A minor difference in theoretical foundations
One thing I like about IT is that it is a place where I don’t feel free to pull the sort of nonsense I will regularly do at home.
I was talking to my ops person this afternoon and we were mulling what I’ll just refer to as a situation with some automation and I said “I have made no decisions here … so let’s be clear … but I think we are a little over-automated in this particular area …”
I was doing my rhetorical gambit for when I’m expecting a tussle.
They cut me off with a “hard agree, but I was told ‘better to be over-automated than under-automated.’”
Oh no.
There’s kind of a funny dynamic here because I think there are people who look at someone like me and think “he says things like ’let’s not over-automate’ because he’s old”
Well, sure. And they don’t say it because they’re not.
They just haven’t lived through enough inverse XKCD-is-it-worth-the-time foot-guns yet.
The year of screaming at a desktop
Some Linux guy hard-locks Emacs and loses some work when he kills it.
He investigates.
It’s because a project management package ran hog wild in his home directory when he left a Makefile there, which the project management package took as a license to run hog wild and index his whole ~/.
His response?
“It was dumb to leave a Makefile in my home directory.”
I think I have more time for Linux people than Mac people in the same way I have a soft spot for anyone with Stockholm Syndrome.
I checked. You can do this on a Mac, too. I just think a Mac person wouldn’t think to blame themselves.
The log
I continue to keep my daily log. I’m not going to say how, or what with. I just keep it.
If I get going to fast to keep it well, I do a periodic catchup entry where I make bullet points of what happened since the last thorough entry and get on with my day.
I use it for general notes sometimes, but when an entry gets long because the notes got involved, I copy the long part to a new file and save it when I’m done because it’s supposed to be a log, not a journal, exactly.
Because you’re not me and I have no idea how your brain works, I have no idea if a log would be useful for you. For me it does these things:
- Helps me remember things to come back to when I have the brain space to switch contexts into task creation.
- Helps me remember what happened today.
- Helps me feel better because holy crap, I do a lot in a day. Especially this week. But like many managers, especially managers who don’t really like managers, it’s easy to forget that deciding is work.
I do go back now and then and look at entries more than a day old, but not often. If I’m using the log correctly, anything that matters is probably an action in another place built for recording and describing actions.