Omnindex Journal 16/mar - My advanced backlog tool
This is a journal I write while I build Omnindex, a search app, and post here, without much editing, just writing what comes to mind
Quick post, I just wanted to share how I organize things I'm doing and that I need to do next for Omnindex.
Well, at the beginning of my career, back when I was an intern, the first tool I used for the job was a super advanced one: the company had exactly which tasks should be done by which employee, down to hourly-tasks, and we had to write down how many hours - and preferably minutes! - we took to solve that task.
This is certainly amazing for management isn't it? Imagine understanding 100% of all tasks, how much it takes, how are your employees performing, you can certainly optimize and do wonder with it can't you? Except… software is not like that, the company was completely waterfall, and there were no teams, only silos
I tried to mimic the same system, because it was the only thing I knew when I started my own small company back in 2010, using Rails, I built similar complex system to manage tasks in no time, only to watch it fail to help us at all with meeting deadlines, or with anything really.
Fast forward a couple years, I meet Agile, and post-its, and Trello! It's heaven, it all works!
But no we can't stop there, how dare you to stop at Trello, you need burndown charts, and sprints, and management control! Maybe that's a good thing - I try to convince myself - but it's not, I miss trello everyday I look at our Jira board at work, and there no hope escaping it either, all my friends working on other companies also use Jira, or even worse alternatives
With time, for my personal projects and even at work, I created my own system, even better than Trello, I present you, my backlog:
Yes! It's a simple, plain text, note. It totally gets out of the way and just let me write, I don't even use a proper TODO app, because I want the least amount of clicks as possible, I want to be free to do stuff like just pasting that image without any additional effort.
Here I can control everything, I can split tasks, I can easily prioritize by cutting and pasting the lines, with a glance I can read all the lines, and see what's most important to be delivered now for a lean solution, vs what's can be just a nice to have, the line at the top is easy to see as the current work in progress, and as I find a bug, remember something or have a new idea, it takes basically zero effort to add it to the backlog, nothing is missed
The intern Rogerio would for sure find this very stupid, unprofessional, and unorganized, but he doesn't know the tricks and processes I know, which is really what makes this whole thing works, not the tool :)