ingvald
– at least regarding your own work
– “No“? let’s take a look
– “Yes“? let’s talk about it…
– (for you)
– at least until next daily meeting
– “No“? let’s take a look…
Remember:
Being busy all the time is bad for you, your team, and your organization. It is far better to allow for slack, which is not a bad thing, but creates opportunities for improvement without needing to schedule them.
“Recipe” for what to work on next, incorporating slack:
A bit more reading related to slack.
At LKNA13 in Chicago this year I listened to @JoshuaKerievsky talk about #techsafety.
He made me think about quite a few aspects of safety and injuries for a programmer. Here’s a few quotes and elements:
What’s interesting is his claim that having #techsafety as a primary value would be profitable and produce outstanding results. I think I buy into that, even if he hasn’t had time to prove it yet with his own company, @IndustrialLogic.
A few twitter notes from the session.
Edit: Joshua have written on #techsafety himself:
Yesterday I attended TDC.
It was fun to see so many from the software development community in Trondheim turn out all at once.
I also had a short talk about better ways to work, focusing on delays and feedback – especially how it’s more central to knowledge work than we think.
Here’s the slides if you’re curious (PDF):
201210 TDC Better ways to work
Update: I added a few slides for a talk at the office – see extended version (pdf) if you like, containing a few more links/ reading tips.
Last week I looked at my overgrown todo list, or rather several lists, and preparation for a demo at work was coming up, and I have a long trip to prepare for… So I simply had to create a personal kanban on the cupboard behind me: 
Collaboration on the demo preparation led to tasks on the board, and I took the most important and urgent tasks from my todo lists onto the board. I used a form of priority filter, with a generic todo column to the left, then a “soon”/today column, then the usual doing and done columns. It worked really well to let tasks float up and to the right in the todo columns, kind of like bubbles. I got an immediate impression of relative urgency (more to the right) and relative importance (upwards), making it very easy to decide what the next task should be when I finished a task.
The Pomodoro Technique is a timeboxing method where you can use a timer to help you focus on only one thing for a short period of time, typically 25 minutes.
You can also do this onscreen and online. A simple, interesting experiment is the Tomato Timer.
try the multitasking game..
“Use this game to study the effects of multitasking on productivity and cycle times.”
The Multitasking Maze, ProChain Solutions
(the point: multitasking is bad for you…)