Lifestyle change

A while ago I decided that things weren't going well. I was overweight and pretty unhealthy.

My sister and parents were pushing me towards to a low GI diet. Diets however are not something I believe in or want to deal with. The resolution to this was to make a lifestyle change.

A lifestyle change is more encompassing. For a start I not only decided to change what I was eating but also to increase my physical activity. As I have previously only enjoyed doing weight training as a form of exercise, this was an obvious choice to me. A single change would have been insufficient and so I incorporated some of the basic low GI principles within the program I decided upon.

After this time, I have trimmed down nicely and improved my physical ability as well as my overall health. Of the things I can attribute to leading to the biggest success, its being committed to reaching a goal and making a note of what I was doing in order to get there.


I'd say that writing down what you do and have done is the greatest motivator in keeping to the plan. There were some periods when I skipped writing down what I had eaten (although still recording the exercise routine) and in those periods I had the most trouble in keeping up with the overall plan and had the least progress towards the final objective.

Reporting in a Technical Area

Reporting where the project is and what you've been doing is a common feature within a development project. Reporting is however not something that's liked since it takes up too much time (among other reasons).

Personally I track what I do in a TiddlyWiki. More than that seems to be redundant. The basic features of a Wiki make it a great tool for tracking what you do on a project. As a notebook it is superb and then adding the cross references (links) and index (tags) it surpasses any solution I have tried in the past.

However good this as a personal solution, it doesn't cover the needs of management. The often rigidly formatted documentation can be a real pain to work through as format constraints often exceed usability.

In consideration of this, as well as finding myself in a position with a sudden need for a status report from others, some reasonable solution had to be found. Among the things I'm experimenting with is a near-agile test automation development process. Of the things within the agile development world I've pulled in are the cycle and the need to plan what to do in a cycle.

My original idea was to use a two week cycle. This did not tie in with the classic development processes adopted outside of our group. As such I've switched to a 1 week cycle which is way too short, but it does mean that there is a synergy between us and the rest of production.

With each cycle is the associated planning for the cycle. The planning is a simple top-down approach - task with sub-tasks. The tasks and sub-tasks are prioritized (high, medium, low) and scoped (short, medium, long). This information forms the basis of the ultimate report.

For now, I've put the planning in an MS Excel file and supported the basic actions with macros. The macros pull the data from the planning cycles into a formatted template. The priority and scoping data is being used to generate an approximation of the actual effort - total and remaining.

This seems to be an effective solution. Planning is a good thing which is being positively reinforced by the least-effort status report. I just need to put some more thought into the effort estimates as well as into some additional efficiency options.

Planning

Planning is an important part of a successful accomplishment. Seems like a simple principle but how often is it actually done?

A top down approach seems to be fairly effective. On getting a task, break it down into a few high level ideas on how to resolve it. When actually starting on the high-level idea, break it down into smaller tasks. On working through the objectives add additional tasks as soon as they come to mind. This means that the list of subtasks is representative of the actual amount of work entailed by the task.

Ultimately the task list will enable improvement in estimating how long a task will take. By not removing items from the list, it forms a record of the thought process involved at each stage of completing the task.