You Cant See The Forest For The Sand Dunes
You Cant See The Forest For The Sand DunesConfused - Dis-Oriented - Lost? ThinkingOutLoud.DonaldNoyes.20130311.20140802
We are often so busy in the details of what we are doing, that we cannot seem to know what is next! We sometimes are distracted, led astray by a search path that has taken us down a blind-alley or a wrong fork-in-the-road! We are, or seem, to be looking for, say, an "oak tree", but all around, all we see is piles of wind-blown sand. Just a moment ago, we seemed to be on the right track, but we became distracted, and now we find ourselves in the middle of a desert.
It is hard to find something without including frames or containers in which to put or view the thing. Perhaps we should start WritingThingsDown. Yes, old-fashioned, pen or pencil on paper-pages or index-cards. Then have a place you put and can find them later. A small in-box, or in my case a kleenex-box with a pencil-in-it and the top removed, just to the left of my key-board. I have a names
Then you can explore the forest for the "oak-tree" with the ball-of-twine or GeoLocater? to allow back-tracking.
Keeping proximity to/ or location of the forest of solution possibles and not allowing for inadvertent detours over the desert or plains where they do not reside is important.
It is rare that you will find an "oak-tree" in the midst of sand-dunes, so don't go there if you want a high likelihood of finding one, stay in-sight-of the forest.
Perhaps we should start writing things down.
Something I have been touting for decades now. Writing things down Makes Them Real, and prevents "mis-remembering" how things came about. The trick is to get the right balance of looseness and discipline.
Sometimes it's too stiff: I had a captive job at a firm making (mostly) Class I and II medical diagnostic equipment. For these guys the lab notebook was no joke; these things were issued with a serial number and locked in a vault when a project was complete. If was like chain of evidence handling to retrieve old lab books to look something up. Way too rigidly controlled.
It can be too loose: In my current two-man shop I maintain a daily log (with the inevitable slippage) and steno pad books for individual projects. For a while I was trying to get my partner to maintain the discipline of keeping a daily log as well, but you know how hard discipline is. I wanted both of us to read each other's logs every day so that we could hold each other accountable for getting work done and to keep each other sync'ed up. Well, that didn't last.
Just right: After working at the medical place mentioned above I had a captive gig at a typesetting equipment manufacturer. In a casual group meeting I suggested that all the engineers should maintain a daily log so that our boss could simply read the log books and know what all of us were working on and what progress we were making. The boss immediately agreed and made a policy statement then and there that everybody in engineering would maintain a daily log that he would read at the end of the week, perhaps more often. The others looked daggers at me, but hey. If it's worth doing it's worth spending a minute or two writing it down.
Well, bunkie, imagine my surprise when a week or two later my boss jumped into my sandbox with both feet because my log was not complete! "Where's your description of this? And what about that? And you didn't even mention this other thing when I know you spent two days working on it!" Hoist on my own petard, as it were.
Logging works well in a firmly-managed environment. If the boss insisted that everybody kept a daily log that he would be auditing occasionally, and that teammates would read regularly, that would keep everybody on their toes. [sigh] If only.
P.S. -- I forgot to mention, back when I was doing W2 contract work I always provided a weekly report to my contract manager/broker. This report was copied to the site boss as a courtesy. (The report was originally generated for his benefit, of course.) The content of that weekly report was extracted from my daily log. Sometimes little details of day-to-day operations become important annotations to a report that gets passed around on the client's side.
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