The blog's been taking a back seat the last couple of weeks. Presumably in a Smart car or a pickup truck or something where the back seat is notably absent. Various reasons that I won't bore you with here, because they're very mundane, but can be boiled down to negative things (fatigue and too much to brain over) and positive reactons (not beating myself up about not doing absolutely everything on my list if it helps with that).
Anyway, I like writing these notes, and am trying to make sure I keep doing it. But sensibly, y'know?
I like Mondays. I'm like the anti-Garfield, in this. I'm lucky enough to enjoy my work, and the start of a week represents a kind of reset point -- a reset of intentions, a fresh-ish start, even if the actual happenings and practices the week will bring might be anything but. It makes it more plausible, for instance, that I can hit the reset button on something like this blog, forgive myself lapses in habits, and crack on regardless.
I like the sprint structure of working for much the same reason -- more strongly, if anything. For the uninitiated, to explain briefly and simplistically: sprints are a system for organising workload, working time, and work assignments, devised for software development. An archetypal sprint would be a two-week period -- everyone involved has a calculable amount of working hours, and each task is estimated. Therefore, you can be assigned an amount of work which -- in theory at least -- matchs what's actually achievable for you. Obviously, there is slippage and drift, unexpected illness or overruns, but fundamentally, it gives you a) a view into your next two-weeks worth of work (with, ideally, no surprises that throw that off), b) an amount of work that should be proportional to your actual time, and c) a sense of priority and importance within that.
Sprints work really well for my brain. I like the short-term predictability, without having an excessively long path laid ahead of me such that it becomes predictable and boring. I can sit down and figure out how best so structure my time over the coming sprint to handle this specific workload. Which feels like a fun little puzzle, sometimes -- knowing which tasks will require what sort of working structure, what sort of headspace. Arranging them to try to manage energy over the course of a sprint (by e.g. trying to avoid stacking all the most intense writing days next to one another).
It also provide an ebb-and-flow cycle between sprints. No matter how well or sub-optimally a sprint is going (or feels like it's going), you know that, eventually, you're going to tie a bow on the whole thing and move on. It's like a mental clearing-out, for me, setting a thing aside and getting somewhat of a fresh start. It also lends itself well to iteration and reflection -- being able to look back on a discrete period of work (collectively as a team but also individually and from the point of view of craft) and use the rhythm of the cycle to operationalise the things you learn.
Related to this, one of my most successful habits is my weekly whiteboard. Each Sunday, I run through a checklist of things to review and prep for the week ahead, organise my brain and digital workspace, and writing it all up on a physical whiteboard. The physical thing is strictly duplicative, but it's a nice touchstone throughout the week, and a physical marker of things. Each Friday, as I'm wrapping up, I unwind all that, wipe down the board, and stow things away until it's time to start again. Reset buttons. Burning away the old.
New Year is an important time for me, for much the same reasons. Taking time to reflect on the year that's gone, and setting intentions and preparing, at leisure, for the year ahead, has an outsized impact on my brain. The ability to burn away the old and begin anew, but in continuity with what's gone before. Reset buttons.