date: 2021-05-11
description: The author shares the busy work status after the department reorg, being involved in two projects and learning while doing. During the May Day holiday, when organizing work, the author realized that the reasons for tasks were not thought about, and multitasking led to unfinished work and easy anxiety. The author then puts forward the realization of doing one thing at a time.
keywords: department reorg, multi - project work, task thinking, doing one thing at a time
tags:
- Random Thoughts
title: The Busier You Are, the More You Need to Think
Background
After the department reorg, especially after the Spring Festival, everyone became obviously very busy. I was involved in two projects simultaneously. One was a development - type project, where I had to handle both the front - end and the back - end. The back - end was based on Django, which I was familiar with before. The front - end used Vue, which I had never used before, so I had to learn and work at the same time. The other project was more focused on operations and maintenance, using tools like Terraform and GitHub Action. There was even a period when I had to consider using Packer and Ansible for system image creation and operations and maintenance. Most of these were new to me, and I had to learn as I went. With time being tight, I had been extremely busy since the Spring Festival, always in a state of just trying to complete tasks, but not really thinking much about the tasks themselves, like why I was doing this task and why it should be done in this way.
Think More About Why
During the May Day holiday, I took a few days off and organized the work I had done since the Spring Festival at home. I found that there were several parts in the projects where I wasn’t quite clear about why things were done in that way.
In each of our projects, the number of people was actually not large, and we had quite a lot of discussions in daily work. However, I still had areas where I didn’t know the functional background, which reminded me of the situation described in the “Background” section above.
During this period, I was always rushing to complete tasks, but every time when tasks were decomposed in meetings, I didn’t think carefully enough about whether this task really needed to be done, whether it should be done in this way, or if there was a better approach. Even during functional discussion and task - decomposition meetings, I was busy doing other things instead of participating in the discussions seriously. Perhaps because of this, over time, I became even less clear about the project background and details, and just got trapped in one task after another.
Do One Thing at a Time and Finish It
Since I was working on two projects simultaneously, with different technology stacks, and there were also some other scattered tasks to do, I had a lot on my plate. Especially in the past two weeks, there were an overwhelming number of things. I felt a bit anxious. I would start one thing, then be called away to discuss something else and start doing that. As a result, at the end of the day, I had only completed parts of several tasks, none of which were fully finished. This not only gave me no sense of accomplishment (because I didn’t finish any single task) but also made me easily anxious (because there were more and more things piling up).
Do one thing at a time. In fact, I’ve read many articles saying this, but when I’m really busy, I often forget this point.