Heaps of work
noun
(colloquial) A lot, a large amount
Thanks a heap!
Right, if we do heaps of work, we’ll get loads of money!
Serve pizza on plastic throwaway plates. It’s better for business!
Okay, wut?
To stay motivated and engaged, I’ve started thinking about what kind of work I should be doing in my current role and team.
A helpful motto I’ve learned is: any time a task comes onto your radar, you can:
- Do it now
- Drop it now
- Delegate it
- Do it later
Some people talk about stacks and queues of work. That’s pretty helpful. It makes a lot of sense, when every task is of equal priority. But time is finite. Not everything can be of equal priority!
As time and priority become more important factors in my personal algorithm,
heaps – also known as PriorityQueue in Java, possibly a
a deque in Python, and possibly a PersistentQueue in Clojure
– is the analogy I’ve landed on. I don’t even know if it’s original, but it’s useful.
But also, big projects should not be rapidly moving on to and off of the heap. They have external commitments (stakeholders around the business, and maybe deadlines) that need to be kept in alignment. And context switching between big projects is expensive.
So, what’s on that heap?
Snacks
At any moment, there’s likely a real, important project that I could be working on, but so many ideas and potential things to work on come up every day.
An idea that stuck with me is the clever label for work that is enticing and easy, but not a great use of one’s time: snacking.
All the credit to The Staff Engineer’s Path and Staff Engineer for the clever analogy of snacking.
- Big projects are on a queue-ish and stack-ish system.
- Snacks stay on the heap.
What’s worth my time?
Besides the real, important projects, what’s worth my time?
A few ideas that seem obviously worth my time are:
- Org-wide sources of friction
- Org-wide drags on velocity
- Preventing the next incident we haven’t thought of yet
When I’m on-call, maybe a little different:
- In incident response, fill the gaps
- Fixing recurring sources of incidents in the system and on-call lives
- Fixing recurring sources of on-call friction and cognitive load
What should I do with snacks?
It’s okay to snack from time to time. It breaks up the monotony of the week. When I’m in the middle of large projects, it’s good to have a small quick thing that I can just ship and get validation on.
Instead of snacking all the time, I can:
- Delegate them
- Keep a list of snacks
- Block out an hour or two a week to have a snack
Might look like a snack, but actually important work
There’s a class of work that is actually important for future success but feels like a snack in the moment: researching big ideas that could become org-wide improvements.
To nurture these ideas, I can:
- Keep a list of pie-in-the-sky ideas
- Use an hour or two every week to continue the research and prototyping
- Sneakily build consensus. Get people sold on the idea, before it’s even working