I've wasted hours on projects in the past due to a lack of organization, processes, and general good practices. So this time I wanted to sharpen my project management skills in a way that would be replicable for my future self.

My perspective is particularly honed because I've worked for many years as a small business operator. I had to source contract and agency work before getting into web development myself.

The premise of this kind of one-man-shop project management comes from Brett at DesignJoy:

Below are some lessons learned after I implemented this over the course of a few weeks.

1. Organization is key
2. Time restraints are tricky
3. Deliver on time
4. Define the scope
5. Define the process
6. Test, test...and keep testing
7. Polish is important
8. Results matter most
9. Previews are good
10. Let the client lead when possible

Organization is Key

Prior to Trello, I was doing a combination of email, texts, and Google chat. That's fine when you're starting out and have one client at a time. But having one place where all communication about a single project lives saves time and effort.

Clarity on the order of events was incredibly helpful too. I set up lists where different tasks would live:

• Directions, assets, and general information in the first column
• Task queue in second column
• Active work in third column
• Work ready for client review in fourth column
• Approved work in the fifth column

It's a very simple but effective setup that allows for asynchronous communication (I have had zero phone calls so far) and a clearly defined pipeline for requests/work/review.

I grant the client full access to the Trello Board and they're able to rearrange the queue such that the work that needs to happen first gets put at the top.

From there, I grab the top item, and work on one thing at a time in active work. This is valuable for the client to see what I'm working on. And, bonus – it's incredibly helpful for people like me who are easily distracted from one task by wanting to go do another one "real quick".

Time Restraints are Tricky

Hot take: don't set time restraints unless you have to. Often I resist the urge to add a note about timing for delivery. It's common to do this when talking to people, but unless I'm asked for a scope of delivery, I leave this off.

This allows me room to expand on design work, try out different implementations for coding, and not be crunched on non-time sensitive items.

Deadlines are just tricky. A lot of times you have to move them after you set them. And a lot of times they're arbitrary to begin with. I avoid them unless I have no other choice.

That said, if you're not disciplined enough to put in the hours without them...you may need to have a few. 😂

Deliver on Time

It's unlikely that you'll have zero time restraints, though. Otherwise, the project may drift on in perpetuity. And then, caught in its numbing undertow, you'll turn around in 6 months only to realize how little you've progressed and how much anxiety lingers under the surface as a result of a lack of closure.

You don't want this. 🚫

So, when you do have a deadline, deliver before it. Give yourself some room so that you can likely deliver ahead of schedule, and at the very least deliver on time.

Define the Project's Scope

What are we building? What are the guardrails? Is it a marketing page? Is it an ecommerce site? Will it require skills beyond my knowledge? There are many questions like these to answer up front.

Starting out, it's easy to want to say yes to any and everything. And in most cases, go for it! There were a couple things in my last project that I had to research and figure out mid-stream.

But, try insofar as is possible to define the scope up front so that you can structure your project well and have a good idea of what it will take to get from start to finish.

Your client may or may not know their own scope. You will be a very helpful resource for them throughout the process, especially if they are not technically proficient.

Define Your Process

This is where Trello really helped me with some of my natural weak spots. Organizing the board and setting it up to be as simple as possible for both of us really paid off as we worked together.

At the onset, I built a template card with instructions. This both defined the process for me, and gave a reference for my client.

The process of working on tasks throughout the project was extremely straightforward and left little room for confusion. On tasks where explanation was needed, screenshots, notes, and checklists were available to box up issues into containers.

Test, Test, and Test Again

You can never test enough, and there will likely be things that slip through anyway. At least that's been my experience! Always test on mobile devices and not just the Chrome Dev Tools.

I broke some image gallery functionality and didn't realize it until client sent screenshots from his cell phone.

Not ideal! 😅🤦‍♂️

Polish is Important

Get the meta tags and favicon stuff right. Depending on the platform you're developing on, this may be done for you, but just make sure you've taken care of it before launch. It's easy to overlook things like this.

If you're doing these yourself, I found some helpful tools to generate and test them:

• https://metatags.io/
• https://realfavicongenerator.net/
• https://socialcarding.com/
• https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
• https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validatorst

Results Matter Most

I overrode some Bootstrap 5 CSS in my main.css. I tweaked an npm package. Your client doesn't care what you do, or about the perfect best practices. Results matter most.

Don't break stuff, but that aside, you may bend some rules to simplify things if you need to.

Your client wants you to do awesome. Concern yourself with the best way to get them the results they desire.

Previews are Good

Clients are not always technically savvy. Descriptions, screenshots, and so on are often insufficient for them to grasp and approve what you're working on. Be able to send them a working preview build when possible.

I developed this project using GitHub for my codebase and Netlify for deployment. Deploy previews are a built in feature at Netlify, and you can share URLs based on pull/merge request numbers. That way, if there is a working site up and running, the client can preview changes separately.

Let the Client Lead when Possible

Hold your feelings and opinions loosely. This is their project, not yours. It's easy to get that backwards.

But the client is in charge and knows what they want even if they don't know how to get there or even how to describe it.

Part of our job as developers is coaxing that out of them by using the tools we are proficient with. Communication, organization, and teamwork are equally or more important than our technical toolkit.

As a freelancer, we are valuable assets to their business and should be pointing toward serving them well during the course of all our work.

Let them lead when possible.

Make suggestions when asked or when it's necessary.

But be helpful above all.

Empathy 😊 is the name of the game.

Master this and the coding will often be the easy part.

Thanks for Reading 👊

I hope this has been helpful for you!

Come say hey 👋 over on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EamonnCottrell

Many programmers are missing out on a simple way to improve their programming progress.

Just think of athletes, entrepreneurs, students, health-nuts, and travelers. They’re among the diverse groups of people who use a planner. Planners are often used to give productivity a boost in order to stay organized and prioritize tasks.

But that’s just the start.

A planner can also help you:

• Stay on the direct path—instead of winding down random paths and hitting dead ends
• Measure progress
• Stay motivated
• Conquer imposter syndrome

If a planner offers so many benefits, why don’t more programmers use one?

They should.

No matter if you’ve been programming for a month, year, decade, or more, all of us have something in common: there’s a lot to learn and we need to continually get better at our craft.

That’s why programmers of all levels should use a skill-building planner. It’s a way to get better faster and to actually enjoy the journey. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way during my days as a long-distance runner.

Born Out of a Need

My first half-marathon was memorable for all of the wrong reasons. I felt terrible during the race because I was completely out of shape. Plus, since I didn’t train properly, my finish time was dismal.

However, the experience taught me a useful lesson that I continue to apply to subsequent skills, including programming: the power of a planner.

Knowing that I could achieve a better race time, I committed to doing another half-marathon. I did many things differently on the second go-around, but two things stand out: I followed a running plan and kept a running journal.

The plan was useful because it contained all of the details: the number of miles I needed to run and how fast to run them.

The journal, which consisted simply of a legal pad and a pen, served a qualitative purpose. Each evening, I’d write a few notes about my running workout: how I felt during my run and factors that may have affected my performance, like the food I ate that day.

As I’d later learn, a plan and a journal are critical elements in the skill-building process.

Together, the details from my plan and the responses from my journal helped me to see progress, hold myself accountable to get the workout in, and ultimately become a much better runner.

I not only far exceeded my expectations in my second half-marathon, but I also enjoyed the training process and the race itself.

Simply put, using a planner and journal in combination can have a huge impact on the outcomes you achieve. In the years since, I’ve put this planner/journal model to the test by building other skills, including programming.

What I can tell you is this: incorporate the planner/journal model into your programming routine if you’re looking to achieve results efficiently and effectively.

Let’s dive into this model and how it can benefit your programming progress.

Different Skill + Same Process = The Outcomes You Want

When I began learning to program, I thought back to my running days and the habits that helped to accelerate my progress. The planner/journal model came to mind. I figured what worked so well with one skill could be re-applied to another.

I was right.

I re-applied this planner/journal combination (with some tweaks) as I set out to learn and get better at programming. Once again, it made all the difference.

As a programmer, I keep a detailed account of what I want to do each day and each week. These concrete details make up the planner side of my planner/journal model. The journal side consists of personal assessments of my work and abilities, such as:

• The mistakes I made during the day and the lessons I learned
• Learning strategies that worked well
• Tactics that helped or hurt my productivity

These responses are useful because similar comments creep up over time. So I’m constantly on the lookout for patterns. When I spot one, it’s usually a sign to make a tweak. Or, equally important, I know what to keep doing.

Using a planner and journal in tandem can help you stay on the direct path, measure progress, stay motivated, self-assess your work and abilities, and conquer imposter syndrome.

Let’s look at each in turn. To keep it simple, I’ll refer to this planner/journal model simply as a “planner” going forward.

Take the Direct Path

People who build skills often have a similar experience: they wind down many paths and repeatedly hit dead ends. Skill-building becomes time-consuming, frustrating, and exhaustive.

These are reasons why a planner can be so useful. It can help you stay organized and focus your time and attention on the things that matter most. Thinking strategically through each day and week can help you stay on the direct path—and bypass the number of random and unproductive paths and dead ends.

It’s not to say that you’ll never feel frustrated or stuck while using a planner. But here’s the difference: using a planner will help you identify what you need to do each day and why. This can help you get the most from your skill-building time, substantially reduce frustration, and reduce the number of starts, stops, and restarts along the way.

Are You Making Progress?

You may be working really hard toward your skill. But the question is: are you making progress?

This is an important question to answer and a second reason why a planner matters. Effort isn’t enough when it comes to building skills effectively. You’ve got to have concrete ways to measure your outcomes to ensure your hard work is paying off.

Some skills are easier to measure progress than others. If you’re a runner, the time it takes you to run five miles is either increasing or it’s decreasing. So measuring progress is relatively easy to evaluate.

But other skills, like programming, make measuring progress much more difficult. You can solve a bunch of programming problems, for example, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re becoming a better problem-solver.

