How do you organize miscellaneous tasks? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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I am an experienced developer, but not an experienced manager. I'd prefer if organizing tasks was not my responsibility, but I work at a small company and no one else is inclined to do it. How do you organize miscellaneous tasks when using a task management system such as Jira? We're using GitLab, but it has the same basic features, such as epics, milestones, tasks, and subtasks.

I don't want to have miscellaneous tasks floating around in the ether, because things like that tend to get lost. But an epic is supposed to have a well-defined end goal, right? A good epic is something like "Implement this complex feature" or "Reach this level of maturity" - not "Miscellaneous stuff".

The majority of the work we do fits fairly clearly into specific goals, such as "Release the next version of feature." But what about bug fixes and other random improvements and miscellaneous tasks? How do you keep those organized?

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[-] NostraDavid@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

If you're asking for a tool that contains shared tasks:

The Stack Overflow Survey dropped not too long ago. If you want to pick a tool, pick one that's admired. That means looking at this specific list and probably picking Linear - available at Linear.app.

Disclaimer: I have zero experience with Linear; I'm just going off on how admired it is. Choose at your own discretion :)

[-] firelizzard@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

We're already committed to using GitLab, so I'm asking devs who use similar tools how they organize tasks.

[-] NostraDavid@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, and for myself: A markdown file, where I have a custom syntax to track what I need to do, what I'm done with, working on, etc.

I separate each day with a == yyyy-mm-dd (the == is literal, the letters are replaced by an iso8601 formatted date.

Then I have a symbol at the start of each line, indicating what's what. Here's an example

== 2023-06-18

+ this item is something I still need to do
* stars are used for tasks that I'm currently working on (though I tend to immediately replace + with -)
- this is a task I'm already done with
% this is for events that have happened on that day, that I've deemed important (birthday, someone left the company, etc)
@ this is for ideas that I want to come back to one day - I can just search for '@' and dig through my .plan file to find them
# this is for general comments about the items (not used that often)
? this is for questions that I have, that I need answering
! this is for questions I have answered | the bar separates the question I had from the answer I found for it; this way I can track my open questions (via ?) and find out what answer I got to that one question I used to have.

This format is somewhat copied and personalized from John Carmack's .plan files. His format was based on the ye olde finger command for Unix operating systems, but I'm on Windows, so I just made my own format that made sense to me.

In the long run, I'll have one super long log file of what I did when. It's nice to see myself evolve and grow.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023

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