TheFocus.Quest

Next steps on the focus quest

I haven't been writing lately. Sometimes I think about that and feel the frustration of having another abandoned project, but then when I try to get to write, I can't find a topic to address.

I see two possible causes for that:

TL;DR: it's the latter. Things have improved and the combo of attention and distraction is no longer the main issue. Yay!

Next goal is to think about external circumstances (team, client, tools), how to make the best from them and how to decide when it's time to move on.

Now, here's the full stream of thought

Since I say that I want to make work more pleasant, do it in less time, and enjoy life, the first point would explain the dried-up blog if the relationship with my own work was flawlessly pleasant, effective and enjoyable.

While things have mutated and certainly improved in the relationship with my current job, it's still far from perfect. So, since there's room for improvement, the second case may be true.

I think that's what has happened: my original ideas revolved around cultivating attention and taming distractions but in the past few weeks I can't say that lack of attention has been my primary issue.

These are the kinds of things that led to writing this blog:

While some of those still happen today, they are no longer the main challenges I'm facing.

I find it easier to switch contexts now because I have a much better understanding of what's going on at pretty much every layer of the project. I find it easier to wind down at the end of the day because I'm not as stressed and excited during the day. I can focus on tasks because I don't feel the constant fear of having other, perhaps more important things I should be doing or thinking. I can focus on specific tasks because I'm more trusting of the team, and have a better sense of where we are and what comes next.

So, things have improved. Yay!

I'm still not quite happy about my work, though. What's the next round of improvement?

The project I'm involved with presents lots of friction to development work. There are obstacles to access some tools (I use a VM and a VPN inside it to connect to an RDS database, go figure), communication is kind of slow and involves lots of people, and requirements are often vague and change on the fly.

As a team, we kind of accept some of those limitations, and I sometimes think that we could or should be more proactive in eliminating friction and refusing to put up with some things, not with an intention of being complainy of capricious, but in an attempt to make ourselves more valuable for the client. If we spend some percentage of our time just dealing with "oh dang! the VM timed out again and I have to wait 5 minutes for it to re-start", that's time we're charging for and not doing anything useful.

From a different perspective, I feel that all that friction is getting in the way for me and preventing me from doing the best work I can do.

Life is short; I don't want to spend it waiting for the VM or testing some weird edge case that only exists because we don't get access to good test data.

That's the next likely focus of this blog: thinking on how to deal with external circumstances and making the best out of them. And, perhaps, also deciding when it's time to move on and find more fertile ground to do good work. We'll see.