The solution is this: focus on small strides—that is, incremental improvements—each day. The idea is to identify one to three things you want to do or accomplish today. They should be small and manageable. Getting the problem to work on paper is an example of a small stride. Identifying the right algorithm to use in a problem is another.

Identify the small strides you want to make each evening for the next day or first thing in the morning. Then, at the end of the day, reflect on the progress you made toward these small strides, whether that’s something you did or learned.

Say the problem remains unsolved, for example. But you figured out the right data structure to use. Or you learned about a new approach that you can apply. That’s progress: you’re moving forward.

These small strides accumulate over time and will help you reach the outcomes you want.

Identifying the small strides you make each day matters for another reason: they’ll fuel your motivation. And this is the third reason why using a planner matters.

Stay Motivated

Creating small strides each day has made a big difference in my programming progress. I can see the progress—no matter how big or small—unfold right before my eyes, and it’s motivating.

Something I struggled with yesterday, for example, makes a lot more sense today. Or I flawlessly applied a concept I learned about last week. These small strides encourage me to get up and get after it each day.

There’s another reason to focus on small strides. Doing so makes building a skill much more manageable. Identifying the correct algorithm to use is manageable. Refactoring a portion of a program is manageable. Writing clear and meaningful variable names is manageable.

These small strides are exactly how skills are built: incrementally, step-by-step, one small stride after another.

Self-Assess

We’re often in such a rush to move on to the next problem or program, that we fail to take a few minutes to self-assess our work.

That’s a mistake.

Taking time to self-assess matters: you want to make sure you’re running down the right path in the most effective way possible. The process is easier than you may think.

As programmers, we can assess our work by “looking back,” as mathematician George Pólya puts it in his book, How to Solve It.

Looking-back means to “reconsider and re-examine the result and the path that led to it.” It’s the step to take after you’ve solved the problem and before you move on to the next one.

The idea is to solve a problem or write a program. Then—and this is the important point—before rushing to the next problem or program, look back at your solution: learn from it, improve it, and consolidate your knowledge.

Sure, your solution may be correct. But is it also efficient and effective? Put another way, is your solution the best that it can be? Is there room for improvement by using a different data structure, better variable names, or another algorithm?

Answer these questions by taking time to assess your work and abilities. Looking back can help you move forward.

Conquer Imposter Syndrome

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to keep a skill-building planner is to conquer imposter syndrome. A lot of people struggle with imposter syndrome—including my past self.

The root of my imposter syndrome, as it turned out, was that I was playing the comparison game. You know, when you compare yourself to others. When I began to program, I often felt inferior to those with math or engineering backgrounds. I also felt inadequate when I read stories about how people who claimed to learn to program “quickly.”

The comparison game is a bad game to play because it puts your thoughts and energy toward things you can’t control. Plus, it distracts from what really matters: your progress.

There’s an alternative. Instead of comparing yourself to others, compare yourself to yourself. That’s what I’ve set out to do. It’s a small change that can have a huge impact.

A key step in that process for me has been to use my planner each and every day. Doing so has made the game a competition of one: comparing myself to myself. I do this by planning out each day, then evaluating my work and abilities.

A planner keeps the journey inward—focusing on the things that are in your control, like your daily effort, and the small strides you make each day.

Make It Happen with Daily Skill Planner

If you’ve read this far, then it’s clear that we’ve got something in common: we want to become better programmers. The ideas outlined in this post will help you do so.

If incorporating these ideas on your own is too much work, then here’s a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you: Daily Skill Planner. It’s a hands-on, practical skill-building planner that my husband, Paul, and I created and designed together.

Daily Skill Planner contains a four-part framework that’ll help you build skills efficiently and effectively. It’s also designed to include the benefits addressed in this article:

• Taking the direct route toward the outcome you want
• Measuring your progress
• Staying motivated by focusing on small strides
• Self-assessing your work and abilities
• Conquering imposter syndrome

Whether or not you choose to use Daily Skill Planner, I hope this post has motivated you to keep a skill-building planner—even if it’s as informal as using some paper and a pen, as I began doing years ago.

So here’s my challenge to you: keep a planner for a week or two and incorporate some of the ideas addressed in this post. Then, at the end of this short time period, just see how far you’ve come. I think you’ll be impressed by the outcome.

Programmer and writer | howtolearneffectively.com | dailyskillplanner.com

It's tricky to make a good-looking and functional table of contents in Microsoft Word.

You might often encounter documents that have messy tables of contents along with navigation panes with links to missing headings, non harmonized styles, and badly structured sections.

This wouldn't be a big problem for smaller documents, but with hundreds of pages in a file it ruins the user experience and makes it painful to navigate from one section to another. Not to mention that non-harmonized styles throughout the file can mess with the overall hierarchy of titles.

So how can you build a customizable and structured table of contents with pretty personalized titles and numbering? You'll learn how in this guide.

How to Build a Table of Contents in Microsoft Word

How to Define Numbering Styles in Word

What we're going to do first is define a new list style to create a personalized numbering for our titles. Go to the Home tab > Paragraph section and click the multilevel list button. Choose Define New List Style.

This will open the Define New List Style window which we will use to customize the numbering style and format of our titles.

Name your style however you want (here MyNewListStyle), then click the Format button > Numbering... This will open the Modify Multilevel list window.

We will only define the numbering ("1)","a)") and no format or style will be applied at this level. We'll define and apply font styles and formats later on.

Let's take the following numbering for our titles "1.","1.1","1.1.1","2.","2.1","2.2" and so on.

First replace the parenthesis character with a dot character in the Enter formatting for number field. This will change the level 1 numbering format to "1.".

Then we'll define the second level of numbering by clicking the number 2 in the Click level to modify list.

Change the Number style for this level by clicking the associated dropdown menu then select 1,2,3, ... You should get this result:

Erase the parenthesis character in the Enter formatting for number field and place a dot before the "1". You should have ".1".

Now how do I get the numbering style 1.1 at level 2? Pretty simple! Place your mouse before the ".1" in the Enter formatting for number field. Then open the Include level number from dropdown menu and select Level 1.

This will insert the numbering for level 1 before your numbering for level 2. You should get this result:

Inserting numbers manually in this field will give you static numbers which won't be linked to any dynamic numbering in your document. These numbers won't be highlighted in grey in the Enter formatting for number field.

Let's repeat the same steps for level 3. Select level 3 in the Click level to modify list. Select the right Number style for this level in the dropdown menu. Remove unwanted characters and add a dot before the "1".

Then place your mouse before the ".1" in the Enter formatting for number field and open the Include level number from dropdown menu and select level 2. Add a dot before the level 2 "1" in the Enter formatting for number field. Then open Include level number from and select level 1. You should get this result:

You can modify the space character following the number by clicking More >> then Follow number with and select what you want. Here I am going to use Tab character for all my levels.

Click the OK button and you're all set for the numbering part! You won't have to do these steps again as the styles you define can be available from one Word document to another. We'll talk more about that later.

Your list style should be available by clicking the Multilevel list button in the Paragraph section of the Home tab.

We will now define our title styles.

How to Define Title Styles in Word

In the Home tab and under the Style section, click the down arrow next to the different styles available.

Then click Create a Style.

Give your new style a name. It's good practice to include the level number where you're going to apply this title so it's easier to follow your title hierarchy. I am going to name mine NewStyle1 for level 1. Then click Modify.

If you've clicked OK too fast don't worry – you can find your style and modify at anytime in the style section. You can edit it by right clicking on it and clicking Modify...

We are going to apply formatting to our title style.

Start by opening the Style based on dropdown menu and select Heading 1 for level 1. This is an important step for Word to understand the title hierarchy level. You'll apply this step to each level (Heading 2 for your level 2 style, Heading 3 for your level 3 style...).

Then open the Style for following paragraph and select Normal. This will prevent any formatting from applying automatically to the following lines of text you type.

Open the Format menu and open the Numbering... menu. Make sure that None is selected then click OK. This will prevent any conflict between the numbering we defined earlier.

You can then select any font formatting that you want. This is what I picked:

Let's create a style for level 2 and 3 by following the same steps. Be sure to have the numbering set to None each time. This is what I have for level 2:

And level 3:

We are now going to link our title styles with our numbering style.

Go to the Home tab, Paragraph section, Mutlilevel list. Then right click on the Numbering list style we created in the first part and click Modify.

Open the Numbering window by clicking Format. Select the level 1 and in the Link level to style dropdown menu select the level 1 style you created for your level 1 title. You should get this:

Repeat these steps for level 2 and 3.

Then click OK.

How to Apply Your New Title Styles

Now let's try to apply our new title styles. Type in Title 1 in your document without any formatting applied.

If you already have a format applied you can remove it by clicking in the paragraph and applying the Normal style in the Styles section. This is useful to remove any unwanted formatting or styles you may find.

Now click in the Title 1 text and click on your newly created style for level 1. This will apply your level 1 style to the whole paragraph.

If you go to the View tab you can check the Navigation pane and see that "1. Title 1" just appeared as a selectable heading on the left Navigation panel, allowing you to go to it quickly.

Let's try our other titles styles as well. Type in the text without formatting, place your mouse in the relevant paragraph, and then click on your newly created styles to apply them. You should get something like this:

As you can see on the left panel, all my titles are appearing in a structured way with harmonized numbering. You can collapse are expand these to navigate faster. There is also a search engine available on top of this panel.

You can now insert a structured table of contents by going to the References tab > Table of Contents > Automatic table 1. You should now have something like this:

You can customize this table of contents to only display titles down to a certain level by clicking Table of Contents > Custom table of Contents > decrease the Show levels number > OK.

How to Preserve Your Styles in Word

At the moment, these title styles are only available in this Word file. We are going to make them available every time we open Word as well as make them transferable to other people.

Open the Developer tab in Word. If you can't see it displayed click File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Check Developer in the right panel > OK.

