Describing the Work Became the Work

Look at what your morning actually held.

A ticket updated
so the board matches
where the work really is.
A comment on that ticket
explaining why it moved.
A sentence at standup.
A reply to someone asking where we are.
A slide, because it is Thursday.
Then a short answer to a person
who wants the thing in the slide
in a slightly different shape.

Every one of those was asked for
by a reasonable person
for a reasonable reason.

Together they took the morning,
and the thing they all describe
has not moved since yesterday.

This is how it grows.

The describing is visible
and the work is not.

Nobody can see you
holding a problem in your head
for forty minutes.
Everybody can see the update.

So the update gets thanked,
the update gets asked for more often,
and the incentive points
exactly the wrong way
without anybody choosing it.

And it is not free attention.

It is the good attention,
spent in the hours
when you could have held
the whole shape of something at once.

Three things help.

Put it in one slot.
All of it, once a day,
late enough that there is something to report,
and never in the first hour.
Twenty minutes of writing
costs less than six interruptions
that each take the thread with them.

Write it once, for everybody.
One place, one shape,
that the four people asking
can read without asking.
A question repeated four times
is usually a missing page,
not a missing answer.

Then make the work report itself
wherever it can.

A link to the branch.
The open pull request.
The test that used to fail.
Something a person can look at
beats a paragraph
about something they cannot,
and it costs you nothing,
because it already exists.

If describing the work
reliably takes longer than doing it,
you are not behind.

You have been moved
into a different job
than the one you accepted.

– Serguey Asael Shinder