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entries for 2002/7/21
go go go
Three emails left in the ACTION box, but my brain is fried. I'm going to see if I can stay up all day, and get back on a normal schedule.
Since I don't trust myself to do any real work, I'm going to do something silly instead...
(never mind... I fell asleep instead)guilt and ruthless automation
Playing catchup on email. I still think it's better to prevent email than to answer it, but I get this overwhelming guilt if I let support email sit too long. (Or anything, really, when people are depending on me... It's the main reason I hated working as a lone consultant, and loved working on an XP team.)
Since I do the Getting Things Done process, email that's easy to answer gets answered quickly. What piles up in my inbox is actual work that requries actual thinking. If I already have a script for an issue, I just run the script. But if it's not automated or only partially automated, I have to think about it, and that's why it's so much work to answer my email.
There's a story at the start of the Cashflow Quadrant that applies here. Two guys compete to bring water to the villiage. One hauls buckets back and forth. The other guy disappears for a year, then comes back with a pipeline. Answering email is like hauling the buckets. It just doesn't scale.
Automation is the key. How do you do it? I call it the CEO-matic process:
- do it manually, using ad hoc methods
- type up notes on how you did it
- if the situation comes up again, use the written description of the solution as a guide. Refine your notes.
- Repeat until your notes start looking like code.
- convert the notes (or parts of the notes) into a script
The advantage of this process is that you don't waste time coding something that happens once in a blue moon. You wind up automating the things you do the most.
There are still plenty of situations that I haven't written out, though. I suppose that's because they were less common. But the more customers I have, the more those situations crop up.
That never occurred to me before. Rare problems become more common as the business grows. So even if I completely automate the ten most common problems, and I never have to think about them again, the ten next most common problems will crop up more and more. Why? because the longer I stay in business, the more chances an event has to happen, and the more customers I get, the more directions it can come at me from.
There's a real benefit, then, to taking notes on everything, even
if it seems like a one-time-only deal. It probably will happen again. And someday, when the business grows large enough, it will probably happen every day.
And by the way, this isn't just because my business lives in a computer. When I was a consultant, I pushed hard for the exact same concept. Even if every project we did seemed different, some things stayed the same. Yet we started each project from scratch. I said we should have one main way way to build projects, and become really really good at it. Everyone agreed it was a good idea, but we never really agreed on a shared vision, and I don't think anything ever came of it. (Except, perhaps, that I took the philosophy with me to Zike and came up with the sixthday architecture...)