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Saturday, April 28, 2012

The secret ways of my work


I sincerely hope my bosses at work are not reading this. :)

Well, when I am stuck at work, I employ some techniques to get ahead. It makes me smile to think about them, but it works.

So today, I am looking at a task, as a part of my training. They have given me a requirement and asked me to develop it. So far, I was re-doing whatever was already developed, so I had a reference. Now, I have to come up with a design on my own. So as will be the case, I was stuck.

So this is how I approached it.

  1.  I tried to glance through all the documents. I cannot read exhaustively and understand well at the first read. So generally, I read twice or may be more to understand a document well. The first read is what can be called a perusal, where I am just going through, without getting an in-depth understanding. So now I know what topic the document covers and what is where in the document, if haven’t slept off by then that is.
  2. Which leads us to point 2, sleep over it. No need to pack up and go home. Just close your eyes, take a power nap, take a break. :)  Today I actually nodded off till a colleague walked in to chat with me. Good I had my back to her and my head up straight. :)
  3. Once fresh, I read through the document again, and now it makes 50% more sense. I am looking at things in a way that I didn’t look at earlier. Newer perspective. And the world is a whole lot better!
  4. I list down my understanding of what needs to be done, and the steps needed to do it. At this level, questions will begin to spring up, and I will get it clarified. No matter how long it makes, I ensure that my questions have answers, even if I have to look them up myself.
  5. And so now that I have understood what needs to be done, and have an idea on how to do it, I start. I ensure that I do not make any assumptions; it will kill the work, and is the most dangerous thing as far as a programmer is concerned.
  6. So I start, by breaking it up into tiny baby steps which will not overwhelm me and then get going. I plan on what I will do for how long, and if have exceeded one deadline that I set, I know it will impact the overall deadline, and will work accordingly.
So there… that’s how I get things going at work.  :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

i think now u r eligible for a promotion.. usually, we dont make a big fuss about what we do, or give a structure to 'how we drink coffee' or something trivial like reading a document..
the moment u give an importance, and start telling abt this with such an air, congrats gayu, u are eligible for the elite management (who work very hard to understand what is work all about)

monu said...

actually the toughest job if you ask me is to go through a 100 page document..