I love a quote from the Phoenix Project:
“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.” Phoenix Project.
There are signs that, in retrospect, tell us whether we have not been improving our daily work:
We have less time for new features because there are too many hotfixes and bugs to solve.
We spend less time coding because the developer experience is getting worse and worse.
Management is not happy with the team even though the team is working long hours.
Onboarding a new team member to a small project takes a month.
I have been in some of those situations and hated it.
It’s like taking the bike to work and realizing it needs oil, pumping the wheels, and the gears aren’t working properly.
In the same book, they present four types of work:
Business projects. New features or new projects for users.
Internal projects. Not directly related to the users. For example, automate deployments or fix technical debt.
Updates and changes. Improving or changing current features.
Unplanned work. Hotfixes, bugs, setting up a dev environment, flaky tests, etc.
One type is the destroyer of teams: Unplanned Work (don’t you agree?).
Most times, when teams don’t move forward, it’s because there is too much Unplanned Work:
There are new bugs every week.
Setting up the development environment to start working on a task takes forever.
The deployment process needs two full days of an engineer.
Bugs that take one hour to solve take a whole day to fix.
According to one report from 2021, developers spend only one hour per day coding, and according to the book Accelerate, teams spend between 20% and 30% on Unplanned work.
The solution to Unplanned Work: “Improve daily work.”
“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.” Phoenix Project.
There are many ways to improve daily work. For example, reducing technical debt, ensuring environments are easy to set up, improving the deployment pipeline, or identifying useless meetings.
We get worse if we don’t improve every day because projects always move towards greater complexity.
“If you're not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse” Phoenix Project.
Since I read the book, I changed my working habits a bit.
I used to prepare a list of daily todos every morning (or the night before). I divided them into “Priority Tasks,” “Long Tasks,” and “Short Tasks.” After writing this article, I added one more section: “Improve Daily Work.” “Improve Daily Work” goes after “Priority Tasks” but before the other long or short tasks.
This is the template I use for my daily todos for reference:
Whatever your working habits, don’t forget:
Constantly improve your daily work.
Thanks to Elina for reviewing this article!
Unplanned work.
Meetings.
Poor communication among teams or team members.
Inadequate tooling.
Anything else?
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