Yesterday I did a formal project plan using Microsoft Project.

I feel a little dirty, and repeated showers don’t seem to touch it.

Apparently, this is how managers do their work. What I’m trying to understand is this: how can you find fulfillment in keeping track of the cool stuff other people are doing? I mean, I put my name on some of the interesting tasks and my manager was scolding me for not having other people do the stuff. For me, the thing is that I never, ever, ever want to lose sight of what goes in to being a good developer. I work religiously on ensuring that any task I assign to someone else in my team is something I could take on myself and get done.

And the thing is, MSProject has one real goal: to abstract away the work into line-items with start and end dates, assigned resources, and the like. That way you can put them on a Gantt chart and see what goes where. Don’t get me wrong, there’s value in that — I need some way to show my business users that what they ask for has a very real cost in time and effort, and it affects when other things they want can get started/done.  But something about moving from the person who does the work to someone who supervises the work being done is bothering me, and I’m not sure I’m okay with letting go.

So I’m trying to decide how I can achieve balance here. I think that if I move to 100% supervision, I’m going to feel my soul drain out of me.  But if I don’t keep track of what I’m responsible for better, I’m going to lose the resources that let me get all the good projects to do.

I guess this is how managers earn their pay.

No, seriously. I open up the “Write Post” page at least twice a week, usually typing something into the box, and then end up either saving it as a draft and never actually posting it or just deleting it.

Why? Because I’m self-critical. Especially when it comes to writing. When we had those stupid exercises in high school where you were supposed to freewrite whatever came to mind without correcting yourself, I would always, well, correct myself. I just can’t help it, I see the words on the screen and I just know that it’s supposed to be a certain way and I just can’t leave it without it being that way.

Of course, as I get a little older and have more responsibilities, I’ve begun to break that habit in emails at work. For instance, years ago, if I had gotten an email saying:

Dave,

We're having a problem where our widget-builder is getting corrupted by
the goobershwank. We looked into it and we think it's the foshizzlenizzle.
Can you fix it?

Mr. OtherCoder

I would have responded with something like:

Mr. OtherCoder,

I see where you would think that the foshizzlenizzle is to blame, but
I put together a sample program which clearly shows that the problem is
in your widget-builder, and not the foshizzlenizzle. Take a look at
line 231 of your WidgetBuilder.C file and make sure it's capturing the
googlybits.

Thanks,

dave

Now, My response looks like:

googlybits need capturing, look at the wiki and fix yer shit

Maybe I’m just getting crabbier as I approach senility. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a method to my madness. See, if I’m nice and respond with complete sentences and clear answers, then the next time this idiot has a problem that has nothing to do with me, I’ll also get an email, which I then need to respond to. So not only have I wasted my time writing the first email, I have also proactively wasted MORE time on MORE emails to come. If I write a terse response which clearly shows my, um, lack of enthusiasm for this person’s troubleshooting skills, then not only have I saved multiple minutes of email-writing time today, I have also effectively lowered the chances of getting another email from this person, as they’ll try the sucker in the cube over who’s nice first.

And that, my friends, is how you boost efficiency.