The Week

[rowyn]

I seem to have convinced myself that editing A Rational Arrangement should be my top priority and I should finish it before I do anything else. The result of this is, naturally, that in addition to not editing RA, I'm not doing anything else. I give this my award for Least Effective Strategy. I don't know why I keep trying it.

Last week at the day job went better than usual. I have way too many long-term projects so I got my boss to prioritize them. It's a little frustrating to me that she prioritized the one that is the most complicated and takes the longest, which means that this stack of 2-4 hour projects are stuck behind the two-three week project which has to be done first. On the other hand, I am making progress on the multi-week project and may even finish it next week. Until then, everything else can keep getting in line behind it.*

* Every other multi-hour project, anyway. I get a lot of 15-30 minute requests that I'll just do because they're quick and not worth the extra effort of putting into the task list. And I have 10-20 hours a week of recurring tasks that need to get done, so there's only 20-30 hours for projects regardless.

Anyway, the multi-week project is kind of fun and kind of frustrating. Mostly it has involved a lot of digging around in one of our undocumented databases* looking for crap.

* We have two of these that were bought from third-party vendors. (I won't include the terrible in-house undocumented databases, of which we have too many, especially if you count the OMG WHY ARE YOU USING EXCEL AS A DATABASE PROGRAM NO OUTLOOK IS NOT AN IMPROVEMENT STAAAAHP). Our technology sucks and the documentation is worse. One of them has thousands of pages of completely worthless documentation. I mean, literally, they filled up thousands of pages without giving any useful information ever. I don't know how they did this. I don't know how it is even POSSIBLE to do this. You'd think now and again they'd slip up and give you a field name or how to do something or where it was located or SOME INFORMATION AT ALL. But no. The other one went the more straightforward route of never writing anything down.

Anyway, the fun part is when I can actually find something without having to ask where it is. I think I've only broken down and asked once so far. This included some particularly weird discoveries. For example, I was looking for a field which the UI calls "Current Liability", under the screen for parties with "Indirect Liability" on a loan. I found a table labeled "Indirect Liabilities" which had field descriptions corresponding to all the stuff on the screen. ALL OF IT. "Aha!" I thought. "This must be the table." I added it to my report. No data in any of the fields. "Huh. Maybe I did the joins wrong." I tried some different joins. Still nothing. I made a new query with nothing but the Indirect Liabilities table and queried it to see what data it had.

Nothing. The table contained no data whatsoever, on anything. WHY IS THIS EVEN IN HERE? It had three sibling tables (for reasons TOTALLY UNCLEAR to me, this database often has multiples of what look like the exact same tables -- same table description, same field descriptions, same field names, but the table name will be something like CUP019L instead of CUP019. Also, the naming convention is from 1982 so all of the names are utterly cryptic.) I looked at all the sibling tables. They were also all empty. WHAT WHY I DON'T EVEN. But I did finally find the right table, in the "loans" as opposed to "customer" section of the database, which is unintuitive for reasons too arcane to elaborate upon. WHATEVER I FOUND IT HAH.

The one good part about dealing with this antique is that finding the thing I need is very satisfying because it's so hard.

So I don't feel like I'm failing at work. I am still failing at my hobbies, though.

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Looks like your approach is quite reasonable — but perhaps on the editing, breaking it into tiny tasks might help, because a tiny task can get done without too much grief.

I've been using DoIt.im as a free, quick-and-dirty things to do tracker with some success. I have it generating little editing tasks for me each day.

Best wishes!

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

I did break it down into a bunch of little tasks, but all I do is look at the list of little tasks and think "blah, I don't want to do any of these". Maybe I do need to break it into EVEN SMALLER tasks. n_n

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Microtasking!

And then, of course, Nanotasking!

===|==============/ Level Head

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Ew @ terrible table management! That should probably go on someone's list of things to clean up. I suspect programmer flailing. (not you, the original programmer)

Maybe you should mark 'edit RA' a top priority only when you have a large block of time, and use other things when your time available is smaller? Having just one to-do list may not work when the tasks are of different sizes to even initiate and so is your available time.

