[amenod]

Just wanted to say - thank you for sharing this! This sounds like an incredible idea and I can't wait to try it out.

I already seem to work better when I write down whatever development tasks I have on paper, but it has never occured to me that management tasks could be handled in a similar fashion.

[stuntkite]

No problem! It was hard for me moving from dev to management. I think a key difference in the tasks is that the majority of management tasks are personal and cannot be collaborative or even public. They involve peoples feelings and behavior. Sharing them to scrum the problem would shame people for no reason and cause a mutiny. As a manager, my task is to catch chaos and distill it to comforting direction. You can’t write good software if you are aware of the terror of the day to day. Daily terror should be invisible to my team so when real emergencies happen, it’s not stacked on a constant pressure of minor annoyance. Predictability in the day is so critical for engineers to produce amazing shit. Predictability allows for room to experiment.

I think that is why journaling is so effective. If you rely on dev tools and tracking for management tasks without journaling you have no outlet for the real work of the job, sifting human conflict and ambition into a rewarding work environment. Through that, building a cohesive historical narrative that can act in defense of my teammates when shifting goals make engineering look like it failed and giving a concrete foundation for process improvement.