Checkin 1: Lists of Lists.

Last week I hit the ground running by making lists of lists. That’s right! Lists! Exciting, yeah? No?!?!? Look, I’m willing to admit when I might have a problem, but this stuff is important! Here, I’ll explain...

Whenever I have a big project looming before me that I can’t get my head all the way around, there’s only one thing to: make an outline (a list) of what needs to get done, in broad terms. So I did, I just jotted down whatever came to mind and started organizing tasks into their types and ordering them by their priority.

What quickly rose to the top of that list was to get clear about what, why, and how I’m doing all of this. This entailed writing a handful of documents:

1. The Vision (Why?)
2. The Mission (What?)
3. The Strategic Plan (How?)

Maybe it’s obnoxious business school prattle, but it’s very important to get your head clear before you dive in and start slinging code (trust me.) That said, I didn’t need to create large, formal documents for each of these. No, I simply started with a rough draft in the form of, you guessed it: lists!

As I wrote all of those lists, some questions were popping into my head. Questions I didn’t want to answer just yet, but that I didn’t want to lose, either. So I threw those into a list of “Open Questions” that I could refer to later.

Once that unholy triumvirate of business docs was listed out, I set about a rough Roadmap document. Whereas the Strategic Plan listed the various specific technologies and services I would use, The Roadmap would list specific steps to take, in order.

I found that when I zoomed in to this level, I noticed a lot more “todos” than were really covered in the Strategic Plan, and the real shape of the work before me began to come into focus. I broke that list of tasks into sub-lists so I could categorize them into phases.

And ya know what? Most of the tasks in the first few phases weren’t even code-related. Glad I didn’t fly off half-cocked to take on the beast directly, I’ve gotta complete at least a few side quests first! So I did the only reasonable thing for a list-obsessed person and started a new Trello board for rapidly making and completing todo quests err… lists!

Curious about these lists? They’re the subject of this week’s Unlockable Content. Sign up for a buck to get a sneak peak, and you too can go list crazy with me! (No?!?!?)