/\ndy

A hard deadline means no more excuses, no more options, no second chances. It’s literally now or never.

Of course, deadlines don’t usually work that way. That’s the part of the threat of a deadline, and after the deadline passes, threats usually escalate. The stakes get higher; consequences and punishments more severe. You’re not off the hook—the deadline just hangs around your neck like a millstone that keeps growing and getting heavier.

Hard deadlines, with their attendant fearsome consequences, can shut your brain down as the deadline looms, and leave you with reduced cognitive function for up to two days after the event.

What happens to your ability to observe, to problem-solve, even to think clearly when faced with time pressure? Read More...

November's issue of the Pragmatic Programmer magazine, PragPub, has my latest article, Avoiding the Infinite Abyss:

Estimating is never easy. In agile projects we try and get a better feel for estimating over the course of a project as we get more familiar with the pace and capabilities of ourselves and this particular team and technology environment. On most projects we want individual team members to come up with estimates for their own tasks, the ones they’ve selected from the current project backlog. That puts the onus of estimating on the person who actually has to do the work, a nice touch of straightforward reality in an otherwise messed-up world.But for programmers new to this style of working, or new to the team or to the technology, trying to decide on how long a task might take is kinda like trying to pick a winning lottery number: billions of choices, only one right answer.
...Read the rest at www.pragprog.com/magazines/2010-11/guru-meditation

"What are you planning on doing today?"  That's one of the key three questions you must answer during a daily Scrum meeting.  And it's the topic of the first Pomodoro of the day, if you use the Pomodoro technique. No big deal, it's just asking you to think about a goal or set of goals for the day, right?

But a "goal" sounds like an elusive, hard to reach target.  I suppose we've been conditioned by too much football, where the drive to the goal line is a hard-fought contest of brute strength and occasional cunning. 

In some ways, a football goal is an easier target than those we face: everyone knows right where it is, and it's not moving.  In software and in life, goals are rarely that static or cooperative.  So we might need a little help making sure we're actually headed in the right direction.

A study done at the Dominican University showed that three factors contribute to helping you accomplish significantly more toward achieving your goals:

• Written goals
• Public commitment
• Accountability

Just writing your goals down can be a big help.  Sharing those goals publicly, even just with a close friend, helps even more.  And for the trifecta, you can email your friend with periodic status reports on how you're doing.

Without that kind of support, it's easy to wander aimlessly through the jungle of e-mail, IM's, tweets, failed unit tests, and obfuscated requirements until the week has suddenly evaporated. And that's just on the project—your personal goals are just as important; in some cases, more so.

What happens without goals? Heinlein nails it:

"In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it." — Robert Heinlein

So here's today's challenge.  Consider what you're doing. In what way is that advancing you toward your goal, versus daily trivia?

/\ndy

A new study shows 10X improvements in cognitive tests (including ability to focus) from doing brief meditation.  That's not too surprising by itself, as the benefits of meditation have been shown in neuroimaging and behavioral studies for years.  What is surprising, though, is that it doesn't take much to see results.

As it turns out, you don't have to train like a monk for years to get these benefits of enhanced cognitive skills. Researchers found profound improvements after just four days of 20 minutes training per day, doing simple "mindfulness" meditation.

There's a write up over at sciencedaily.

If you haven't given this sort of thing a try, I highly recommend it.  

/\ndy

The February 15th print edition of SD Times lists columnist Larry O'Brien's picks for the top ten most influential software development books of the past 10 years.  Of the ten, he's chosen these fine two books:

• Practices of An Agile Developer: Working in the Real World
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

In addition, in his blog comments, Larry mentions the two most influential books during the decade, which were released in 1999: Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained, and of course, The Pragmatic Programmer.

So of the 12 books mentioned as most influential of the past decade, I'm privileged to have been co-author on 3 of them. Thanks Larry, I'll try and get my head through the doorway now.  The swelling should go down momentarily.

And a serious thank you to my co-authors, Dave Thomas and Venkat Subramaniam.

/\ndy

• Andy Hunt is co-founder of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC, and is well known as a programmer, author, and publisher. His email signature, "/\ndy", dates back to the paleolithic days of uucp and ihnp4.

  See my home page. Follow me on twitter at @PragmaticAndy or subscribe to this RSS Feed

• How to Avoid Agility
• Stage 0: Not Ready for Agile
• How Not to Eat an Elephant
• Avoiding the Infinite Abyss
• The Perfect Deadline
• Why Johnny Can't Be Agile
• Timeboxing: Perfect, Good, Done
• Uncomfortable with Agile
• Getting Past Advanced Beginner
• The End of Agile

• 

  The Pragmatic Programmer
  The original classic.

  Refactor Your Wetware: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
  

  Practices of An Agile Developer
  Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity award.

  ...more