Day Two - Let's Get Organized

Hello again.  Day Two.  Still here.  Let's get to work!

I promised in my last post to talk a little bit about how I am trying to organize things, so let me briefly share with you my "Domestic Engineer Organizational Techniques version 0.1".  I am pretty certain that if it were software it would be still in the "early development stages", but hell, you have to start somewhere, right?

I have always worked well in my professional career by taking good notes, and carrying around a well used lab journal with me.  I would jot down results from experiments or tests in it, as well as short hand notes for commands or instructions I needed to remember.  Yes - these are often things that would later be entered into a test case in JIRA somewhere, but they always seemed to start out in a lab journal at some point.  Perhaps its because I got used to taking notes on paper when I was studying Linguistics at UCSC - who knows, I just know it works for me.  So, thats what I went with initially.

My favorite lab journals are Moleskine Folio Professional Notebooks.  They are large format, nice paper notebooks that are absolutely overkill for what I am using them for.  In short, I love them.  I like to take my notes with a drafting pencil as well, which is, once again, superfluous, but it makes me feel more "engineery", and I love the thing, so why not.

I plan on using this book for the following:

• Sprint Planning:  That's right.  The poor man's JIRA board.  Also does not require power or a dedicated IT team.  Also not scalible for large Enterprises.  Meh.
• "Bucket" Tracking:  AKA - Epics.  I have defined five different categories of tasks I plan on doing every week.  Each category is it's own "bucket", which I then poor tasks into, pulling one out a week for my Sprint.  These map (roughly) to the Epics you would encounter in Agile.
• Work Journal:  If I need space to keep notes for a particular project, say, replumbing the kitchen sink or building a new planter box, this jornal is the perfect place to keep those notes.
• Home Improvement Master Task List:  On New Year's Day, every year (okay okay, this is the first year, but it is the start of a new tradition, I swear!) my wife and I walk around the house and inventory everything that needs to be done to the house room by room.  This can range from small repair, to epic remodel.  No matter what it is, we write it down on the list.

My journal is just getting off the ground, but I have the basic sections laid out already.  I transferred the Home Improvement Master Task List first thing, and plan on using that as my "Home Improvement" Bucket moving forward.

Tomorrow I will get into my thoughts around my "Bucket" system, go over the categories I am initially starting with, as well as how I envision them relating to Epics in Agile.  My goal is to keep these blog posts relatively short, both so I have an improved chance of actually doing them every day, as well as making them more digestible to read.  Nobody wants a wall of text.

Ta ta for now!