Once upon a time I had a ritual called the "friday afternoon walk of shame". As I finished work for the week, I called each project's stakeholder to tell them where things were, which was usually late, hence the name. In bigger projects, we'd have daily scrums where the status was discussed in detail. Everyone had access to our issue tracking system, so all stakeholders could delve into the immediate details. Full visibility. In the last three years, my visibility on some projects has gone from daily to weekly to monthly to sometimes quarterly. My three current projects have been...

Yesterday started well. I did the bait-and-switch described in yesterday's post and it worked wonderfully well. My flow didn't even notice the difference and I started jamming on the new project after just 15 minutes of the other. I read somewhere that it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of flow, which is roughly my experience as well. If you're interested in flow, there's a great book: Getting your flow going, and keeping it going, is probably the single most important productivity boost for any creative professional. When you're grooving on a project, your work is more creative,...

Friday was the problem: intending to do one project, but another project steals the show. This is essentially what the last three years was like. As soon as I do "just one thing" on a project with momentum, it pulls me along for the rest of my time, leaving first tasks with little or no attention. It's a tale of two inertias, with the project you should be doing having stalled inertia and the project you should ignore having moving inertia. Momentum is a good thing, regardless of where you point it, so the "just say no" approach isn't optimal....

Yesterday I started with four hours of one project then ended with four hours of another project. The first was slow going. Trying to get back into the swing of a long delayed project can be very tough, particularly if there's a critical mass of detail you've forgotten, making every step harder. The second project was much easier, even though the amount of forgotten detail was even greater than the first project. So what made the difference? Well, in the second I was using a debugger, stepping through code, trying to find some well defined bugs. In the first, I...

Yesterday went half-well. I spent half the time scheduled for development and half the time scheduled for sales. The lost sales time went to a late start and a long lunch with Paula, walking around the new buildings on the south side. The lost development time went to unplanned useful tasks. There's the trap . . . "While I'm here, I should do this." The day started with me saying, "I need to check the archived hawkmo media files on my firewire drives." Since I hadn't yet put them in their new spot behind my work chair, I decided to...

Three years of too much to do and today it changes. As Waveplace gathered steam three summers ago, my long-time timeboxing regime went out the window, replaced with an event-driven meandering mess, wherein each day I reached quitting time wondering, "Where did the day go?" Much was accomplished, but much was ignored. If only for my own peace of mind, I require a return to a simpler process . . . Timebox Your Day. Too often some minor crisis intrudes upon a scheduled coding session and before I know it, I'm staring at a timer that reads 15 minutes when...