| All "Remote Work" Posts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Information I | Information II |
| Gambling | Priorities | Anarchy and Order |
We always say we don’t have enough time. Then something like our corona crisis happens, and we have a lot of it in remote work time. I mean, without all that pesky meetings, and 16 coffee breaks a day, we have a lot of time. So what do we do with it?
We still need to work on the important stuff.
Some of us have it easy. We get a list of tasks to do and go do that. That is, we assume other people see the whole picture (our product owner, our team leader, or their manager) and they decide what’s best to work on first. Which works well enough in the beginning.
Then things start to be a bit blurry. As we disconnect from the team and remote work for a longer time, we start to build our own vision of what’s more important.
We start to go off track. We gamble, even if we don’t think that’s really gambling, we’re just making decisions. When we find out, it’s too late. We have wasted time working on something less important, or now need to catch up.
The consequences of these decision include conflicts in the team. I thought that you’ll be ok getting feature X by next week. But you’re ready for integration for the last 3 days, wondering how I don’t see what’s really important. It may be better that we’re kept apart.
And that’s in a tidy environment. If work is messy around the office in regular days, you can see how things just fall between the cracks with remote work.
So what can you do?
- Communicate more. Create more opportunities to discuss who’s working on what and who is expecting what when. (I’m pretty sure that’s real English)
- Continue doing daily meetups. They make more sense when people don’t see each other all the time.
- Visualize tasks, blockers and priorities. Use the tools you have or find better ones (Looking at you, Jira)
- Define a sprint goal (yeah, that thing from Scrum that Jira forgot). If someone’s wondering what should be done next, that’s the guiding light.
I can help you work on what’s really important. And that’s really important. Register for my First Aid Kit program.
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