Just a short musing post today since it’s been a bit of a hectic week.
Earlier today, I did something I had been putting off for a while, updating the dead simple homepage that acts as a roughly curated list of links to all the things I’ve written for this newsletter. The site is extremely simple, effectively a Jekyll site that is stored to GitHub and whenever I update the code, it triggers an automatic builder in GCP that’ll compile and host it. There’s an old post about that setup.
Updating the site mostly involves me just entering the post title and URL into a spreadsheet, then I mark a few cells for the rough classification. After that, the spreadsheet generates all the necessary markdown to paste into GitHub to update the site file. Once I commit the changes, the automatic build system triggers and within a minute or two, the site is updated. The most tedious part is seriously just copying the post names and links into the sheet.
Despite the relative ease of updating the site, a task that would take five minutes if I kept up with it every week or two, I had fallen behind. Today I had to update over thirty posts to catch up. At the current pace of roughly 6 posts a month, that’s five months of writing while also slacking on a five minute task! Even I was surprised at how many posts I had managed to stack up in my neglect. And I had deliberately gone out of my way to automate the posting process because I knew I would get lazy about doing it.
At the same time, this probably highlights a weird flaw in how I motivate myself. I’ve done a lot of long lonely projects over the years, like spending years translating games after work while peers and coworkers would be going out for drinks after work. The primary way I motivate myself was just to make myself sit down and finish one tiny sentence. There’s a hurdle of getting my butt into the chair to work, but it’s not insurmountable. Usually, if I get that far the original passion/interest that drove me to start the project to begin with will kick in and before I know it, three hours have flown by and I’m a hundred lines in. Same goes for writing these weekly newsletter posts.
But a task that takes less time that what’s necessary to overcome the friction to sit down at the computer? Total failure.
This pattern extends into my work life too. I’ll gladly take long, complex, sometimes slogging projects and see them through with little to not supervision, but will completely drop the ball updating the ticketing system used to track said project. I usually rely on other people to help remind me to update things as needed.
Having this level of self-awareness definitely helps at work. I can clearly tell managers whether their new policies will work well or not, and ask if they’re willing to accept a compromise. Most typically are more than happy to figure something out that meets both our goals.
But this gets me thinking about the many people out there who haven’t figured themselves out yet. I honestly don’t know how to help people figure out their most comfortable work style quickly. At best, all I’ve been able to do is suggest to the people that I mentor that they should try out a few example processes and see if they can comfortably sustain them. The only important thing is that I emphasize that there are usually alternative ways to get the job done and it’s okay to hate using ticketing systems or similar.
We talk a lot about data science pipelines and workflows, we even talk about how our teams engage with other functions. But all that cool and important work rests atop this really boring, mundane foundation of “how do we get our basic work tracked and done” that’s overlooked because it’s most definitely not a data science problem but a human worker problem.
While there’s plenty of “welcome to working as a data scientist” type posts out there, I don’t think I’ve seen anything resembling a “welcome to working as a tech office worker” type of thing. I wonder what would look like… and whether I should take a stab at it.
I suspect it’s going to be one hell of a snarky post when I’m done with it…