Question on the timeboxing / calendar stacking: What happens if you set an hour for your task & it doesn't get complete in that hour? Where do you find the time to finish said task?
Hello, I used to be a .NET developer. I now help organizations build cloud-native apps on Azure. Despite doing a lot of work with Docker and Kubernetes, I still love .NET.
I love this question and I am resisting the urge to write you an entire blog post 😅
TLDR: I update my calendar many times a day.
When I have a thought like... "This is going to take me longer than the time I carved out" then I have to the calendar and I try to carve out more time. It's going to force me to move other things around like:
Cancelling meetings
Postponing other projects to the next week
Skipping a lunch break
Ask for help from someone so that I can delegate
For things that I don't know how long they will take, you can schedule a re-occurring time. For example, checking your email/Twitter/dev.to account. In my last job, I had a lot of emails and it's impossible to know many emails I will receive in the future. So, I had a 30-minute time-slot twice a day to check my email. I barely get emails now, so you won't see it on my current calendar. But, you will see that at 4 pm every Friday I will play Starcraft with friends. It's really refreshing to have a re-occurring fun time/date night/hobby because it removes the burden of trying to schedule it.
But, there's so much more I want to say... because this only works if you stick to your calendar. For what it's worth, in the beginning, I felt like I was failing at it all the time. Yes, it's really true that we developers are really bad at estimating.
I gave in to the urge. Sorry about the mini blog post, but after all, there's an entire book on it 🙃
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Question on the timeboxing / calendar stacking: What happens if you set an hour for your task & it doesn't get complete in that hour? Where do you find the time to finish said task?
I love this question and I am resisting the urge to write you an entire blog post 😅
TLDR: I update my calendar many times a day.
When I have a thought like... "This is going to take me longer than the time I carved out" then I have to the calendar and I try to carve out more time. It's going to force me to move other things around like:
For things that I don't know how long they will take, you can schedule a re-occurring time. For example, checking your email/Twitter/dev.to account. In my last job, I had a lot of emails and it's impossible to know many emails I will receive in the future. So, I had a 30-minute time-slot twice a day to check my email. I barely get emails now, so you won't see it on my current calendar. But, you will see that at 4 pm every Friday I will play Starcraft with friends. It's really refreshing to have a re-occurring fun time/date night/hobby because it removes the burden of trying to schedule it.
But, there's so much more I want to say... because this only works if you stick to your calendar. For what it's worth, in the beginning, I felt like I was failing at it all the time. Yes, it's really true that we developers are really bad at estimating.
I gave in to the urge. Sorry about the mini blog post, but after all, there's an entire book on it 🙃