The Quick Brown Fox

Sometimes everything comes together. I am currently reading Personal Kanban . I had a work-from-home day today, and I had a million small tasks that needed to get done before the kids got home from school and destroyed my quiet space -- documents to write, appointments to make, meetings to attend, and a few household chores (since the one downside of working from home is that I don't get much exercise, throwing a load of laundry in every once in a while at least means I got up and went downstairs). It felt like a lot. Even if I remembered all of it, how was I going to get all of that done?! I followed the recommendation in the book and wrote everything out on sticky notes. Some things, like the meetings, had to be done at a particular time. Calling to make appointments was better not attempted during lunch hour. I wanted to get my documents out for review as early in the day as possible so people had time to look at them. A few minutes on Duolingo would make for a nice afternoo...

A while back my perusal of Management 3.0 posts led me to an exercise called Moving Motivators . I did it by myself and thought it was interesting, and I've been wanting to try more exploratory kinds of activities with my team in our retrospectives. I thought this might be a good one, but I was determined to start small. We had an hour set aside for the entire retro, and I thought ten minutes was a good slice for something like this while still letting us talk about the sprint. This an existing team that has had several members join recently, one of whom has previous experience with this same group but has been on a different team for a long while now, and two who do not. So I thought this might be both fun and useful as an introduction of sorts. I printed out a bunch of card sets and asked everyone to spend a few minutes sorting them. (Mine had changed even since the last time I did the exercise.) Curious though I was about everyone on the team, I had them pair up and spend a ...

Today I got a classic Scrum Master sort of situation: one of the teams wanted me to create forward sprints in Jira so they could plan ahead. That's not how Scrum works, I replied. But all of the other teams are doing it.  Well that's weird.  I don't work with those other teams, so I can't comment on why they might be doing this. I could, however, take the opportunity to explain why we don't  (as a rule) do this: because the foreseeable future isn't very far at all. We have two-week sprints here, and I don't think I have ever, in two and a half years, seen the backlog for an ongoing sprint go unchanged. If we can't even look ahead two weeks to figure out what it is we need to do, why on earth would we try to look out farther than that? What a colossal waste of time. For the record, I anticipate being overruled on this by product management, but at least I did make the argument.

I've had a very nice vacation, saw a lot of family. Still thinking about what I want 2019 to look like, where I want to put my energy. I do know that I want it to be a much more analog year. I feel like things have gotten a little out of whack that way for me.

Missed quite a few weeks here -- been putting my energy into a different project for a while as frustration becomes a challenge here. These things tend to go in cycles.

This was, of course, last  week now. Things are finally feeling back under control in terms of my personal task list, but I feel distinctly disengaged. 100% of my creative energy is going to other projects. The culture of work we have is so weird . I don't know if it's an American thing, a software thing, or what, but I am increasingly disturbed by what seem to be expectations of a non-reciprocal emotional connection with one's workplace.

It's Thursday, and this week has been a blur of catching up on documentation work after two weeks of mostly not being here. I have the sense that things are not going particularly well, but no data, and I feel a bit cut off from my team. In good news, I got one of my Scrum teams to try something fun (a communication exercise, which is what I'm calling things instead of "games," because God forbid we do anything that isn't deadly serious here). It seems to have been well-received, or at least didn't annoy anyone. There is only so much of me to go around.