The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 27. The Trickle List

There’s a gaping hole in the prior chapter, “The Taste of the Day.” Yes, it’s a handy task management system, but it’s incomplete. It describes a process for constant scrubbing of a task list, as well as a handy place to keep distractions out of your way via the Parking Lot, but at the end of the day, what exactly is it helping you do?

Here are three tasks from my current list:

• Headcount Asks

• Lunch with David

• Move Europe Trip

These are tasks for today. They are well defined, measurable, tactical, and must be done today. While it’s professionally terrific that I’m actively making sure nothing is falling through the cracks, these are still just tasks. What am I accomplishing when I complete them? I’m getting things done.

Is that what you want to do all day? Things? Stuff?

No.

You’re a senior development engineer or an engineering manager or a project manager, and while things and stuff are part of the gig, if it’s all you’re doing, you’re productive, but you’re vigorously running in place. You’re tactical but not strategic. Tasks are an incomplete picture of what you do and what you need to do.

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks to the point that you believe merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that ...