Asking What Would I Do Today?

As a new week started, I was thinking about things to do. I made a little list of changes I knew I would need to spend time on. There were quite a few, which made me think of individual choices I can make on "What would I do today?"

I've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about the fact that time is limited. There's so much to do, so much to learn and not choosing a focus means not making progress on any of them. Everyone has their individual choices of what and how they choose to do.

My Monday list included many choices of what I could do:

• Reflect what happened recently and learn from past
• Analyze the product, in particular business goals/progress and requirements against the product and ideas of where the product is evolving
• Prioritize the backlog with others
• Pairing on production code, or just reading it for ideas
• Working on Selenium tests, could add a few again
• Working on Unit tests, could do something there
• Exploring the application and the new features to find problems quickly
• Updating documentation
• Staying connected with my colleagues in office and outside
• Learning general applicable ideas about testing and software development
• Re-energizing by something

I could learn to be better at any of these tasks, improve my abilities. But I couldn't do all of it at once. 

This brought me back to thinking about short-term vs. long-term gains. Learning is like farming. You plant seeds and pay attention, and you  have lots to eat. On the other hand, we need to eat today and for that purpose hunting keeps us fed now. There's always a balance.

Balance of perspective (short vs. long term gain). Balance of types of tasks. And balance of where I am right now, and what I am able effectively do from that state of mind. 

I made my choices. And made sure my choices this week are different from my choices last week.