My First Challenge
by Mishkin Berteig
Wednesday is nearly done and I’m looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I’ve only done a few out of the forty for this week. What’s going on?!
Well, for one thing, I’m over-committed, and I know it. This is why my goal is to eventually time-box my effort to 50 hours per week. As it is, I expect I’ll have a few more short nights this week in order to get even a reasonable amount of my commitment done.
Also, I’ve been cherry-picking. I’m doing the easy/nice/comfortable tasks first. I’m avoiding the paperwork tasks. I’m avoiding the administrative tasks. These are the ones that I hate and I always procrastinate about. (Hmm… writing this is actually procrastination too… just a few more words and then I’ll get back to work.)
Finally, I’ve got some obstacles which I’m not sure I will overcome this iteration. First of all, I’m spending less time on work than I anticipated. Secondly, I’m getting distracted by tasks that are not directly related to my work items, but which seem to be pre-conditions. For example, I need to do a bunch of administrative follow-up for recent courses I have delivered. Part of that is to send of images of the attendees license forms. I’ve got the images on the SD card in my digital camera. I’ve also got a lot of other images on there. So, instead of focusing purely on the task at hand, I am actually cleaning up the whole card. Which is getting rid of technical/administrative debt, but it is slowing me down. Hmm… “administrative debt”… that’s gotta be a common theme for the procrastinator!
Anyone out there want to write an article for Agile Advice about administrative debt?
Tags: Business, Discipline, Learning, Planning, Work