Improve Daily Work > Daily Work
“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.” Phoenix Project.
Improve Daily Work
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.
Types Of Work
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?).
Unplanned Work
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.
Improve Daily 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.
Improve Or Drown
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.
Action Item
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!
What do you think it’s the great productivity monster?
Unplanned work.
Meetings.
Poor communication among teams or team members.
Inadequate tooling.
Anything else?
I believe strongly in the basic principle of "improve daily work" and work on that daily. By wife finds it quite funny but appreciates the results! But I think that a lot of the context that led up to that conclusion in the article is highly variable across teams, or at least needs nuance before applying it to a given situation. E.g. unplanned work is often a direct consequence of technical debt, but especially in a startup, technical debt needs to be managed, not eliminated. Unplanned work can also be of the form of someone unexpectedly asking for help, and giving that help can be a very positive thing for the team as a whole, even if it delays one's own plans a bit. One last thought: After many years I decided to eliminate the difference between internal and external customers for most purposes. I think Amazon is right.
Great read! Many people want to improve but they are intentional about it. Your logical devision gives a way to think about the balance which your business needs.