Once you're in the Developer tab go to Document Template > Organizer.

In the left panel (in Document1 for me) you can see the styles available in this file. In the right panel are the styles available in the Normal.dotm which allows you to store styles that will be available every time you open Word.

Let's select all our newly created styles then click Copy->. You should get something like this:

Now if you open another file your styles will be directly available in the styles section. This can be useful if you want to transfer styles among your group and harmonize the structure and format of your files.

That's it!

Voilà! You are now able to build a structured Word document with customizable titles styles and a reliable navigation panel.

James Taylor, who authored Managing Information Technology Projects, noted that a “project life cycle encompasses all the activities of a project." And the goal of systems development is the realization of the product requirements.

If you want to learn how to build, deploy, and create high quality software you will want to follow a blueprint.

As Taylor articulated, your goal should be to think holistically about all the activities of a project and how to best manage each stage.

But where should you start?

One answer is to leverage a framework to guide your behavior and work-flows.

One particularly powerful and popular framework is called the Software Development Life Cycle process (SDLC).

In this article I will walk you through the following:

1. How SDLC works and why it is used
2. Each stage of SDLC and the best practices and methodologies you must be aware of when using it
3. I will conclude by citing examples to show the benefits of the SDLC approach.

How SDLC Works and Why it is Used

SDLC consists of six steps which I have diagrammed here for your reference.

In totality, SDLC is a closed loop. This means that each step influences actions that come after it and each stage provides forward looking guidance.

The six phases seek to build on each other in an efficient manner to answer questions and to ensure alignment in your development process.

I seek to take the abstract and provide examples that you, as students and practitioners of software development, can more readily relate to.

For example, if you strive to build software designed for hourly employees, as Zoomshift has done, or time tracking software, you would start at the “requirement analysis” stage.

Here, at this most foundational level, you would figure out what the requirements of workers are when it comes to tracking hours and labor.

You might do this by speaking with hourly employees. Perhaps you would engage in a conversation with managers who lead hourly worker teams.

Another idea is that you could test solutions on the market to better understand the pitfalls of existing software.

You could take notes, sketch diagrams, or build graphs to more deeply understand qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Only after deeply understanding these pain points will you be ready to go to the next phase of SDLC.

Only then can you start the planning phase.

The requirements analysis phase may be tedious.

But by going through these steps you can reduce your time to market, ensure a better product output, save money, and increase the likelihood of product market fit.

Think beyond time tracking.

Think about what you want to build and where your technology passions are.

Figure out the requirements to solve problems in that domain. This is where you start.

Stages of SDLC and Best Practices and Methodologies

Each step must be completed before proceeding to the next phase in the development journey.

Most importantly, the first three steps seek to generate answers to questions and the last three steps are optimized to provide outputs.

• Requirement analysis
• Answer: what problems need to be solved?
• Planning
• Answer: what do we want to do?
• Architectural/software design
• Answer: How do we reach our goal?
• Software Development
• Solve: Let’s build
• Testing
• Solve: Let’s ensure what we have built works
• Deployment
• Solve: Let’s take our solution and use it.

These six phases map to behavior you might already be implementing when scoping, building, testing, and releasing software. But SDLC makes the work-flow standardized and formal.

This is to your benefit: by following specific steps you can easily communicate where you are in the process, and inform others of where you are headed.

Let’s dive deeper into each stage and explain the probing questions and outcomes you will want to optimize for.

Phase #1: Requirements Analysis

This stage of the SDLC forces you to obtain feedback and buy-in from relevant internal and external stakeholders.

Think about my prior examples with time tracking software development. You will need to think broadly about who your “users” are.

Some ideas include your clients, designers, your boss, or other technical representatives on the team.

Ultimately you are looking to answer this question: what problems need to be solved? I find it helpful in phase one to take notes and to actively listen.

When you feel highly comfortable with your answers you can advance to the next phase.

Phase #2: Planning

You are seeking to answer this question: what do we want to do? This question might inspire you to understand the unit economics of your plan (costs and benefits), risk mitigation factors, and expected values.

Much like planning for a vacation, you need to get your possessions organized and think about what bags to pack.

Here is a relevant example.

I have read extensively about the history of Instagram. A tremendous amount of time was spent on the planning phase of the app’s development. This was just at the time social media was rapidly expanding.

How users would interact with the product was still very much unknown.

The founders knew that if the foundational experience was strong (taking, editing, and sharing photographs) then growth, success, and high conversion would follow. This is what they planned for.

The founders spent time on application and website design knowing that if they planned correctly the actual architecting and design stage would be smoother.

They were always looking one step ahead and thinking about the future of social sharing and e-commerce shopping.

Plan for what you can control and be mindful of things you can’t plan for. This will help you have a solid foundation heading into phase three.

Phase #3: Architectural/software design

By this stage you know what your requirements are and what you want.

You are on solid ground to now answer the following question before you start writing software: how do we reach our goal? In short, you need to decide what you are optimizing for and design for that.

Perhaps you are building software that you want to be secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient. Which of those principles is most important to you and why?

Do the stakeholders from the first phase agree? Ensure that stakeholders are fully aligned.

After the design phase you will start putting “hands on keyboards” and making changes will become more costly in terms of time and money spent. Small variable costs will add up.

There are a few pillars of design that I advise you to consider during this phase: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

Use these buckets to drive final design decisions.

Phase #4: Software Development

This is the build phase in which you seek not to answer questions but to produce outputs.

Specifically you are looking to show a bias towards action and develop a prototype or system that others can experience.

When you start building, it's critical you follow the first three phases so that your output aligns with expectations.

Get your computer out, make sure your environment is conducive to work, grab a coffee and mug warmer, and turn on your monitor.

In this phase you get to earn the trust of your stakeholders by embodying a builder's mindset.

Phase #5: Testing

I used to see co-workers wear t-shirts that said the following: “Building rocks, testing not so much.”

You can’t produce a final version of a product without eating your own “dog food”.

At the completion of this phase you are able to ensure that what you have built works. Look for bugs or defects. Get second opinions.

Probe deeply to find errors that will slow down the release of your final product. Ensure strong fundamentals.

Phase #6: Deployment

Go take your solution and use it. Launch. Go Live.

Get the stakeholders from phase one to use your software in the wild. Celebrate. Start measuring sales engagement.

Listen to users and iterate because through user feedback surveys and guidance you can start again at phase one scoping new requirements.

Bringing It All Together: The SDLC Approach

SDLC exists to help you reduce your time to market, ensure a better product output, save money, and increase the likelihood that what you build is useful to the stakeholders that you care about.

SDLC is particularly helpful in the world of software development because it forces you to “color within the lines.”

In other words, SDLC will force you to follow steps and to ensure you are doing the right actions at the right time and for the right reasons.

Think of SDLC as a blueprint for success. Following it blindly doesn’t ensure anything - but it increases the likelihood that you will be satisfied with the results.

Software development - as we all know - is a broad domain and can cover website design tools and online forms to more robust machine learning or backend systems.

Whether or not you are coding in the browser or doing more robust development work, you need a plan of action.

Building software can be hard.

It can also be rewarding. SDLC is a guide for technical work, but more broadly it can be thought of as a guide in life.

You can deploy SDLC to many domains.

For example, SaaS content writing follows the SDLC cycle. Before writing content the author must first define the requirements, plan what will be written, and then actually put pen to paper.

SDLC is a great framework for technology entrepreneurs as well.

My friend wanted to start the a company and reached out to me and others for guidance. I advised him to use SDLC to first perform a requirements analysis even though his ambitions were quite large.

I asked him: what problems are you looking to solve? What do your users want? And lastly, how would this platform help you achieve these goals?

By framing these questions around SDLC he was better able to hone in on his ultimate solution and to build the right tools for the right users.

He narrowed his scope and more tightly defined his problem space. He was able to allocate resources to the planning phase before he started to do anything else.

He went on to build arguably the best Instagram growth service that I am aware of. But his field is constantly evolving.

Now software exists to perform the role of a social media scheduler at scale. Eventually he will need to go back to the basics: requirements analysis.

The adoption of his technology is proof that SDLC, when applied and executed correctly, can lead to profound technological and business outcomes. But as with the development of a business, software is never done.

Hence the cycle continues.

Regardless of what you are building - a company, a tool, a complex program, or an entirely new product - you would be wise to deploy SDLC to ensure quality and to help you maintain focus on your customers while you build.

“Building rocks” should be your North Star.

SDLC is a tool that will help guide you along the way.

Because of the changes brought about by COVID-19, many people have had to find healthy and productive ways of working remotely.

Some have been sent home and can continue doing their work from there, but the "art" of remote work is not just about staying at home and trying to be as productive as possible. There is a whole range of techniques and best practices that can make you super productive without getting tired or exhausted.

The idea for this article came up when people asked me how I get organized and don't freak out creating articles and publishing content weekly (in addition to dealing with other issues like communities and events).

At first I didn't understand what the big deal was, as I didn't see it the same way – until more people started asking questions, as well. So I realized that this was a topic of interest to the community at large. That's when I decided to write about what I do with the hope of helping everyone who reads this.

Objective

This article isn't necessarily the be-all-end-all resource, but is rather intended to be a set of best practices and tips that I've collected and organized over the years.

Note: This article is totally based on my individual experiences, so I may be missing or leaving out some things because I just haven't lived them.

In addition, all the tools that I mention throughout and the opinions about them are completely mine, based on my use and my experience.

If you have had different experiences or have a different view on personal organization, I would love to read about it in another article or on social media.

That said, let's move on to the content!

My History with Personal Organization

For those who don't know me, my name is Lucas Santos. I currently work at Microsoft as a Cloud Advocate, but I've been working with technology and development for almost 9 years.

But why am I telling you all this? Because I want to show where my ideas about personal organization come from and why I think they're particularly important.

During my career I have held various positions in various areas, from support to leadership. And throughout all my experience I have never worked only with development.

