{"id":18155,"date":"2017-06-13T16:28:28","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T20:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=18155"},"modified":"2017-06-14T08:54:54","modified_gmt":"2017-06-14T12:54:54","slug":"tracking-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/13\/tracking-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.plover.com\/misc\/evaluation.html\">Mark Dominus<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/blog.plover.com\/misc\/evaluation.html\">\n<p>The way I have been able to escape this horrible trap is by\ntracking every piece of work I do, <em>every<\/em> piece, as a ticket in our\nticketing system.  People often come to me and ask me to do\nstuff for them, and I either write up a ticket or I say &ldquo;sure, write\nme a ticket&rdquo;. If they ask why I insist on the ticket (they usually\ndon&rsquo;t), I say it&rsquo;s because when self-evaluation time comes around I\nwant to be able to take credit for working on their problem.  Everyone\nseems to find this reasonable.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Instead of thinking &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t I finish big project X? I must have been goofing off. What a lazy slacker I am&rdquo; I think &ldquo;holy cow, I resolved 67 tickets related to big project X! That is great progress! No wonder I got hardly anything else done last fall&rdquo; and also &ldquo;holy cow, X has 78 resolved tickets and 23 still open. It is huge! No wonder it is not finished yet.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>I think it is important to maintain the correct attitude to this. It would be easy to imagine ticket management as unproductive time that I wasted instead of accomplishing something useful. This is wrong. The correct attitude is to consider ticket updates to be part of my work product: I produce code. I produce bug fixes. I produce documentation, reports, and support interactions. And I also produce ticket updates. This is part of my job and while I am doing it I am not goofing off, I am not procrastinating, I am doing my job and earning my salary. If I spent the whole day doing nothing but updating tickets, that would be a day well-spent.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Dominus: The way I have been able to escape this horrible trap is by tracking every piece of work I do, every piece, as a ticket in our ticketing system. People often come to me and ask me to do stuff for them, and I either write up a ticket or I say &ldquo;sure, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,708,1265],"class_list":["post-18155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-fogbugz","tag-getting-things-done","tag-productivity"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18165,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18155\/revisions\/18165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}