Little Things Mean Alot, Eventually

Being a science-oriented male, I have a perhaps under nuanced view of the world. At both work and home, I tend to prioritize my tasks, which is usually good.

But when there is not enough time to do everything, this method has a huge drawback: because there is always a high priority task to do, low priority tasks never get done. This causes problems both at work and home: eventually the owners and stakeholders of even low priority tasks tire of waiting for attention.

As is so often the case, I drew on Linux kernel development for inspiration in my life. [This is a huge exaggeration for comic effect. Really. I hope.]

In the early days, the Linux kernel's scheduling was relatively simple: the more important tasks, such as disk I/O, had high priority and relatively un-time-critical tasks such as servicing the keyboard had relatively low priority. This meant that early Linux systems were amazingly good at getting performance out of mediocre hardware BUT performance degradation was not graceful. In other words, when things went bad they went very bad very quickly.

I remember hammering on the keyboard in frustration, having provoked a database server into taking on more work than it could handle, my typing apparently having no effect, until the system decided to see what was happening in keyboard land, whereupon all of my frustrated input, all of it, was faithfully processed to amusingly ill effect. Well, amusing with the distance of 19 years. At the time, I was beside myself.

Soon thereafter, the raise-the-priority-with-age algorithms were fine-tuned, giving me a much better experience even when I do something really stupid. Or when other people do something stupid. When stupidity raises its ugly head.

Human beings seem to have an innate sense that age should raise the priority of a task. Intellectually, we all want to do the most important tasks (or easiest, or most praise-garnering tasks) but viscerally we also want the small things which have been bugging us forever to get done.

As IT people, we often forget that. I know that I am inclined to avoid what I consider "trivia" because I feel that I am so important that such things are a waste of my time. Alas, I cannot seem to get much buy-in to this view of the importance of my time, so I  had to institute "laundry day" in our consultancy: a day every couple of weeks dedicated to doing the laundry: fixing or adding all the small, silly, useless things that users value and that they will eventually rage about unless we get to them.

We see many IT organizations which do not make time for trivia, to very ill effect. We sympathize with IT folks who are not given this opportunity: if your boss does not let you do the laundry, it isn't your fault that you stink (figuratively speaking: the tendency of programmers toward low standards of hygene is another matter entirely).

Which reminds me: currently, I am WAY overdue to replace one of the outside lights, which lights are important to my wife but not to me. I will try to get to that today even if I feel that I have more important things to do. Sigh.