In other words, my work was never my only job – I've always been very involved with development communities, events, meetups, teaching programming, writing articles, making videos and podcasts...all while trying to manage my personal life.

Since I was little I was always a very anxious person. I was always very curious to find out how things worked and I always wanted to have control of everything. I had to know the whole process of things to be sure of what they did. It gave me a feeling of security, of knowing where I stood.

During elementary and high school, this was never a problem. But when I got to the job market and college, it started to prove quite impracticable. It is easy for you to know everything in a small company, but when things start getting big, it is out of your control. Trying to regain full control of everything is like trying to hold back a moving train with your own bare hands.

And, of course, I believed I could hold the train...

So, 2016 and 2017 were some of the most stressful years I've ever had in my entire life. I had to manage my college (at that time studying UFABC) and also my job, which had recently moved to a location in São Paulo called "Vila Olímpia". It was far away from my home and public transportation to get there was a pain.

This was one of the most difficult tests I had to pass. It took me almost 2 hours to get to work, so I woke up every day at 5:40 am and went straight from work to college returning at 11 pm.

Needless to say, I needed to find a way to organize everything I had to do – study for exams and my hours of sleep and leisure. But I failed miserably. In the same year, I had several health problems and several anxiety attacks. I still take an anti-anxiety pill every day.

From that point on I started to realize that it wasn't the volume of things I did or didn't do, but what I thought of them. I always thought I wasn't doing enough and that I wasn't getting where I wanted to go.

That's where that I realized that the problem was not me, but my lack of organization. And since then I have tried to evangelize personal organization to as many people as I can so that no one must go through the same problems that I went through.

Why Personal Organization Matters

Firstly, being organized matters because it helps to reduce (if not eliminate) your anxiety about seeing things get done - but we'll talk a little more about that in another section.

This is great for your health because it helps you avoid a lot of problems that anxiety can cause. You know that you can relax because things are planned and, if you follow your plan, everything will be ready when it should be.

Everything in life requires organization and planning, from the smallest things like your hamster's birthday to large and complex problems like distributed systems using Kubernetes with AKS.

You might be wondering - do you have to organize yourself to do everything in your life, is it an obligation? No, you can just go through the tasks one by one and do them in the order you want, storing everything in your mind. But eventually, it will end up weighing on you.

Last but not least, getting organized is a way of doing more things in less time. So it could be that those 5 things you were planning to do during the week could all be resolved in parallel in 2 days. Then you would have 3 days to do other things.

Also, getting organized includes not only having your work organized but also your personal life and your leisure time. Yes! Leisure is as important as any article or project you are going to do in your life. It needs to have time in your agenda at any cost. But if you do not plan for it, you'll always end up pushing it to the last priority and then your anxiety will come back again.

Advantages of Personal Organization

Let's summarize what we talked about in small topics. What are the advantages of personal organization?

• Reduces anxiety and stress caused by not having control of things

• Creates a growing organization mindset that allows you to extend your organization psychology to other areas and other people

• Increases your efficiency, enabling you to do more things in less time

• Frees up time to accomplish more things and, consequently, gives you more time for yourself

• Creates healthy organization and filing habits that allow you to search for and find things much faster

• Generates responsibility

• Induces self-control and discipline

Difficulties of Personal Organization

Getting organized is not a simple task and therefore takes a long time. Personal organization goes far beyond calendars and task lists – we have to create habits. And it has already been proven that a new habit takes at least 21 days to be formed.

We also need to create discipline, avoid procrastination, and do a lot of other things that involve not only a mental but also a physical change.

Many things can undermine our personal organization that we don't even notice, for example:

• Procrastination, the act of leaving something to be done later when there is no punishment for not performing a task

• Mental tiredness

• Physical tiredness

• Lack of prioritization

• Lack of definition in tasks

• Problems with self-discipline (after all, not all people can organize themselves to the point of creating discipline and taking people seriously)

And a lot of other stuff.

Let's make it scientific and see how our brain works.

The Psychology Behind Personal Organization

The brain is an impressively complex computer full of secrets that we have yet to discover. However, we have managed to create analogies very similar to computers.

Just like you often have a series of tasks running at the same time on your personal computer – mine, for example, now has a browser, the editor where I am writing this article, and some communication apps - everything seems to be running at the same time. But in fact, the processor is switching between tasks very quickly, that is, essentially it is running only one task at a time.

The same is true of our brain. Although it appears that we can perform several tasks at the same time, the brain can only perform two cognitively complex tasks simultaneously.

So many people think that the act of multitasking is beneficial and efficient when, in fact, it is more harmful than beneficial. A classic example is trying to talk on the phone while typing something different. Or writing an email while talking to someone about another subject. This is because the channels that process speech are the same and there is only one of them.

And that explains why we can tie a knot or play a song and sing at the same time: the voice and the motor channels that are responsible for the movement of the strings are different.

When we do this unconsciously, we call it task switching, otherwise, we call it cognitive shifting.

Besides, there is this concept called your attention span which is the measure of time that a human being remains focused on a particular task. Microsoft Canada published a study in 2015 which says that the average time that a human being remains attentive to a task is about 8 seconds. And this is super important for what we are going to talk about next.

Of course, this can change according to the type of task we are doing. Apparently, when a task is motivating or pleasant, we can have up to 20 minutes of attention.

And why is this important? Simply because we now have a time limit in which we must accomplish our tasks to stay efficient and organized. That is, we cannot create tasks that exceed 20 minutes.

This forces us to break larger tasks into smaller tasks. And that by itself forces us to detail everything we do, creating a better description of what we need to do. It also makes us eliminate useless tasks or ridiculous items that may seem important at first glance.

And that is the first step towards personal organization: Know exactly what you need to do.

When you have a cloudy task or one that does not seem very explicit, you simply cannot develop that task on time. So you need to create another task just to be able to think better about this first one. This means you have a task for the planning of the next task, which was exactly what I did when writing this article.

I wanted to write content about personal organization, but I didn't know where to start. So for two weeks, I leaned over it and researched possible topics I could talk about and write about, always taking notes.

Since I'm Brazilian, my organization notes are in Portuguese, but you get the point...

Initial Tips

For this part of the article, I will focus more on the discipline you should develop throughout this process. We'll work on organizing ourselves as people, so I'll leave the discussion of specific tools and methodologies to the next part.

Everything I will talk about here is based on what I have experienced throughout the years.

Avoid half words and open contexts. Always know exactly what needs to be done

Make sure your tasks are very well defined to the smallest detail. "Talk to John" is not a well-defined task – you need to make extremely clear everything you need to do, with as much detail as possible.

For example, "Talk to John about the insurance policy and ask for the payment to be sent on the 23rd" is much more specific and clear.

Your brain is not a hard drive, it is not reliable

Do you remember what you were doing at this very moment 3 years ago? No? Of course you don't. Our memory is unreliable, so always note down everything AT THE MOMENT YOU THINK OF IT. Do not wait until later, and never say the phrase "Later I'll write this down".

Always write everything down in as much detail as possible somewhere to get it out of your brain.

One day I talked to a friend, William "PotHix" Molinari - who is also a developer on one of the organization tools I like most. He gave me one of the coolest tips:

"Your brain is made to process, not to memorize, so take everything you need to remember it and put it in another more reliable channel, like paper".

Be Disciplined

Personal organization is highly guided by self-discipline and responsibility, so you need to take it as part of your job.

Some people have a hard time turning something personal into a responsibility. Because, after all, nobody is going to fight with you or pull your hair out because you missed or delayed a personal task. You are your own manager.

But this is both good and bad, mainly because you need to be a little hard on yourself to be productive and efficient. Remember, the only person to blame for your failures is you and no one else.

Therefore, the responsibility of building up discipline – for both large and small tasks – is yours and only yours. So create consequences for yourself if you fail to meet your expectations: "I will not watch my series today because I have not completed my tasks", or "I will turn off the Internet because I delayed this task ".

EVERYTHING is a task

We'll talk about this later, but everything can be considered a task, from cleaning up the leaves in the garden to working towards world peace. So write down everything you need to do and make extreme use of to do lists.

Don't be ashamed to ask friends to send invites for that Sunday barbecue, and live by the principle: "If it's not on my calendar or in my to-do list, it doesn't exist."

Keep it Simple

We just talked about writing it all down. But there's no use in just putting down a task with the title "Achieve world peace". That's too big and vague. We will talk more about this below, but always try to break big tasks into small tasks – remember, 20 minutes or less. This way you'll always know what to do.

Everything has a deadline

I'm a programmer, and I hate working with deadlines because I want my system even more robust and more perfect. But unfortunately, in our lives, everything needs an end date.

All tasks you create need to have a date and/or time to finish. If you don't finish by then, you have failed your plan and need to rethink how you are organizing yourself.

It takes a while to understand your rhythm. For example, I am a human amoeba before 9 am, so I know I will not be able to complete anything very complex before this time. So I plan the most complicated and demanding tasks with greater cognitive load for after midday.

Before that I perform minor tasks such as: replying to emails, reading some articles I have on my read list, watching some YouTube lesson, organizing folders and files, and so on.

Grow beyond your fear of the future

This goes beyond the personal organization of tasks. But the big problem is that we think we will use something in the future and we end up keeping it – for example, I have a folder full of floppy disks here, which I keep only because of sheer nostalgia.

But professional organizer Mia Lotringer showed in this excellent article a very interesting way to organize yourself physically and virtually with your files:

1. Overcome your fear of throwing things away or deleting files.

2. Put everything you think you will need in the future in a box with a destruction date, usually 6 months from the current date.

3. If you need to take something out of there and use it before this final period, take that thing out of the box and put it in another box with a longer destruction period, 1 year for example.

