Todo list evolutions
At first, I was asked simple things. With my own study as field experience, I had no real problem to do the tasks given to me. At first. I asked if they wanted quality or quantity work. They wanted quality, so I tuned myself to this work style. At this time, my todo lists was written on any paper I had at hand when a requirement was told. I had a few products in the line. The details involved on one of the products was immense though. I made a huge requirement specification to remember it all. After a while I had to mark some of these not as much needed as the rest.
Months passed. The todo lists changed form to emails.
More months passed. The todo lists changed form back to paper. Actually, I had both e-mail and paper todo lists. Its kinda hard to have to systems, but it does give a superfluous feeling of control.
Months passed. I tried to memorize todo lists. It worked well until I fell back to paper and I got convinced I have a terrible memory. I learned that once you write something down, you forget it.
Years passed, alternating between e-mail and paper todo lists. We then experimented with using a Wiki to track orders, which is kind of a formal todo :-) The lists was easy to browse. One drawback was that it was a burden to enter all info there, even though we used templates. We usually got orders per speech or per e-mail, so we usually ended up having the order people come to me and I wrote down the order. It didn't look efficient at all.
A year or two later, me and my colleague surveyed the marked and bought and installed JIRA, a custom made todo list heaven, used by several open-source projects. It turned out to be an impressive product. Every employee could send e-mail to an address and it got automatically registered as a todo task. Each task had multiple attributes one could set, all you really ever needed. The user interface was (from a technical viewpoint) slick. It worked well and I used it often, some days quite actively, some days not at all i.e. when my schedule was already set. Throughout the organization however, we used it only for the technical issues like errors and technical orders, and only for my main project and a few other projects, so there wasn't much talk or fuzz about it. The JIRA system falls through whenever one needs a way to quickly jot down a task AND when you are not having it in your hot memory i.e. when it's long since you've used it.
We managed huge todo lists and had to prioritize. We weren't any good at saying no, so we had a huge queue of stuff to do. In that sense, the times of todo lists were good. ;-)
Today, I still use paper for my todo lists. I put a square in front of each todo item for easy checkout and status. I also decorate my computer desktop screen with URL shortcuts I need to visit etc. I have a folder of old (last years) shortcuts to keep it somewhat clean. I also have a todo text file I quickly edit using an equivalent of notepad. But what beams towards me on my physical desktop, is A4 papers with short notices on them.
When I now clear my desk and see loads of todo lists that have just been buried by other todo lists, I feel sorry for the order that I didn't held status more often and threw old ones away.
Looking forward, the challenge of managing todo lists is to manage todo lists in various media simultaneously;
Rule # 1: Keep it hot.
Rule # 2: If a list is older than 2 weeks, it is cold and it may be thrown away. See rule # 1
Months passed. The todo lists changed form to emails.
More months passed. The todo lists changed form back to paper. Actually, I had both e-mail and paper todo lists. Its kinda hard to have to systems, but it does give a superfluous feeling of control.
Months passed. I tried to memorize todo lists. It worked well until I fell back to paper and I got convinced I have a terrible memory. I learned that once you write something down, you forget it.
Years passed, alternating between e-mail and paper todo lists. We then experimented with using a Wiki to track orders, which is kind of a formal todo :-) The lists was easy to browse. One drawback was that it was a burden to enter all info there, even though we used templates. We usually got orders per speech or per e-mail, so we usually ended up having the order people come to me and I wrote down the order. It didn't look efficient at all.
A year or two later, me and my colleague surveyed the marked and bought and installed JIRA, a custom made todo list heaven, used by several open-source projects. It turned out to be an impressive product. Every employee could send e-mail to an address and it got automatically registered as a todo task. Each task had multiple attributes one could set, all you really ever needed. The user interface was (from a technical viewpoint) slick. It worked well and I used it often, some days quite actively, some days not at all i.e. when my schedule was already set. Throughout the organization however, we used it only for the technical issues like errors and technical orders, and only for my main project and a few other projects, so there wasn't much talk or fuzz about it. The JIRA system falls through whenever one needs a way to quickly jot down a task AND when you are not having it in your hot memory i.e. when it's long since you've used it.
We managed huge todo lists and had to prioritize. We weren't any good at saying no, so we had a huge queue of stuff to do. In that sense, the times of todo lists were good. ;-)
Today, I still use paper for my todo lists. I put a square in front of each todo item for easy checkout and status. I also decorate my computer desktop screen with URL shortcuts I need to visit etc. I have a folder of old (last years) shortcuts to keep it somewhat clean. I also have a todo text file I quickly edit using an equivalent of notepad. But what beams towards me on my physical desktop, is A4 papers with short notices on them.
When I now clear my desk and see loads of todo lists that have just been buried by other todo lists, I feel sorry for the order that I didn't held status more often and threw old ones away.
Looking forward, the challenge of managing todo lists is to manage todo lists in various media simultaneously;
- Incoming E-mails you need to handle.
- Incoming spoken items you need to jot down quickly because you are working with something else. A better way seems to ask them to send you a mail about it, since they can often describe the problem in their domain language (sales department) and you also train them to send e-mail instead of disturbing me in my busy focused schedule. I admit it, I have trouble asking them this.
- Stuff you encounter yourself when investigating code and when implementing projects
- Recurrent maintenance and revisioning
Rule # 1: Keep it hot.
Rule # 2: If a list is older than 2 weeks, it is cold and it may be thrown away. See rule # 1
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