Robby on Rails

It’s been just over four months since I posted about my experiment, Email. Twice daily. No more, no less. where I shared my plans to restrict myself to checking email only twice a day at designated times. In the post, I had hinted at sharing my lessons months later. So, it’s time to throw my dirty laundry in the street and expose myself.

First off.. the brutal truth. It’s really fucking hard to maintain this. Habits are nearly as hard to make as they are to break. I suspect that I honor my rule 2-3 days each week and it’s completely inconsistent the remainder. Usually, I find myself looking at email at 8:30am and have to slap myself and yell, “what are you doing?!!?”

Guilt sinks in and I hit ⌘-q. Problem solved… for a little while.

So, what has lead to this. Well, one of the biggest hurdles has been that one of our largest clients is now focused more in the United Kingdom. Luckily, I’m an early-morning person, but this means that my 10am PDT rule wouldn’t have me checking for their precious emails until 6pm GMT their time. Not exactly acceptable. So, I’ve been more flexible in the mornings and responding to emails as early as 5-6am PDT. However, I realize that I’m cheating myself of previous focus time and need to recalibrate my email windows.

Given these new constraints, I’m now trying 8:30am and 2:30pm as my primary email times.

I’m curious how this has been working out for you…

Saw this tweet the other day…

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

So, I have to ask. How many toilets (buckets) do you maintain? How many of them still have projects/tasks in them? Why haven’t you flushed your toilets yet?

I fucked up this last week.

On Monday, our primary contact for a large client sent over some last minute requirements and deadlines that were needed by end-of-day Wednesday. I didn’t have a lot of time to collect requirements and execute it without having to rearrange my priorities. But, I accepted the challenge.

The big change involved was that we were going to be supplied with a ton of data to be imported in to the database and approximately 20% of the data provided was new records, while the rest were duplicates. However, the other 80% wasn’t to be discarded as there were a few attributes that needed to be updated from the data file (which was supplied from the client’s parent company). In my haste to get the task done on time (didn’t get proper export file to be imported in our system until Wednesday morning)... I ended up running a few tests locally and pushed it out to production.

I managed to get the import file to run in production before leaving on Wednesday afternoon. The following morning, I came into the office to find out that my import process didn’t match up records properly and resulted in nearly all of the 80% side of that to be duplicated in the system. This resulted in lost productivity for our client, their vendors, and our team over a 12 hour period as people were confused about why reports were running weird, online transactions didn’t account for the duplicated, etc.

It took me most of Thursday and Friday to clean up the data that got skewed due to that oversight. Hi ho.

So, the take away from this? Sure, I could have blamed it on a lack of sufficient time to properly test things, but that’s bullshit. I should have had at least one other developer from our team review the problem and evaluate my proposed solution prior to me attempting to push into production.

Luckily, the client was happy that we were able to finish the last minute tasks, despite the unexpected headaches that cropped up.

If anything, I was just disappointed in myself, but Alex reminded me how important it was to fail early, fail often. It didn’t kill me (or anybody else for that matter), cost us the project, nor was it irreparable.

In the real world, deadlines and requirements change on a moments notice and it’s experiences like this that will make ourselves more confident that we can quickly respond to and execute.

What was your latest failure?

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Install it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40367

Enjoy!

We’re just a few days away from 2009 and it’s that time when we all start looking back at the last year and set goals for the coming new year. I felt like sharing some of my thoughts on how I’m aiming to approach the new year.

Historically, I’ve never been a huge fan of New Years Resolutions because my attempts were always too big to successfully measure. The goals themselves weren’t poorly thought-out, it’s just that it’s really easy to make a list of personal targets, without putting a lot of emphasis on how you’re going to achieve them. The biggest trouble that I’ve had with goals is allocating enough mental energy for implementation planning. (if only I had someone to and wireframe my life…)

Due to this, New Years Resolutions haven’t been a huge success for me. I’ve found it much too easy to pass the buck onto the usual suspects, which consist of: lack of time, energy, too much work, general life changes, health, etc.

So, for 2009… I’m going to try something different by focusing on a set of best practices that I can use on a daily-basis. I suppose that my main goal is to not place too much emphasis on any specific targets and instead place the responsibility on myself to follow these best-practices and see what good (or bad) comes of it.

By rephrasing my internal conversation from, “What did I achieve this last year?” to “Am I doing things the best that I can?” I am confident that the answer will usually be, “not likely.” I do believe that through this subtle change in context, I’ll be better apt to self-evaluate how (and why) I am doing the things that I do and refactor accordingly. If we’re not consistently Refactoring ourselves (as we do with our code), we’re going to retain a lot inefficiencies in our personal and work lives, which make it difficult for us to quickly respond to changes and opportunities.

Our life (personal and work) is just another project that we manage. Much of methodologies that we spend learning about and adopting can easily be translated to these other areas of our lives.

So as I brace myself for 2009, I find myself asking, How can I lead a more Agile life?

I’d love to hear how you’re adopting best-practices inspired by Agile methodologies in your life and I promise to share mine over the coming year.

Related Posts

• Agile development begins within…
• Agile development begins within… continued
• Those that Tend the Store need Dialogue

It’s been quiet here the past several weeks and that’s because for the first time since I started Planet Argon, I was able to take an extended vacation.

My partner and I headed to France (Paris, Nice, Lascaux II, and Bordeaux) for a few weeks. It was a first time for both of us. I’ve posted some photos on my flickr (vacation set).

I’d like to thank my amazing team for helping make it easy for me to take off for that much time. :-)

In any event, I wanted to post a few non-technical links…

• Veggie Tastespotting (tastespotting without the meat)
• Robby’s Muxtape
• Robby’s Grabb.it
• Robby on twitter
• Robby’s feedflix (netflix queue/stats)

Link yours up!

In the coming weeks… I’ll be posting some more thoughts on Project Management, time management, and anything else that seems to come up. If there is anything you’d like me to write about, feel free to drop me a line with a request.