Three-month work-life retrospective

I am going to go through each of the points listing out as many items as I can for each.� When I�m done I will create a list of action items from them.

What do I want to stop doing?

Let go of my anxieties about �how things should be done�.� Everyone has their own ways of doing things.

Stop bringing work home with me.� I�ve had troubles sleeping for years because of this.

Stop feeling �rushed� and know I�m working hard.

Stop wondering if I could have made an impact at my last job with the �if only I did this��

What do I want to start doing?

Communicate more effectively my anxieties about �how things should be done�.� Work with people for my learning or theirs.

More test-driven development.� I�m still learning and not always writing that failing test first.� Blasphemy, I know.

Blog more.� I�ve been too focused on side projects (because of rejuvenated dev passions) and my actual job.

Write more experimental blog posts.� E.g. invest more time in an article that requires research or trial and error.

Learn more about agile, scrum, kanban, etc� processes.

Enjoy my free time more.

Do weekly retrospectives with my family.

Do weekly retrospectives by myself.

What do I want to continue doing?

Develop.� Develop.� Develop.

Maintaining a high pace, but a maintainable pace.

Pair programming.� I�ve never pair programmed on a whole task in the past (only typical help me debug a problem).

Test-driven development.

Reading/Learning.� I�ve read more technical books in the past three months than I have in the past three years (maybe more)!

Using a scrum board.� I�ve brought this concept home for my chores (my house is so much cleaner!).

Working on a product.� I enjoy the single point of focus.� Lots of options to explore A/B testing, etc�

Action Items

Wow, that was a long list.� It�s clearly not possible to create action items for all of the items.� Let�s go back through and see if we can find a few common themes:

• Learning, development, TDD, writing seem to be somewhat related and good probably have a good action item associated with it.
• Communication.� I think this covers another good set of tasks (retrospectives, communicating with team members, pairing, etc�).
• Closure.� This kind of goes hand-in-hand with communication, but slightly different.� This covers things like stress, wondering about my last job, and ensuring that my communication is effective.

I�m happy with that grouped summary of my stop, start, and continue doing lists.� Now I can formulate some action items:

• Perform a regular personal retrospective.

I thought about writing done more actions, but I decided against it.� The above action item I feel is extremely powerful.� I also feel that by doing this first, it will lead to more action items that have been thought and explored during my retrospective.

Checkout Word

Surprised.

When I write blog articles I feel like I have a general feel for where it is heading.� This blog post did a complete 180 from where I thought it was going to go.� I had no idea that at the start of writing this post I would end up with an action item.� More importantly, I didn�t expect the action item to be do a personal retrospective.

Summary

What a fun exercise this was.� I originally thought I was going to directly discuss several points about how fun Agile is versus Waterfall.� Or how much my code has improved by reading a few books.� How awesome TDD is.� Etc�

I covered a few of these points, but definitely not to the extent I originally thought.

Now it�s time to see if I can follow through with the single action item I gave myself, perform a personal retrospective.

Published on Sep 11, 2013

Tags: Optimization | stress | Theory | Rants | scrum | retrospective