kevinsuner

I always start my workday by looking at the tasks that have been assigned to me, looking at their priority, and making a list with the ones that I want to complete. This routine that I follow, clears my mind and allows me to go from task to task without losing focus-and has worked in all the companies that I worked for.

Not all companies are the same, which is a thing I knew, and experienced, but in terms of work organization, each had a similar approach, and deviating from the assigned task, was the exception. The occasional hotfix¹ would popup from time to time, as well as changes on the priority of some tasks, it was expected, and an acceptable thing in all the teams I worked in.

Fast forward to today, and I'm facing the complete opposite-it's a common occurrence in my workday, to have a list of prioritized tasks to complete, and ending up having done one or none. Such problem happens by various reasons, the ones that I have identified are-having each stakeholder of the project pushing their own agendas and ideas, driving the product into multiple and often incoherent directions, and having an amount of tech debt so high, and a level of confidence in the code so low, that almost every deployment comes with its many issues that need to be quickly fixed.

The second is solvable, the first is pure drama, project managers do many things to keep the train from derailing, but when tasks are imposed by the ones that provide money to keep things rolling, and each has its own vision of what the project should be, everything becomes a priority, and nothing ends up being one.

¹ A hotfix is a software update that is released outside the normal update cycle or intended to be applied to a live system; often to fix a bug. Wikipedia