And some other wisdom (lot shorter) on motivation from the movie “Office Space”:

The BBC’s graphic on not sitting up “too straight”:

Correct posture (image from the BBC)

But the real position for corporate situations I think is quite often more like this:

Correct corporate posture.

It’s one of those sayings to encourage people to break things down into smaller tasks, but I came up with a little visual idea for dealing with the “too bloody big” tasks. One of the developers on my team was getting stuck on where to begin on a fairly daunting bit of work. This was my attempt to break the mental deadlock: a picture of an elephant with the various tasks written on it. The good thing was that it seemed to work: she got that nasty bit of work done.

So I present to you the “elephant list” or “task elephant” concept.

The idea is that you visually play around with your list and use the elephant to track your progress/keep track of the list. As you think of new tasks, add them somewhere on the elephant. You can pick symbolic areas of the task elephant if you like.. I’d suggest perhaps:

• the rear end for the really shitty tasks
• the head for the ones that require a bit of thought
• the legs for the bits to get you up and running
• the back for the ones you just have to grin and bear and do a bit of hard slog
• the trunk for the last task

Or just stick ‘em anywhere that the text will fit, but a bit of thought about where on the elephant they belong forms part of the exercise really: to think about what’s required to get those done.

My cleanup GWT elephant list.

A lot of the exercises and games in Agile software development are about engaging interest, engaging different bits of the brain and being a bit silly. The elephant list idea certainly does that as a handful of people wanted to know what the elephant was all about, so it’s something different at least.

Anyhow, I’ll post up a month or so in the future and see how the concept is working out.
Here’s my quick and dirty elephant task list template if you want to try the idea out yourself:

Quick and dirty task elephant template. Double click to get full sized (then right click-> save as).

A few years back (ok a handful of years back.. I’m getting old) I had the “pleasure” of having a seat next to the trading floor while I was consulting at Macquarie bank. It was a fun team to be sitting with, but the constant roar of non-nonsensemustgetthistradecommunicatedtosomeonebyyellingquickly got a bit hard on the nerves. Sure: you were awake, but it was more of a fight or flight type instinct.

Unlike the economy, I escaped from the insurance bankers and got back to a quieter seat, but I’d have to say that too much exposure to that sort of environment day in day out would slowly but surely fray your nerves.

Now THAT is a transformer!

If I want some welding done on whatever “mad-max” vehicle I’m driving in the post apocalyptic/post comet strike world: I’ll be giving this guy a call to see what he’s coddled together out of scrappy wires, string, cardboard and metal.

Update: Image had died. That’ll teach me to rely on the internet!

In terms of work itself I’ve been doing the usual reading half a wiki to find out what things are and how things are done. Fighting the urge to track down and torture the people responsible for making J2EE (JEE sorry) and messaging kinda painful to get up and running: IBM.

RANT WARNING!!

I mean I used to whinge about IBM’s painful install process back 5 years ago when I taught Sun’s J2EE architecture and developer courses and STILL nothing has changed?? Get on with it guys. You do so much other stuff so well, but boy do you make people suffer to get things installed!

END RANT!!

What else is new in enterprise techie stuff in Sydney:

• Still no one using ruby (or one of these other fanboy languages) on anything important or real (thank fuck for that) and using either Java or .net based stuff.
• Lots of places with hiring freezes, the usual stupidity to get around such things (hiring contractors instead of employees).
• A bit of gloom about the economy but no where near say the UK (the part of the world that invented gloom).
• Ajax stuff making a bit more of a show (google’s framework in particular)

I’m working with a couple of colleagues of mine from the old days at CustomWare Asia Pacific. Things seem to be in place fairly well: automated build stuff, unit testing, morning status stand-up (although what sadistic fucker puts these at 9am eh?).

Anyhow, it’s kinda good to be back working although thankfully the daylight saving hour helped me be a bit more awake. Guess I’m an upstanding member of the community again (e.g. I’m paying tax and helping clog up the CBD again?) and I don’t feel quite so worried about dropping a chunk of cash on a new toy.