Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2008 February 16 (entry 2)

# 16 Feb 2008, 09:05PM: Lessons Of The Past Few Weeks: I work better when I keep my inbox to fewer than ten messages on a daily basis. Everything that's not a to-do task goes into one big archive folder that I can search or sort if I need something. Thanks, Gmail, for giving the world the insight that, in a virtual environment without haptic reminders of size and relevance, search engines beat a zillion hierarchical folders hands-down. And IMAP rocks.

I still need to work on keeping my volume down when I'm excited in a conversation.

The art of the cc:, especially when sending out an email documenting what everyone just agreed to in a conference call.

If you provide a critical service that other people depend on, and you can't quickly get them an explanation describing the service with sample inputs and outputs, I throw up my hands in disgust. Bonus points if you change the service without telling anyone and respond to questions with "nothing's changed!" for a day or more.

I need more office pants. Black pantage is de rigeur for business-y women, it seems.

A bug tracker is orders of magnitude better than Basecamp To-Do lists for organizing software development tasks. A bug tracker is a collective memory, a place to prioritize, a wiki for specs and repro cases and screenshots, and an easy collection of nifty, gameable stats on How Many Bugs We Closed Today to wow the client and your manager. Even if the project manager has to spend time each day translating between the bugtracker and emails with clients and colleagues, it's worth it. I knew this before but I'm newly re-grokking it.

I am good at this job. This job is good for me. I am so grateful and proud.

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