Organizing Work
Why organizing is personal, and why the usual systems and advice fall short.
problems / pain points
organizing is hard because organizing is personal youtube and books are often an echo chamber of quippy titles and tired opinions and there's no metrics on whether these systems are good or bad worse - some people will claim "you aren't doing it right" if it they're method isn't helpful to you JIRA is fucking awful - it's both too rigid and too unstructured? how did they manage that
wants / needs / requirements
a way to organize information according to my job, work, hobbies, and taste something the scales with the pace of work. sometimes tasks are fast, sometimes tasks take months something not on the computer -
features / solutions / tasks
if you're reading this right now - you're looking at it! Split conceptual phrases into references, pain, needs and features
features / solutions / tasks are actionable or enacted
i draw a box to each to signify if i've started or not, finished, or moved to another page
/ for started
> for moved
X for finished
I divide my journal into 4 sections by foldding and scoring with a pen and write my tasks on the last section
this way, if i run out of room i can continue on the next page and use the fold to see what was on old pages for transcription
the preceding column is for needs typically this is a place for short meeting notes, so i can take note of something someone else or myself wants that we dont have a solution of task ready for what differentiates it? a need may have multiple possible solutions. "I need to have Data Uploaded" doesn't include a statement of work or description if batching or streaming is required
problems / pain points - records of times my job pisses me off, or errors i encounter that i dont have time to fix
references - information i probably want to remember that I know i likely wont stuff like processing times, quantities of datasets, crucical numbers and metrics I want to report about etc