Idea Inventory
I see a lot of potential around me. I always want to take apart or tinker with some thing or process to improve it. All of these ideas create a growing inventory of things to do. All of that Getting Things Done (GTD) talk that I started to notice couple years ago, was an eye opener. Suddenly everybody had great ideas to help me organize and plan. Now in 2008, armed with A note pad, an Inbox with 0 items in it, and a Remember the Milk account, I am finally starting to get things done.
In the first few iterations of my GTD approach, I would just keep adding and adding things to my ToDo list. When something was added, I would give it a priority and never look back. Inevitably, I would just start ignoring things and move on to the one that I really needed to do when I would look at my task list. Turns out one important thing about getting things done, is coming to terms with the fact that an idea you had last week may not really make sense this week or a priority from last week may not be the same. Now I have modified my process of adding to my list to also include a quick audit of the items on the list. I always end up removing one or two things.
This lesson should not be lost on those of us that develop software when we are at work. There are a lot of ideas that you can come up with that can be added to the idea inventory for your project. What makes this harder is that you have other groups that are hired to add to your inventory as well. QA will keep your inventory full of bugs to fix, Designers will keep it full of crazy new patentable interfaces, and Product Management will keep coming up with more features that MUST be there. Every time something is added to the mix a full audit and re-prioritization needs to be done to keep the inventory manageable.
PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2006 by kogakure.