Track Your Workday For Fun and Profit
What Code Management Can Teach Us About Tracking Our Work
Work is an important part of our daily ritual. Come to think of it, if we were asked how our day was, the response would be broken along work, sleep and the rest.
We would be hard pressed to name a singular activity that captures so much of our time and attention. Yet, so few of us, when asked, can connect the dots on what we did, how did it help us and how can we improve. Simply put, if we had to, could we crisply answer the following questions.
What did we do (today)?
How well did we do it? How can we improve?
Why did we do it? Did it help us progress us towards our goals?
Whether we like it or not, we invariably get asked this exact set of questions at least twice a year at our employee appraisals or in 1-on-1s with our managers. When asked, we turn to emails, appreciation plaques, notes scattered in Slack and the like. Then we paint a flattering picture, fill out whatever form we need to fill out and move on. Our managers then take this picture, white wash it a bit to suit their subjective biases and hit submit, rinse and repeat. This is how most of engagement and feedback in the workplace looks like today. Barring a few outliers, most of the people on a team at the end of an appraisal cycle end up looking like the picture below.
Jokes aside, something is obviously off. On a road trip, most of us know where we are going before we start, and which roads will take us there. Most of us glance at our our fuel gauge and other instruments to get a sense of how we are doing. And most of us follow road signs and check milestones as we go.
The status quo
Goal tracking tools available to us are less systems-of-record and more systems-of-fairy-tales.
Our tools don’t make it easier for us to simply record what we did. It is invariably spread across multiple notes, emails, task tracking software and if we are very organized, a spreadsheet.
Getting frequent, relevant feedback is hard. There is the feedback we get from conversations with our peers and colleagues and the formal feedback we get from our managers. Then there is the feedback in code reviews, Jira tickets, retrospective documents, progress readouts and so on. It is harder still to take in the big picture and really understand how all it ties together.
The result of any attempt to outline an answer to the three questions above, the what, why and how, ends up being an exercise in performative story telling, rather than an authentic artifact of our work life, something that we can refer to over time and something that serves as a map that showcases our work and provides us relevant feedback as we move towards our goals and milestones.
A solution
A potential solution that could help is one that has been around forever, and that, at least some of us use on a daily basis.
A frictionless way to record what we did. Make giving and receiving feedback the norm. Tie our actions to a higher level goal. Do this with minimal ceremony. Make this information available when needed to guide retrospectives and next steps.
Those of us who work in a software practice have been doing this for decades. Commit logs, code reviews and tagging a commit to a story. The commit log is available for people to look into what was done and comments and suggestions are available as well.
This is the fundamental problem that Team Marker is trying to tackle. We are building an app that helps us get clarity on what what we are doing, why we are doing it, what’s helping us and what’s holding us back.
It is exciting for us to tackle some of the teaming and collaboration issues that we ourselves have come across. Over the past couple of weeks, as we started talking to potential users, we have received tremendous feedback and insight. Over the course of this build, we will be sharing these insights, as well as our learnings via this blog.
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