4. If you need to take this item out of the 1-year-box again, then keep it, because you are using it for real.

5. If not, when the date arrives, throw everything in the boxes away.

Do have a place to organize your tasks

We will talk about tools and software in a bit, but for now, always have a place to write down and get your tasks ready, with dates and descriptions. It can be a notebook, a calendar, a planner (which I never understood how to use), whatever. The most important thing is not the medium, but the habit.

You can write everything down on scratch paper, as long as you look at it daily. That is, as long as you create the habit of looking at and completing your tasks every day, no matter where you leave them, that's fine. But remember that we take at least 21 days to create habits.

Organize Physically

Everything I'm talking about here seems to be linked to tasks and things to do, but your workplace and your physical space must be organized. Nobody can do anything in a very cluttered environment because it creates a lot of visual pollution that ends up distracting your mind.

Focus, strength, and faith. But mainly focus

Have focus on the things you are doing. For focus, I say: Do only one thing at a time. Don't try to embrace the world and do five things at the same time, choose one task, do it to the end, then go on to another.

Small tasks right away!

If you have a task that takes 2 minutes or less – like sending an email, answering a person, asking for information, changing something – do it instantly. These tasks don't even have to be on your to-do list, just do them as soon as you think about them.

This is an exception to the previous note where I put that everything should be on the list. Because the time it'd take for you to write a small task on the list is the same amount of time you would spend finishing said task.

Tools of The Trade

Since we've now covered a bit about what personal organization is, now we're going to talk about how to get organized – in detail! It's all about the tools you choose to make your life easier, and about your own self-discipline.

What Should I Organize?

We are always saying "Ah, we need to organize" but what needs to be organized? Your life. Okay... But what makes up your life?

This will vary from person to person, but try to do an interesting reflection exercise: Sit (or stand) and list all the things you usually do for a whole day. After that, try to list with what you interact to accomplish such a task, for example:

• Answer emails (the interaction here would be with email)

• Fix the calendar (The interaction here would be with the agenda)

• Pay bills (The bills would be the interaction)

And so on...

You will find that, in general, a person does not need to organize more than three things: e-mails, Calendar and Tasks.

However, it is important to say that within these items we can have a series of different categories where we can create other items that should be treated differently.

For example, I am constantly involved with events, articles, publications and code, so the tools that I use the most are the calendar, e-mails and text editors. But I can't just categorize everything as an event on the agenda – I have several categories that need to be treated differently.

In this way I prefer to say that the items that need to be organized are:

Tasks

• E-mails

• Notes and documents

Schedule

• In-person events

• Online events

• External work (freelance)

• Daily tasks (personal or work-related)

• Bills

• Personal commitments

• Rest times (leisure, hobbies)

• Neutral time (free time)

So, we've arrived at the biggest controversy on the agenda: Should we organize and plan for our leisure time? Yes! It is free time like any other, and we will talk more about it in the following paragraphs. But the idea is that your agenda should not have "empty" slots. Everything should be occupied with something you would like to do.

And then we have another super valid question: But if I plan my leisure time will it stop being leisure time?

Well, why would it? Just because you put your free time on the agenda to do what you want, does not mean that you are methodically transforming it into a formal work-time that must be followed to the letter.

You see, the idea of ​​personal organization is not only valid for work tasks – it is just the opposite. Personal organization means taking control of your time so that you know exactly how to make the best use of it. All your time must be contained in your personal organization methods.

You can only take control of your time if all of it is being planned, otherwise you will have planning gaps and this will impact your life.

We will now dissect these most important topics.

Schedule

The agenda is your best friend in personal organization. Remember organization's biggest motto:

If it is not on the agenda, it does not exist

You just can't forget to add something to the agenda, because otherwise you will have an increasing number of things that "don't exist" and you will often forget things.

This will make it feel like the methodology you are using is not working, but it's nothing like that. It's all about habits, which we'll talk about later.

Tools

The work you do is as good as the tools you have, so let's talk a little bit about the scheduling tools we have available to us:

• Google Calendar: This is my choice for the sake of convenience. Calendar is already integrated with Gmail email accounts (which I use as my primary account), so it’s extremely comfortable to use

• Outlook Calendar: The same thing as Google Calendar for Outlook users as your primary email account

• Apple Calendar: Again, the exact same thing for users of Apple accounts as main email accounts

For these tools, I really recommend that you stick to one of these three for a few reasons:

• All are linked to an email account, which makes management easier. Remember: always try to use the smallest possible number of tools.

• They are all synchronized in the cloud, so it is very difficult for you to lose any of your data. Also, it is much easier to migrate from one device to another.

• All of them have web clients.

And now we come to the most important point: All the calendars support the import of external calendars. This is important because, most of the time, you will have a personal agenda and a work schedule. I also recommend that you have an agenda for each type of task that you do.

This means it's important that you center all your schedules in one single place. This makes management easier as long as the schedules are synchronized. This means that if I change, for example, my work schedule from my personal schedule it propagates the change to the original schedule.

Sounds complicated? Let's look at an example:

Let's say I change an event on my work schedule from my personal schedule. For example, from my personal schedule I change my RSVP from "yes" to "no" for a work meeting. This change must be propagated to the work agenda where the event must say that I will no longer be present.

This is possible because most calendars use the CalDAV protocol, which is a standard communication protocol for remote calendars.

If you are not happy with the default views of your chosen calendar you can always download a client that you can modify. You can even include other options and features.

For example, if you do not like to access via the web, Outlook has an excellent PWA (see how to do it here). It is also possible, through Chrome's web apps, to turn any website into a desktop application.

Organizing the agenda

Organizing your agenda is very important, as it will be from there that you get all of your own personal organization. Therefore, the agenda is the main point of all our "theory" here.

Have a different schedule for each activity

When we create a calendar in any of the tools described above, we automatically get a calendar called "Calendar". However, this does not mean that we must stick to a single calendar on the same agenda, and we shouldn't.

It is good practice to create a new calendar – or a new agenda, depending on your platform – for each type of activity you participate in. See how I organize my agendas:

My agendas, they're in Portuguese because I'm Brazilian

Since the calendar is in Portuguese, I'll be putting the translated names in the list, and the original names in parentheses:

• Personal (Pessoal): This is the standard calendar that I renamed to be my personal calendar. In it I mark all my personal commitments and those that do not fit in any other agenda.

• Confirmed Events (Eventos confirmados): In this calendar I mark the events that I am sure I will participate in, such as meetups, lectures, conferences, webinars, podcasts...

• Unconfirmed events (Eventos não confirmados): Here are the "Save the date" for the events that I have submitted proposals for lectures or that I am on the verge of participating in, but are not yet fully confirmed.

• SP Events (Eventos SP): In this calendar I mark other events that I will participate but not as a speaker or staff, just as a listener. This is a shared agenda among several people who organize events in São Paulo, so it serves more as a guide for avoid scheduling events on the same days.

• Family (Família): This is an agenda that I share with my parents and other people in my family so that we can know the days that everyone is busy.

• Freelance (Freelas): Here is an agenda to schedule delivery dates for side projects and also important meetings with clients.

• Tasks (Tarefas): This is undoubtedly the most important agenda, as this is where I synchronize my tasks with my to-do list.

Add some color

It's much easier to identify and check what's going on when you add color to your calendars and tasks. This way it is possible to see much more clearly what is taking up more of your time.

It is possible to see through the colors of my calendars what belongs to which category:

Note that there are tasks to the left of other tasks – this is because they are items originally added to the calendar that have the color of this category. You can see that those items that have a gray border have been added to the "tasks" calendar. But I colored it myself with another color. I usually color each of these items by category, so I know right away what I will need to do on certain days.

In addition, coloring the items in your calendar helps you understand where you are spending the most time. For example, the light green items that are very present in the calendar are part of my agenda for work meetings (so you can see that my days are almost all permeated by meetings).

Outlook also allows you to add icons to your events to make them even easier to find.

Go beyond the task

Planning tasks on your calendar doesn't just include creating the item and putting it on your calendar. There are other factors that need to be considered:

• Travel time

• Unforeseen

• Ease of getting to the location

• Distance

All this needs to be considered so that your planning is efficient. H ere are some important topics on how to think beyond what you need to do:

• Measure travel time: Some calendars (such as Apple's iCalendar) have the ability to add a travel time, so the event is filled with a bit of extra time that makes up the travel time to the location. If you don't have that in your agenda, create another travel schedule or try to always take into account that all tasks that are outside your home require some time until you reach the place.

• Make use of the address: Whenever you can, include the address where the event will be taking place. This way most schedules can already let you know how long it takes to arrive at the place in advance.

• The 15-minute rule: Always mark items on your calendar as starting 15 or so minutes before the actual start time, so you will never be late for an appointment.

• Make use of notifications: Add notifications when the event is coming, and always more than one! This can be configured by schedule as a default and by event.

Unforeseen events happen

Always be ready to revisit your schedule to reorganize your tasks daily. Unforeseen events happen, plans change, so the agenda can never be written in stone. You need to have a certain flexibility in everything you can do.

It is not a lack of planning to change your agenda. On the contrary, the ability to adapt to what is happening shows a remarkably high level of personal organization.

Look down the road

Do not stick to scheduling only events that will happen in the next week. Plan and schedule ALL the events that will happen and that already have a date, including events that will happen the following year.

There is no bad schedule

There is no task that cannot be scheduled. Always put ALL of them on your agenda, from your least favorites to the biggest conferences. Remember: "If it's not on the agenda, it doesn't exist"

Schedule your free time

As we said before, it is super important to schedule the time you have for you. So enjoy and schedule free time so that you do not schedule other things over it.

Also, always schedule your lunch time in your personal and company calendar. That way other people (and even yourself) are unable to schedule things at these times.

Be sensible with schedules

That meeting never starts at 10 am sharp...how frustrating. It's always complicated to work with other people and schedules, so try your hardest to stick to the time you planned for things.

But always try to give yourself some time between your tasks so that you don't get overwhelmed.

