Planning and Review time
Planning and Review are interrelated, and for the purposes of Yodo and personal process, they have many of the same features.
I want to say that Planning and Review are roughly the same, or that they happen at the same time.
While reviewing, thoughts for planning come to mind. While planning, you are often gathering the things to review.
But, how to make these cheap and easy? How to keep quality high while reducing overhead?
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Review, at least, can be very objective. Like meditation, all we need to do is observe. Ideally, the collection of _what_ to observe is automated, but it's at least a routine.
Review Process Outline
Backlinks
The first place everything gets dropped.
Consumed as a database by some repl -y tooling.
Useful for by-hand and mobile retrieval during conversation: 'let me show you what i was working on today...' not blocked by some long search through mobile apps session.
Also helpful for personal review. What did I do today? This week? This year? time-indexing and image hosting/data storage by default.
Content: clips/gifs, screenshots, commits, todos, polls?
Execution time usually isn't thinking time.
Some advice that makes sense to me: Take time to think, and to design.
I struggle tremendously to do that - it always feels like my design-time happens in a vacuum. The output feels useless b/c I didn't represent the reality/constraints while designing, so when I sit down to execute, getting from now to the plan just doesn't make any sense. At execution time, shortcuts and quick wins are much more obvious, and progress goes in a different direction. What was the point of designing?
So here's another idea - improve review processes.
It's easy to read code you wrote - well, it's not easy to sit down and do anything, but the success rate is very high once you've started (vs. execution, when you might try to execute for a while and throw it away). Review time is always useful - you're familiarizing and gathering data from past executions and designs.
It's really about creating and collecting aha moments - insights that bubble up and spark at odd hours, as your understanding of the problem deepens.
Review and take notes, execute and take notes. Sure, plan and design if you want to do that explicitly - really it happens _all_ the time, and the act of planning/designing is when you write down the insights and constraints, and put all the captured parts of the problem together.
Fine, that's planning - for some reason I'm quite put off by it!
Review comes up alot for my personal process's point of emphasis.
Perhaps it's too self-referential, but it seems to be a hidden and under-emphasized concept in planning.
To me, it's one of the easiest, most accurate, and arguably the most important part (of planning).
See also:
- Planning and Review time
- Review Day Process
- Reviews
- mind-garden review process
- review is ok
- review-time is thinking-time
One thing I've noticed in my career is that I'm a much better decision maker in the morning.
When rested, I bring the energy, I solve the problem. I used to say I worked exactly twice as fast in the morning as the afternoon. Maybe it is due to being tired from working that morning, or it's a post-lunch crash.
Either way, I know for sure: by the time I get home that night, I don't stand a chance. No room for anything. Personal projects, side-hustle, alternate career as a writer be damned.
It was easier when I was fresh out of college, but by now it's too hard to not just veg on the couch until bedtime.
The difficult part about the limited use of that morning brain is that your side-hustle probably needs it more than your day-to-day. You need your full brain to make big-picture decisions, to push a whole project a step forward. In my experience, most day-to-days are pre-defined at the previous planning meeting, and now is time to execute that plan.
One method that worked for me in the past was finding odd times during the day
to put the when-I-get-home plan together. If I landed at home with an outline
for a blog post, I could finish it pretty easily. The hard part is already done,
and my tired brain has plenty of room for well-defined glue tasks. Well-planned
work is easy - just follow the plan. (And hopefully, plans can be automated as
well.)
All of this is building to make the case for a TODO list that tells you what to do, given the circumstances. I want to be able to opt-in to a task that fits my current mental state.
It should know that it's Wednesday at 2 pm, and that I'll be more productive doing a series of small tasks by 5 than continuing on the long-running task I'm burning out on.
It should know that given the up-coming week, I should take time to run Monday
and Tuesday morning because I have a scheduled Happy Hour on Tuesday night and a
day full of meetings on Wednesday, and my goal is 4 runs per week. (This one is
a reach, but you could at least imagine it auto-including a running day or not
based on whether you're slipping on a habit.)
On Thursday at 8, it should let me opt-in to a 20 min task that will benefit my novel and re-energize me a bit. It should provide me with all the relevant context for doing that task, and then kick me out when the pomodoro is up.
Key to this is Yodo somehow pulling this information from you. You need to tell it a task is a 20 minute one, or it needs to otherwise find a way to know that. Hopefully, that will all happen at planning/review time.
One thought that is recurring lately is about Threads of Work.
Decision-making fatigue is real! Hopefully soon, Yodo will be making suggestions for you.