Looking ahead

Early in my career, days like today used to drive me crazy. It was a full day and, at first blush, not much to show for it.

First thing I did at work was put together the deployment plan for a product we're promoting to production tomorrow. Then, since some of the steps were manual, I ran through the plan in the UAT environment to make sure we had properly spelled everything out. Good thing, too, since it was immediately obvious that one of the steps was going to take waaaaay longer than we had thought, so I worked with one of the developers to come up with another means to get it done.

Then we had our weekly meeting with our product owners. The full team attends on iteration boundaries, but on weeks two and three, it's just the leads. So, we pretty much spent the whole time talking about when things were supposed to happen rather than interesting stuff like what they want and what we've produced.

By then it was almost lunchtime, so I got tomorrow's change ticket finalized and submitted for approval and then spent lunchtime putting together my plan for my directed study course this spring. I fired that off to my adviser and went to a meeting with my Project Manager to talk about staffing for 2016. Naturally, nobody asked our opinion on support costs until the budget was already submitted, so we're trying to figure out how we can keep these systems running with two fewer people available to help.

That done, I had to take the plan we'd agreed to and reformat it for the staffing manager of our department and set up a meeting to review it with the department head.

It was getting pretty close to quitting time and one last check of email revealed a response from my adviser basically indicating that the directed study plan sounded good and we would call the course "Topics in Big Data." That wouldn't have been my first choice because it's not really a Big Data problem I'm working on (more a "lots of data" problem, which is a different thing). However, I know he's trying to get some traction for Big Data Analytics as a formal course in the department and if that title helps, I'm fine with it.

I then did my one demonstrably productive task for the day: I procured waffle fries to go with the fish sticks for dinner on the way home from work.

As I stated at the outset, this would have had me pulling my hair out 20 years ago. I've since come to realize that my hair doesn't need any encouragement on that front and that days like this are, in fact, a very necessary thing. Nothing glamorous about them, but good things don't just happen by chance. Neither are they often the result of brilliance. Actually getting stuff done is usually just the final step in a tedious sequence of incremental moves towards a goal. It helps to keep that in mind on days like these.