Focus time

Every day, try to schedule some time just to focus. During this time, only dedicate yourself to what is scheduled. That is, don't respond to messages, don't answer emails (unless, of course, these are your focus tasks).

Outlook has an extension called Insights which, among other very cool things, allows you to schedule focus time weekly. In addition to it, there are other programs like RescueTime that allow you to analyze your daily productivity:

And this brings us to another important topic.

Look for tools that help you

The most important mantra I bring to life is that we must keep things simple. This means we should only use a small, but efficient, number of tools.

For several months I searched for and tested several tools, some of which did not give me much benefit. But I found others, such as Insights and RescueTime, that showed me super interesting things.

Understand your time

In addition to having insights, seeing the bigger picture is very important. Other tools like WakaTime allow you to have exact control over what you are doing and where you spend most of your time (and what you’re doing in the meantime).

Tools like this can help you get ideas on how to improve your personal organization on your own.

In the case of RescueTime, it has extensions for your computer, cell phone, and tablet that analyze the types of thing you do and classify them as productive time or not.

It's all configurable, and can show, for example, how many times have you taken your cell phone out to look at it during the day. It also helps you set goals that you can strive to follow during the week.

It is important to note that these tools work based on data, so you need to use them for a long time (at least two months) before deciding if they really work or not. So, give them time to adjust.

Emails

One of the great villains of personal organization? Emails. In the past 20 years, email has become one of the most popular forms of communication. However, they also fill not only your inbox but also your time. After all, they are many...

Time and necessity has led us to develop a methodology for dealing with e-mails called inbox zero in addition to [other important techniques](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/growth-center/resources/7-email-management-tips-to-achieve-inbox-zero?WT.mc_id=blog-fcc- ludossan).

Inbox Zero

All emails are tasks that require action. Writer and podcaster Merlin Mann created the inbox zero model a long time ago and, to this day, it is one of the most efficient ways to deal with e-mails.

The goal of this methodology is simple: to zero out your inbox every day so that you don't have any pending issues.

For this, all e-mail can have four actions that can be taken:

• Exclude: Is there nothing you can do? Doesn't it concern you? Will you never need to return to this email again? Delete or archive it – always remember to never leave an email read in your inbox.

• Delegate: If the email came to you, but you are not the best person to resolve the demand, then forward this email to someone else who can resolve it. This does not mean that you automatically become the manager. In this 2016 article personal organizer Mia Lotringer says it is especially important to pass the ball over to the neighbor as you're able, avoid having pending issues.

• Send/Plan: The postponement - or, as I like to call, planning - of email is one of the coolest features that existed in the old (but gold) Google Inbox, which applied the inbox zero technique perfectly! If the email takes more than two minutes to respond, then it is best that you postpone it to a specific date where you can respond calmly and pick up all the items needed for a decent response. Today, both Gmail and new Outlook have e-mail postponement functionality. I like to go deeper than that, though – in addition to postponing the email, I also add a task for it in my favorite task system (both [Gmail](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/ 106237?Co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en) and Outlook Web).

• Do: Otherwise, if the email takes less than two minutes to answer or it can be answered right away, don't waste time moving it, just reply and file.

Schedule your inbox zero

Like any task, inbox zero is a daily action that needs to be performed. But most people have a habit of checking e-mails several times during the day. It's been [proven](https://www.nytimes.com /2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/stop-checking-email-so-often.html) by researchers at Columbia University, that checking e-mail just three times a day can greatly decrease your stress level.

In my case, I usually check e-mail once at nine in the morning, when I start to work. The whole process takes no more than 30 minutes, so at 9:30 am I'm already free. After that I check again after lunch, around 1 pm and, finally, in the late afternoon at 5:30 pm before marking the day as finished.

Emails are tasks

Do not forget that every email asks for an action. This action can be quick or time consuming. If the action takes time it becomes a task that must be scheduled in your task system and placed on your agenda.

Tasks

We've now arrived where everyone thinks the problem lies: the task list! There are several very well-tested methodologies that'll help you make your personal organization work.

Initially we can say that task lists are very necessary, because humans adapt better when we have a list of objective and concrete things that we need to do. This way we don't always need to be thinking.

Your tasks should be:

• Simple

• Concise

• Straightforward

Choosing your tool

Here are a series of tools that exist to organize tasks. As I said earlier, the secret to finding efficiency is to use as few tools as possible that you use well. And this efficiency comes from integrating your tools so that they all work as one.

Let's start with the native tools of the calendar systems we mentioned before.

• The first is Microsoft To Do which is already integrated with Outlook and, consequently, to the calendar. It also has mobile applications, in addition to integrating very well with Insights.

• Then we have Google Tasks, which is also integrated with both Gmail and Google Calendar and has mobile apps.

• Finally, we have Apple's Reminders, which perform the same functions. While it is not directly integrated with calendar, it is synchronized and native to all Apple devices.

These three tools make up the simplest integrations that can be done, as they are native to the platforms themselves. If you are a beginner (or even have been organizing for a while), I recommend starting here.

There are other options for those who want to follow a more Kanban-like model, such as Trello. Check it out.

However, when I first started working on personal organization these apps did not exist yet. So I ended up going to another tool, which is still one of the tools I like the most: Todoist.

For me, Todoist was the right choice because it is quite simple. It's just a task list that allows you to include some type of tags and create several categories, which are called projects:

I was looking for a system where I could write down all my tasks, as well as set deadlines and be reminded of them. Todoist gave me much more than I needed.

In addition to having excellent applications for web, desktop and mobile, it also has integrations with Google Calendar. This means that all events I create on a private calendar become tasks in Todoist and all tasks in Todoist become items in my calendar.

In addition, it allows you to tag your tasks to find them more easily later on. Also, if you are on a project with multiple people, it is possible to share one or more projects with other users for everyone to use.

Small tips about tools

Here are some small tips I picked up while using various task management apps.

You have a limit

We all have a limit on the number of tasks we can do each day, be it a time limit or a cognitive one. We cannot force ourselves to do too many complex tasks at once in a single day.

And this limit is defined by each one of us, there is no magic number. Do not try to include twenty-five tasks in one day, as you won't end up completing all of them. This will give the you the false impression that you have not organized yourself properly.

To try to find out what your daily limit is, try applying the Scrum point technique of applying tags to each task according to their difficulty. At the end of the week count the points for the full tasks and write them down. At the end of the month make an average of the number of points you tallied and you will have your estimated number.

Measure time

One of the most helpful things we can do for our own personal organization is measure the amount of time we spend on each task. We can do this with tools like Toggl - which, by the way, has a blog full of amazing comics - and measure exactly how much time we spend on each of the tasks we perform. You can also integrate the tool with Todoist or others.

However, from my point of view, time measurement is a bit too extreme when we are doing personal organization. This is because, at least for me, it didn't give me any interesting insights, and I often forgot to start the timer.

The more detailed the better

As we said earlier, your tasks should be simple, but at the same time concise. So try to make your to-do titles very descriptive without writing too much. Then you can comment on the tasks and attach everything you need to carry them out.

Describe your tasks in a way you can understand them later

I can't say much about the other task management tools, as I've never used them much, but Todoist allows us to add comments and attach files to our tasks.

So, when creating a task, describe it with a quick and concise title, but leave a comment with as much detail as possible. Also attach any files that are needed, even if these files are already elsewhere.

Let's jump to one example: I received an email about a document that I needed to review and return to the sender. But I needed to ask someone else to also review the document after my review. So what would my task flow be?

1. Create a task "Analyze documents from email X" with a scheduled date and time

2. I would add the task in a project in Todoist

3. I would comment out the context for the task – that way I can return to it at any time and I'd know what was happening and what the context was that I have to follow

4. Attach the document and email to the task

5. Create another task "Send the document to Y" and comment on the context of that task by writing down the email and the person I must send the answer to in this same comment

Divide and conquer

As we saw in the beginning, the human attention span is approximately 20 minutes, so we can't create tasks that are too long. To help with this, most tools offer us a sub task system, where we can include a larger task and several small tasks.

Let's take the previous example and do it in a more organized way:

1. Create a task "Analyze documents from the email X" with a scheduled date and time

2. I would add the task in a Todoist project

3. I would comment on a context for the task, that way I can return to it at any time that I will know what was happening and what is the context that I have to follow

4. Attachment the email in the task

5. I create a sub-task "Analyze document Z"

6. Attach the document to the task

7. I create another sub task "Send the document to Y" and comment on the context of that task by writing the email and the person I have to send the answer to in this same comment

We could create another sub task to follow-up with the person after a certain time or even another one to re-analyze and respond. All with scheduled date-time and included in the same project.

Notes and anything else

In addition to what we must do, it is important to know what we are currently doing and take notes. And, even more important than taking notes, we should keep these notes simply and efficiently so we can return to them later.

In this section I will just leave a list of tools that I have used, but you'll have to choose what works best for you.

Github

If you have study notes or anything that is public, or even private, you can keep them in a GitHub repository - like I do - and they will be secure and versioned.

Google Keep

Keep is an excellent tool for organizing your notes on the post-its model – and it even supports to-dos! I personally used it for a long time before migrating to another tool that suited me better.

From my point of view, Keep is the balance between functionality and simplicity. The problem is that it is a bit heavy and does not have that many features.

Notion

I used Google Keep for many years until I discovered Notion. This is essentially a tool that includes everything. You can make tables, calendars, plan projects and everything. It is really an excellent tool and today it is my tool of choice for anything I need to keep. And it has apps for any platform.

I use this app today to organize my list of content that I am writing (including this article) and also that I will write in the future. I keep lists of talks and ideas for talks I have, streams, songs I want to practice, other important notes, and so on.

No, this article is unfortunately not sponsored by Notion ?

Another nice thing about Notion is that you can import content from other tools natively, and you can also count on a series of templates to create what you want without having to think too much:

It also has many forms of customization, including dynamic organization filters:

Yes, I delayed the publication of this article... But unforeseen events happen, and you need to be prepared for them.

