Deliberate impermanence
There’s something magical about post-its falling off walls.
I think about this as my team spends time pruning tickets, closing ones that seemed important at the time, but now aren’t worth doing. These are ideas that need to fall through the cracks, to slide down the wall behind the file cabinet, to let us focus on the few that matter.
Instead we’re spending time and decisionpower on eliminating old ideas. Me, I’d rather dump the lot of them and resurrect the crucial few.
Then consider the connections between tasks: Christian says that before we create this command form, we need the http endpoint story completed. I could set up a relationship between these tickets, we could make a whole diagram and tie our current priorities into a line. Yet, interdependencies change and shift. We switch priorities quickly as we learn about customers.
The tenacious task tracker is stronger that sticky notes. At best, it’s out of date. At worst, it leads to ossification, to attachment to old plans. If it’s too hard to change this tracking…
Wait. I think it’s more than this. “Easy to change” isn’t enough. “Trivial to change” isn’t enough. The post-its fall on the floor, we pick them up, we put them back, “Oh actually this belongs over here. This one doesn’t even matter anymore. Ah, that was done weeks ago.” The wall of stickies requires active maintenance even to stay the same. It naturally degrades. This leaves room for evolution. Every post-it on the floor is an opportunity for a new start.
So we don’t set up dependencies between tasks. We leave those in our heads, or individual notebooks. I put them on seamaps sometimes, which I use to summarize the daily standup; these only last a day.
Embrace degradation and dump those piles of precious, stale ideas. Be cautious about weaving tight plans and documenting them: persistence has a hidden price.
Free idea: chaos gnome for task trackers?
