[Karunamon]

Can we get "(for me)" added to the topic here? There's no such thing as an organizational system that works (or doesn't work) for every person out there.

I personally use Taskwarrior[1] for work (because I'm in the terminal all the time anyways), and aside from a couple of edge cases, it's the simplest and most effective thing I've found.

Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything work related generates a ticket for it. We've got shell aliases hooked into the web service, so anybody can just do a command like:

  ja awesomeproject 'Finish work on the gonkulator' inprogress

For home and personal, I'm a fan of Any.do[3], it's a Chrome webapp and native Android app. The Chrome app lives in a button on the top bar for easy access, the Android app stays in the notification pane and shows what you should be doing next, and it has this feature called Moment where it runs you through your pending tasks once a day, and you mark them as done, to do today, or to do later. Great way to make sure you keep visibility on stuff.

    [1]: http://taskwarrior.org
    [2]: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
    [3]: http://any.do

[jt2190]

  > Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized 
  > the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs 
  > done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The 
  > motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything 
  > work related generates a ticket for it.

Understand that the system you've created implies that someone else has decided that the work is worth doing, someone else has broken the work down into manageable tasks, and someone else has prioritized it. This may work great for employees who need a lot of direction, but starts to break down as tasks become larger and more complex, and the goal is to leverage the knowledge and experience of the person doing the task.

Markovitz is really advocating an approach that works better for employees who are essentially given whole projects to manage, and are empowered to steer the direction of the project overall:

  > You might think, “There’s no way I could tell my boss
  > that I can’t do this by mid-February.” But I’d argue that 
  > you have to say no. The CFO says no when the president 
  > wants to move into a new building or hire new people, and 
  > the company can’t afford it — that’s part of her fiduciary 
  > responsibility. You have the same kind of responsibility — 
  > to set expectations about what can be accomplished with 
  > the amount of production time you have available.

(edit: Both approaches have their place, given the work and the team. It's important to understand both approaches, however. I see a lot of frustration from employees who want more say in the overall project direction when they're in a "just do what you're told" kind of job. Similarly, some employees really love the ability to focus on the tasks assigned, and not having to worry about whether they make sense from a business perspective.)

[Karunamon]

Ah, I should probably give more detail there. We operate on a kind of tiering system, technicians, sysadmins, and engineers. Sysadmins and engineers are generally the ones entering tickets, and the technicians the ones working them. Generally, but not always. It works as a good reminder system too for all kinds of assorted tasks that would be easily forgotten.

I think you've made a bad assumption in that only one or two people are breaking down projects into smaller tasks - that's not the way the software is set up, and it's not the way it works in practice for us. Anyone can assign subjobs to any main job, and this happens on a pretty regular basis.

The major bonus is that it allows management to see who has the least amount of stuff they're working on and allocate time effectively. When you've got north of 20 people being managed by 2, and you can tell at a glance who has more free time, I don't think the utility of this can be overstated. It definitely makes our lives easier, and I'd like to think it helps the company make money, but I don't have a good way to quantify that.

[jt2190]

  > We operate on a kind of tiering system, technicians, 
  > sysadmins, and engineers. Sysadmins and engineers are 
  > generally the ones entering tickets, and the 
  > technicians the ones working them. Generally, 
  > but not always.

Right. In general, a sysadmin or a engineer ("someone else") decides what should get worked on, and enters it into the issue tracker. The technician is not involved in this decision making process: They just pull tasks and work to complete them.

To pull Markovitz' article back into this, the sysadmins and engineers are (I assume) able to push back on the business, providing a reality-check when plans are unrealistic, and they are the ones he's suggesting should not work off of a simple to do list.

[ams6110]

Are your shell scripts/aliases available anywhere?

[majelix]

They're probably simple wrappers around https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/org.swift.atlassia...

[Karunamon]

That's exactly what we use. Unfortunately the scripts are full of various hardcoded internal info and I am not at liberty to post them. The CLI tools here make it very easy, though.

[ryan-allen]

If they didn't sound authorative, they wouldn't be able to play to peoples' insecurities and therefore get less pageviews.

And pageviews sell Ads!

[corresation]

Can we get "(for me)" added to the topic here?

Such a disclaimer (or rather "for some people") could be added to almost every lifehack / productivity tip / work habit / fitness technique / etc.

Work at home / in the office / in the cafe / for yourself / in a team / pair programming / standing desks / morning walks / coffee brewing / IDE tools / soylent / fasting / feasting / work-life balance / pretty much everything else.

People make absolute statements of universal truth to pitch their confidence and certainty, but really it seldom applies to more than a small subset.

[sanderjd]

(I think) This is similar to how you could preface nearly any statement you make anywhere with "I think". My instinct is to qualify everything and I often have to go back and delete the qualification because it pointlessly weakens every sentence. Either that or I notice it after I've already written and cringe at re-reading it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457261). (I think) It is usually better to let your readers decide which statements are subjective and which are objective.

[ekianjo]

Well the problem of not mentioning "I think" is when you pretend that "X does not work" while 99% of your peers use it and do not seem to have a significant problem with it. Then the statement makes more sense if you phrase it "X does not work for me" or "You may like X but I don't", since it would then seem that you are a very unique person with a very unique problem.

If you had this kind of statement in other fields, like "Gaming on Consoles is broken", no doubt you'd get tons of people saying that this is wrong, because obviously millions of people have no problem with it.

Making such absolute statements is akin to trolling.

[kalid]

Agreed. There's often a pedantic need to point out some structural "flaw" in a statement and dismiss it, vs. making an effort to gain insight from its message.

"All Cretans are liars" - Epimenides

The logical robot concludes that because Epimenides was Cretan, the statement is a logical contradiction (hah, got you!) and nothing can be learned. A wiser man realizes he should be wary when in Crete.

[Karunamon]

Consider your example in the context of a HN topic.

    ^  All Cretans are liars
       7 points by Epimenides | 5 minutes ago | flag | 2 comments

Consider your audience: Programmers, startup entrepreneurs, in other words people who deal intimately with logic on a daily basis.

I'd expect this article to be flagged into oblivion, both by Cretans who are not liars, and by people peeved by the obviously incorrect absolute in the topic.

Doesn't it bug you at all when people engage in these kinds of fallacies to further a point, when they should damn well know better?

Would it have really have killed the submitter to reword as "Be wary in Crete" instead of knowingly posting something false? Would it really kill someone who's making an absolute statement, (a knowingly false one, mind) to reword it into something that still gets their point across, is actually correct, and won't lead to endless corrections in the comment thread?

To me, it shows a certain disdain for your reader when bait like this is written.

[dllthomas]

Well, you can make absolute statements without the implicit "for me" or "for some people" once you've done proper studies that support them...