Native Notes

You can also use the native notes application on your computer/cell phone. In the case of Apple we are talking about Notes, but all cellphones have a native notes application.

Methodologies

Now that we've talked about tooling, best practices, tips and tricks, let's jump into the methods of organizing yourself.

Methodology is the study of a method, or a study of ways to reach a final goal. Methodologies help us follow a path in a more organized and concrete way instead of trial and error. After all, they are precisely the study of these attempts.

It is important to say that if a methodology fits perfectly with what you are doing, then you are probably doing it wrong. This is because the methodologies were created to give us a guide on how to behave, but not to dictate how we should carry out our tasks. In most cases a methodology will need to be adapted or even modified according to your needs.

Why to use a methodology?

Over all the years I tried to organize myself, I tried to create methods and activities that would make me more efficient in personal organization. But this is not always the best way to go about it – we often discover very efficient methods, but impractical, and vice versa.

After a while, I found out that other people had the same problems as I did, and had different ideas on how to treat them. So I started to learn a little more about methodologies.

Methods of organization

In general, anyone working with software development is quite used to the agile development method, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and other famous methodologies. And these Agile methods can also make your life very, well... agile.

That is why, many times, personal organization "borrows" productivity techniques from these methods that were created to help people accomplish a lot in a brief time. The most successful methods, I think, are:

• Scrum

• Kanban

However, over time, people began to take Agile methods, which were originally created for complete teams, and turn them into individual methodologies for managing and fulfilling tasks. Hence other methodologies emerged, the best known being GTD (Get Things Done).

In addition, several techniques such as using a Pomodoro clock have been developed and can be combined with methodologies to obtain an even more effective result.

Let's talk a little about each one and how they can be applied.

Scrum in personal organization

Scrum is an agile continuous feedback methodology. In it, a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and a development team perform evolutionary iterations about a product so that it is developed together with the client's participation in each process. This is unlike the older waterfall model that was based on a step to step process.

The team is organized into sprints, which can last 7, 14 or more days. In these sprints all tasks to be performed within that timeframe are already described and nothing else can be changed until the next sprint.

Every day the team holds a 15-minute daily standup and at the end of the sprint the team performs a review and a retrospective.

Of course we have no way to incorporate team meetings into our personal organization methodology unless you have a talent for discussing things with yourself. But the sprint model is widely used (with some facilitations) to help us further improve the way we can organize our time.

Below are some points that we can think about when developing our methodology:

• Use 7-day sprints. Meaning, plan your entire week on Sunday

• Use sprint points (which we talked about in the previous paragraphs) to measure the number of tasks you do per sprint. This way you will know when you exceed your limit.

• Remember: Unforeseen events happen, so relax the rule of not changing anything in the sprint so that it allows additions and removals during the week.

• Optionally at the end of the sprint do a retrospective checking what you did well or not that week so that you don't repeat the mistake the following week.

Kanban in personal organization

Kanban is another interesting model that is often mixed with Scrum. In this model, visualization is the key, so we have the so-called Kanban Boards, as follows:

The entire Kanban methodology is based on flow control. So instead of having someone telling you what to do, people put their needs in a backlog and the team will take and perform the tasks as there are slots available.

This is because, in Kanban, we have a limit of work that can be done at a time, and usually one person cannot do more than two tasks at the same time.

That is why the board is necessary. Having a view of what is blocked, what is being done, and what needs to be done gives interesting insights for those who are managing the project.

Again, if it's just you, you're not working on a team, so some parts of the methodology, like having someone producing and asking for tasks that are added to the backlog, must be done manually. So here are some other tips:

• Use a board to organize your tasks

• List everything that needs to be done and add the tasks as they arrive

• Reprioritize the backlog whenever a new task is added to it

• Use work limitation to focus

GTD

The GTD (Get Things Done) was created by David Allen, an American who dedicated his work to discovering how to be more productive. In my opinion, GTD combined with other methods can be an extremely effective way of making things, in fact, happen.

The GTD is divided into a few steps:

1. Capture: Get the task or action that needs to be done and write it down in a more reliable way, as we talked about in the previous paragraphs.

2. Clarify: The time you take to define and describe all tasks.

3. Organize: Keep the list always organized and easily accessible

4. Reflect: Review of tasks and setting priorities

5. Engage: Get to work

You don't have to follow all the steps to the letter. I, for example, do not have a moment in my day when I clarify all tasks, because I will never remember everything. So, I capture and clarify at the same time. Organization and reflection are also done the moment I add a task to the list (something I borrowed from Kanban).

The entire methodology is well explained with the following diagram:

GTD in one diagram

We are constantly receiving input from the environment, both new tasks and everyday items. As soon as we receive one of these inputs we have to think: "Is there anything I can do with this?", If the answer is "no", then you have three options:

• Throw Away: You will never use this (a spam email or something like that)

• Reminder: You will probably use this at some point and already know the date. So, you can defer this task to when you believe you will be using it

• Reference: If you believe that this item will be reference material (a document, certificate), store it in a very well-organized place so that you can find it super-fast.

If you have an action that can be performed on the task, let's go back to the previous article, where we can perform three types of actions on that task:

• If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it!

• Delegate: And, as soon as you delegate, create another follow-up task for a future date

• Postpone: When we don't need to take immediate action, but we know that we will need it in the future

See that we are applying the inbox zero techniques that we saw in the beginning with the techniques of this methodology. That is, we are adapting the techniques of each one so that they work better as a whole.

Another interesting concept of GTD is that of "projects". Any task that requires more than one step to complete is called a project. These projects are groups of tasks that need to have all the necessary information at hand.

Pomodoro

Finally, we are not going to talk about a methodology, but a technique. Pomodoro was created by Francesco Cirilo in the 80s.

This is a somewhat radical technique: it requires that you will have to do your tasks in timeframes of 25 minutes each. That is, for each task you need to be completely free of distractions for 25 minutes, at least. This timeframe is called a pomodoro.

After a pomodoro, you take a five minute break. And after four pomodoros, a 30-minute break. This technique can be combined with any of the previous methodologies to complete your productivity, since it avoids procrastination.

Whenever you finish a task, write down how many pomodoros you took and cross it off the list. This, over time, helps to understand how long it takes you to complete your tasks.

However, like any methodology, it has pros and cons. One of the biggest cons is that if you are in a "flow" state, where everything is flowing and you are producing continuously, the timer can end right in the middle of your productivity. Then it can take you longer to get back to where you were or even completely lose the idea.

In these cases, the ideal is to adjust the time of a pomodoro to a longer span, so that you can concentrate without any interruption.

Habits

As has been made clear since the beginning of this article, habits are very important. There is no point in having the best organizational methodology but not having the habit of looking at lists.

A habit takes about 21 days to create, and cannot be removed, just replaced by another habit. So, to create habits we can use our own willpower and force ourselves to do the same things that we want to keep, for 21 days in a row, without interruptions. But this is very difficult for everyone, so we can all use a little help.

There are several tools that can help us with creating habits, one of which is Habitica, which turns your life into an RPG adventure.

It also has a board that allows you to define your habits, your tasks, and also what you want to do daily:

Create your own methodology

In the end, it will all come down to creating your own way of working. Do not worry about strictly following the ideas of all methodologies because that will not work. The ideal is that you adapt each one of them and look for parts that make you organize better and feel good as you apply your own methodology.

In my case, I try to follow the GTD methodology. So whenever I'm working on something very important, I turn off all electronic devices and focus until I finish the task. It's more or less like the pomodoro, but without the timer – because I've used that technique and I didn't adapt very well to the breaks.

Whenever I have a new task or a new email, I go through the process described by the infographic, but I don't have an "incubator" for tasks. I can simply do it or not do it, and tasks that are not done end up going in the waste bin.

In addition, all my tasks have a time and date set – I never put a task in "as soon as possible". If the task is urgent, it must be done right after this task or right now.

To organize myself, I usually make constant revisions to my calendar to adjust to any changes and I am always working to improve it. This hasn't been very productive lately, so I'm going to make a change so that I can apply a quantitative assessment (like sprint points) weekly and review it every Sunday, which is when I plan the next sprint.

I don't like the "projects" in the GTD because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So, in Todoist, I end up using projects as categories to define what kind of work I'm dedicated to, such as: Studies, Personal, Articles, and so on.

Finally, I like to keep the idea of ​​Kanban, so I organize all the tasks in a single "inbox" that would be my backlog. After that, I search and take the tasks one by one and organize them all into categories until there is no new task in the box.

Besides, I don't plan a single week at a time. I try to organize the tasks so that they fill up at least two to three weeks. I always fill in a concise description and an expressive title that help me to remember what I need to do every moment.

Conclusion

There is no best methodology, because the best one is the one that suits you. Try to mix a little of each one to create what works best, and don't be afraid to test and make mistakes. After all, you are in control.

Once you have reached your ideal level of personal organization, you will know that your whole life is organized. And, no matter what, as long as you get on with your tasks, you will know that everything will work out, because you planned it! This is the ultimate goal.

I hope my story and tips have helped some of you get organized. If you have other tips, let me know. Let's create a better methodology together! : D

I also have a personal Blog where I post a lot of content about development and my own thoughts. If you feel like talking to me, you can visit there or my website which has the links of all my social networks. Feel free to follow and reach out.

See ya!

A recent podcast episode reminded me that it's a good idea to examine things from different perspectives. Doing so can expose behaviors that appear purposeful as consequences of environmental factors. You won't succeed at fixing those behaviors unless you do something about the environment that encourages them.

Today the discussion is about Test engineering and organizational practices that tend to lower the quality of your deliverables.

When reading through, please keep in mind that we're emphasizing goals that are contrary to what you expect - lower quality and customer satisfaction. The suggestions may seem cynical and counter-intuitive, but that's the point of the exercise. So let's get started.

1. Make the Test teams solely responsible for quality

One of the best ways to lower quality is by shifting focus away from the product and towards internal politics.