[rowyn]

I don't want to get into the habit of thinking of any task as "too big to get started on in available time", because any task that I can't work on in 5-minute intervals is much less likely to ever get done. "Oh, this takes too long, I don't want to commit to spending THIS much time on it." :/

There is some "this is hard to work on in 5 minute intervals" barrier to editing, granted. Or, put another way: I did most of the actual writing of RA on my phone, and doing the editing on my phone is a lot more annoying than writing was. So the mechanics make getting the latter done at all that much harder, coupled with "that much less rewarding", because the motivation of "I need to finish writing this so I can read it" is gone.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Every database I've worked with has been in Excel or Google Docs or something along those lines.

Of course, they're all hobbyist things with a few thousand records at most. The main problem with doing it that way is that it doesn't scale.

[rowyn]

If it was only a few thousand records, that would be one thing. These are things with tens of thousands of records, with file sizes over 20 megs, that they want to do reporting on.

There is one smallish Excel-based database which manages to still be a disaster because it's got multiple tables that are represented by separate tabs on the workbook. x_x

And oh god I just realized that I have been doing that in Google Drive with the festival giveaway workbook.

At least that is only two tables. So far. c_c

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Pivot tables are the officially sanctioned way of doing reports in Excel. They're not going to be anywhere near as flexible as real database queries though.

[rowyn]

I really need to learn how to do pivot tables for these things. Since they're not going away. x_x

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I seem to have convinced myself that editing A Rational Arrangement should be my top priority and I should finish it before I do anything else. The result of this is, naturally, that in addition to not editing RA, I'm not doing anything else.

Substitute some other task for "ARA" and that describes quite a few wasted weekends for me. =( Actually, a lot of your work-method sounds like mine. ("Is this something I can do quickly and avoid putting on my to-do list? It gets done right NOW, then!")

Anyway, good luck with work and hobbies! (I seem to have a knack for making my hobbies FEEL like work.)

[rowyn]

One of the reasons I've always liked collaborating with you on RPGs and suchlike is that you always understood my typical habits and quirks. :D

I am sorry to hear this one has been afflicting you lately too, though. What've been your top priorities that you can't get yourself to actually do?

I kind of feel like my hobbies are work, too. Well, the creative ones. I don't count my various no-effort activities as hobbies -- eg, playing computer games, watching videos, reading, are all things that I do for fun that don't require the kind of effort that makes them feel like work.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, come to think of it, I think I make that distinction as well. "Playing video games" doesn't really feel like a hobby in the same way as "painting miniatures" or "drawing pictures." It just feels like "entertainment." Even though a video game may require a certain amount of thought, and it could even involve a certain amount of creativity (such as Minecraft), it just feels like I'm shutting off most of my brain. It's kind of like relaxing ... except that I don't actually get any REST out of it, and I will be painfully reminded of this fact if I settle into a state of inertia and end up staying late. (I can't use Gwendel as my reminder on this, because it's not the least bit unusual for me to get up in the morning for work and that's around the time that she's going to bed.)

Priorities that would be a problem would be anything that requires me to do any actual brain-work, and where I don't clearly know what my next step is going to be. If I can easily narrow down the steps I'm going to take to get to a good stopping point, quite often I can soldier through it, because I can envision myself completing the task. Throw in the least bit of uncertainty, and I find it very hard to get started. (If I'm ALREADY WORKING ON IT, then inertia works in my favor until I get physically tired or distracted by something else. Unfortunately, I get tired a lot more easily than, say, 20 years ago.)

[rowyn]

Yeah, my problem lately seems more motivation than anything else. :/

[xyzzysqrl]

I give this my award for Least Effective Strategy. I don't know why I keep trying it.
You and me both. "But I can't (X). I'm doing (Y)." Thus Y and X (also Z, R, K, and D) go undone.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

Electronic filing now perfectly recapitulates physical filing--complete with "How did THAT get in there?"