The sprint plan has your name
against the migration.
It is also your week
holding the pager.
Everybody agreed to this
without noticing,
because the pager might be quiet.
It is never quiet in the way
the plan needs.
It does not have to ring much.
It only has to be able to.
Deep work needs a stretch
where you believe
nothing will pull you out.
A pager removes the belief,
whatever it does with the noise.
So you circle the migration.
You open it, load it into your head,
and hold back the last part
of your attention,
in case.
Then one alert,
twenty minutes, a false alarm,
and what you had loaded
has gone.
By Friday two things are true.
The migration moved a little,
and badly.
And the incidents got
half of a person
who resented them,
which is the wrong half
to meet a production problem with.
Nobody chose that week.
It fell out of a plan
that treated on call
as a background task
rather than as the job.
Plan it the other way round.
On call is an interrupt week.
Take the large work off the board
before it starts,
out loud,
in the planning meeting,
so nobody counts on it.
Fill the week
with small, finishable things.
Pieces you can put down
in the middle
and pick up without loss.
Better still,
give the week a theme
that the pager feeds.
The alert that fired for nothing,
tuned or deleted.
The runbook step
that was wrong at three in the morning,
rewritten while it still stings.
The manual fix
you did twice,
turned into a script.
That work is done best
by the person who just felt the pain,
and it makes the next person's week
quieter.
Then hand over properly.
One note on what happened,
what is still open,
what you changed.
Done like that,
the rota stops being a tax
on everyone's real work.
It becomes the week
the team spends
making the system
easier to be woken by.
And the migration
goes to somebody
who can give it
every part of their attention.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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