Asymptomatic

Posts tagged: work

Importance and Urgency
November 17, 2024
importance urgency work management

One of the weird things about being an Engineering Director (ED) is that the stuff that lands on your plate is almost always very important but not urgent. This happens often and is a constant cycle of evaluation. Misjudging urgency or importance can cause a ton of problems for you and your team. Here’s how I think about navigating this.

The first big pitfall is treating non-urgent tasks as urgent. This feels good in the moment—it’s nice to check something off your list or swoop in to save the day—but it doesn’t take long before the cracks start to show. Constantly working in “everything’s on fire” mode will:

Notetaking For Gaming
October 08, 2024
work games gaming notes

Continuing some of the thinking from my last post about Notetaking for Business, I had mentioned that I use Obsidian for all of my note taking needs. I make pretty extensive notes for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting that I play most weeks with a group of friends.

The notes I take for my game are pretty straight forward, but there are a lot of them. I do use some Obsidian-specific plugin features to enable my game to run smoothly, but this is more of an add-on than an essential component of my notes themselves.

Notetaking For Business
September 29, 2024
notes business work

I have seen endless books and blogs and forum posts espousing the use of specific note-taking techniques that are meant to give a leg up to anyone who takes notes as part of their daily life. I am bothered that most of these techniques assume a certain disposition of note-taker – You are either a student taking notes for topics in class that you will later be tested on, or you are a “researcher” of some kind taking notes to help you think through complex topics for deeper meaning.

In the former case, students have a variety of note-taking tools that have lasted for what seems like millennia. Cornell Notes, a system designed in the 1950’s, is a note-taking strategy that allows students to quiz themselves on details they take notes on, which is generally regarded as a good practice for study. Sadly, there are many studies that report the general achievement of Cornell Notes takers isn’t statistically better than other students.

Traction Touchbase
June 30, 2021
agile development work management standup scrum

I’ve been reading many posts on Reddit about “daily scrum” meetings, and I’ve got to say, there are some really strange practices out there. I don’t understand how people are ending up with the processes they do. I wanted to write down a few basics to get them out of my head and be able to share them with others, so I’m drafting this post. This post will be about the team daily touchbase meeting format that I’ve been using for the last three years, known in for-fee framework circles as “the daily scrum” and also as “daily standup”.

People seem to talk a bunch about “big-A Agile”. I don’t know that I like labels too much. I am working more from base principles here than from a Scrum foundations textbook or the Agile Manifesto. But it does seem reasonable to review some Agile basics.