done (we didn't know about some limits of a service we're using, or something didn't work as we expected, etc).
Anyway, I feel it would be optimal to move to an actual agile method. However, as I said, it's not really going to happen... at least not in my current role, so, this is where we're at. I take part in planning meetings, I offer up my suggestions and insights, I participate, but occasionally, I stop. I start working on something that needs to be done, something I can check in, something I can say, "Hey, look, I am still a developer."
So, in sense, when things start piling up, or you get stuck on a task, or you're getting overwhelmed by meetings, or you just need to get back to writing code, I suggest you find something you've been meaning to do, or something you know needs to be done, or improve your environment... anything. Just take a step back from what's bogging you down. Do something to move you forward. Just keep moving forward... or forwardish.
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