Wednesday, January 20, 2010

the essence of agile

For those who love agile, practice agile daily, feel it in their bones but have not been so agile to find the site with the essence, here it is http://agilemanifesto.org.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

a low importance misfeature

JDoe had a long day, he's been debugging and re-installing and patching for the last 10 hours. And it all worked like magic in the end after a simple reboot. He had spammed quite a few inboxes in the process, so he is thinking now he should probably send a final email saying Hey, it all worked out after a reboot, thanks for your help.

Is this important enough to warrant a new email? Wouldn't he bother the team even more? So he decides he will send the email with low importance ... see, every problem has a solution.

... is it so? What do you do when you get a low importance email in your inbox, do you skip it? Do you simply delete it? Or you have a filter that does this for you? I admit none of the above in my case. I read all my daily 30 something emails in the order I get them, normal, high or low importance ... indeed in some cases I go to high ones first, rarely though.

Weird enough, low importance emails draw my attention more than normal ones thanks to the nice little blue arrow in front:



AND my email client pops up notifications for low importance emails just as for the others, instead of letting me focus on tasks with a normal importance at a minimum.


So,  
Dear JDoe,


I am sending this normal importance email just to you. Please save some of my time by sending a regular email only to the ones that tried to help; forget low importance emails.


Thanks,
Lucian