Invisible work (Week 17)
After a couple weeks away, I spent last week slowly getting back into developing Job Garden. There’s nothing visible yet, but I’ve started building the tools for me to use to make the site easier to expand and easier to maintain.
Another kind of invisible work is thinking work. While I’m fussing and fiddling with the code, I’m also letting myself think where I want Job Garden to be in another three months. I don’t have a clear picture of that right now (I hit my previous milestone and fell off the end of my plan).
A third kind: fixing things is the worst kind of invisible work. Sometimes ‘fixing’ means tracking down bugs and spending time to make the code do what you thought it did to begin with. But when your conceptions or ambitions change and you need to rename things or reorient the code to match, that’s another kind of fixing. There’s been a lot of that.
I don’t like weeks when there’s no visible progress. So I need to remind myself that I spent the weeks before I went away very happily racing towards and reaching a particular milestone. And now it’s worth slowing down and taking a little time to build the foundations to let me chase just as effectively after the next milestone. It feels disheartening none-the-less.
If you’re also in this same boat, have a week-17-shaped comradely-fistbump.
After a couple weeks away, I spent last week slowly getting back into developing Job Garden. There’s nothing visible yet, but I’ve started building the tools for me to use to make the site easier to expand and easier to maintain.
Another kind of invisible work is thinking work. While I’m fussing and fiddling with the code, I’m also letting myself think where I want Job Garden to be in another three months. I don’t have a clear picture of that right now (I hit my previous milestone and fell off the end of my plan).
A third kind: fixing things is the worst kind of invisible work. Sometimes ‘fixing’ means tracking down bugs and spending time to make the code do what you thought it did to begin with. But when your conceptions or ambitions change and you need to rename things or reorient the code to match, that’s another kind of fixing. There’s been a lot of that.
I don’t like weeks when there’s no visible progress. So I need to remind myself that I spent the weeks before I went away very happily racing towards and reaching a particular milestone. And now it’s worth slowing down and taking a little time to build the foundations to let me chase just as effectively after the next milestone. It feels disheartening none-the-less.
If you’re also in this same boat, have a week-17-shaped comradely-fistbump.