You want to capitalize on default human behavioral responses that minimize reasoning and maximize conflict — what better way of doing so than encouraging tribalism.

Holding only one organization responsible for a goal (no matter what it is) will guarantee the divisive behavior you're trying to obtain.

That group will spend most of its time and resources proving their responsibilities were met, instead of facilitating product goals.

To maximize the impact of this principle, make sure that Test teams only own the quality objective. They should not be responsible for determining release content, that's the Marketing team. Nor should they be involved in setting release dates, that's a Sales function. They also don't determine which problems to fix, that's up to the Product team.

You want the Development team focused on delivering features by the time the Marketing and Sales orgs promised them. So avoid imposing any code commit or merge rules requested by Test, like requiring code reviews, passing linters, passing unit tests, and others. After all, quality is Test's responsibility, not Development's.

Breaking up objectives in this way, turns meeting agendas away from customer experience and towards the blame game. You know you're on the right track when you hear statements like:

• "Why didn't you find this bug sooner!"
• "The current tests failed, but we really need to merge this new feature so you can start testing it."
• "Why didn't Test find this customer issue?"
• "We promised the customer a release by this date, so let's defer all Test findings and give them a build today."
• "We found the issue that the customer reported, but you deferred it last month!"
• "I can't run tests because you gave me a broken build."

Spending time arguing about whose job it is to do the work is an excellent mechanism to reduce satisfaction with your product or service.

2. Require all tests to be automated before releasing

Another device for distracting from quality is requiring test automation for every feature. It guarantees that your Test organization spends most of its time doing software development instead of test engineering.

The goal should change from validating a product attribute, to counting how many automated tests ran to verify it.

Rather than thinking through the test breakdown that validates various code paths or fundamentals of a function, engineers will spend time and resources executing multiple iterations of the same test. It leads to higher counts.

It also promotes a fragile test infrastructure and increases maintenance costs.

Since there's no time to consider test strategy and abstractions, they're forced to write very specific - yet brittle - workflows. Whenever Development makes slight changes to the feature, the tests break.

The Test organization must focus on producing a large number of tests as fast as possible. Otherwise, they'll have time to push more value into the product with more meaningful tests.

Make sure to reward this behavior by promoting engineers that produce the highest number of automated tests that run frequently. But don't forget about those that save time by writing scripts that execute other scripts while hard-coding all the arguments so the user won't have to type them.

3. Require 100% code coverage

Since product quality and customer experience are only correlated to code coverage, forcing your Test and Dev teams to chase 100% coverage is another tactic.

Make sure you direct all execution conversations towards the coverage measurement and hold teams accountable for it. People will focus on building tests that call all code functions, regardless of their output.

A nice bonus is that measuring coverage tends to affect timing or performance. It makes it hard for anyone to understand the actual customer experience, thereby adding to your goal of decreased satisfaction.

Make sure that tool implementations are automated, and that every report includes the coverage numbers, so it's easy to bring up in conversations.

Avoid focusing on code branching coverage. It's essential to prove that you tested every function, not every code path in the function. After all, there's no point in planning for customers to hit failure cases. They only happen a small percentage of the time.

Just like the previous section, don't forget to reward the team for being as close as possible to the 100% coverage number. It goes a long way in showing your engineers the behavior that matters.

4. Isolate the Test organization from Development

One of the worst things in software development is when the Dev team is so in-sync with Test that they finish each other's sentences. It's a red flag! It means that you're on a path for producing a quality product or service.

Reduce all chances for collaboration, including physical proximity.

Make sure to separate the teams, so it takes physical effort for a Test engineer to walk over to a Developer and ask questions. Human nature will take hold and solve the rest of the problem for you.

When both of these organizations actively collaborate, they tend to help each other considerably. You'll find the Developer gives the Tester a heads-up about new changes. Alternatively, the opposite could happen, where a Developer will know about a bug before it's reported. Not only does this break tribalism, but it sidetracks well-defined responsibilities.

Collaboration leads to less process:

• In some cases, issues are just fixed instead of reported.
• Internal documentation and knowledge transfers receive less time and attention.
• Test engineers become more knowledgeable about the product.
• Release schedules start to reflect reality during planning.

All of these lead to higher quality and better customer satisfaction! The direct opposite of your goals.

Enforcing more process is a great way of discouraging this behavior. It helps highlight the requirements that an engineer doesn't meet when directly engaging with other teams. It can come in the form of extra checkpoints and meetings, but preferably, more documentation.

Another excellent tool for increasing isolation is access controls. Make sure that Test does not have access to source code and that Dev cannot see the procedures of a test case.

I find that separating tests from code is a must! If you have both in the same repository, then Developers will know ahead of time when they break a test. A process shortcut that leads to the very efficiencies we don't want.

5. Measure the success of the process, not the product

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with coworkers that keep asking impertinent questions about customer adoption.

Things like: How many customers are using that feature? What's the potential impact to our install base? How many steps must the user go through to use this feature? What's the attach rate? How big is our potential customer pool for that requirement? How many users asked for this function?

These folks don't get it. It's imperative to discourage this behavior as it happens. It tends to spread to other team members, and pretty soon, you'll have an organization that only cares about quality.

The best thing to do is redirect that energy by asking questions about the process instead. The items below are some stats that help accomplish this.

Number of open issues and who opened them

It helps prove how well the Test team is doing and how much work they're putting in.

Don't forget to encourage the employees that opened the highest number of issues. Bring it up in meetings often, so the rest of the folks are not surprised during performance reviews.

Some will try to argue that too many open issues lead to significant overhead in managing them. Again, that's the whole point.

Refocus team effort away from quality and towards process. Plus, if there are too few issues, then the Test org looks like their not working.

Amount of time an issue spent waiting for Test response

It's trickier to measure, but when you can pull it off, it's a great way to show how well the Test org is doing when compared to Development. It encourages behaviors that help maximize the active issue count.

To help the situation, try to tie issue status changes to process requirements that enforce particular field values for specific situations.

It reduces the time an issue spends on the Test side whenever parameters don't match because the engineer will have to ask for the correction.

Development is usually too busy to care about this stuff. So it also leads to lots of political discussions in project management meetings and encourages more tribalism.

Percentage of issues in a closed state

Before a release, you want to encourage the team to close all issues. It's best to base the performance review of Development engineers on how many issues were open against their code at release time.

It guarantees fewer defects opened by the Development team - further boosting your Test performance. It also discourages communication with the Test organization and increases friction.

Percentage of tests executed compared to an execution plan

Don't forget to make an execution curve telling the team how to spend their time throughout the test cycle. Be careful not to base it on history, or you may find that the org meets the numbers and improves quality.

Check the graph in every status meeting and ask for progress regardless of the state of the product. It forces the inclusion of tests meant to always complete just to pad the numbers and meet expectations.

Discourage anyone that beats projections. Doing so makes it look like the Test org has free time.

Measure the pass rate

You'll want to track the percent of test execution that's passing vs. failing for all the tests put together.

Make sure you explain to the team the required pass rate to reach a release stage. It reminds them to design suites with enough tests that always pass so that you can meet process requirements.

6. Require granular projections from engineers

Getting a schedule from Dev is hard. Many times they try to throw reality at the problem as if complexity mattered. The truth is you'll release by the date designated by the Sales organization regardless, but Dev never seems to understand that.

Whenever discussing code completion dates, make sure to ask for the day, not the week or the month when they'll complete. If you disagree with that date, bring it up in a public forum of all their peers so they can argue it.

Doing so accomplishes several essential points in lowering quality:

• Developers fight among themselves, reducing communication.
• They stop thinking they have a say in how to spend their days or do their jobs, which increases turnover.
• It makes it unlikely that they meet their deadlines, which lowers their performance review and also increases turnover.

Achieving high turnover is like the holy grail of lowering quality. It helps reduce the bottom line with fewer raises and promotions. It increases disinformation, emphasizing individualism. Finally, it removes any ownership that might build up in the team over time.

7. Reward quick patching instead of solving

Given enough time, engineers can solve almost every problem. But when you do the opposite, an interesting phenomenon occurs: instead of resolving the root issue, they fix the symptoms, sometimes ignoring the problem completely.

Here are some of the benefits you'll see when using this technique:

• Development gets praise for being quick.
• The base problem isn't solved, so there's a bunch of opportunities for writing future bugs, making the Test team and the process look better.
• The customer will keep running into the same issues, which translates to lower satisfaction.
• The patches for each symptom develop a spiderweb of dependencies, making future work harder and more brittle, which translates to lower quality.
• You'll gain issues for everyone you fix at a viral pace. The more problems to fix, the more process you need to track the ones left behind. Win-win!

Rewards are fundamental here as well. Make sure to incentivize this type of work with awards, and broadcast them to the team so everyone is aware of the behavior you want.

8. Plan for today instead of tomorrow

There's always someone trying to foresee what tomorrow brings. These days some engineers will do statistical analysis or machine learning. Formulating an algorithm that explains how well execution is going, which issues are important, how much time is actually needed, the number of resources required to test, etc.

Then there are the folks that have been around long enough and keep bringing up past mistakes or wasted efforts you should avoid.

Ignore that advice and always plan for the best case today. It doesn't matter if technical debt is high, if the 3rd party vendor has low quality, or if everyone planned a vacation on the same day during the next release.

Deal with problems when they occur, not before. Otherwise, efficiency will increase.

9. Conclusions

While there are many more points to cover, it seems our fictional Sales team decided to ship before completing the article!

On a more serious note, test engineering and product validation gets exponentially harder with complex systems and large organizations. It's important to incentivize the right type of behaviors in order to succeed. However, those aren't always obvious and in some cases, they're even counter-intuitive.

I do hope the article helped you observe the test world from a different perspective. One that provides some helpful insight. I find this practice of aiming for bad outcomes quite illuminating sometimes. At the very least, it's loads of fun to think through.

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