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Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#32My brain has some very bad mid term memory (on the hour/day scale). I always forget what I ate for breakfast/lunch. I always forget small tasks I worked on, or where I left my ticket state on.
I can figure it out though. I can replay events from a point I remember and get to it, but it's usually pointless for me to do so, and often better for me to come into tasks from a fresh perspective
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#33If you are worried about a colleague being judgemental, it can be stressful to speak to them -- especially if you are somewhat embarassed. This stress decreases available working memory. This makes it genuinely harder to remember what you did the previous day.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#34"I don't remember what I did yesterday." is shorthand for either "I was switching between lots of small tasks" or "I feel like I didn't make much progress and don't want to admit it". Neither is bad but devs don't like to be called out so they gloss over the details. A good scrum master knows what each dev has on the sprint board and they can prompt for more info if necessary, but generally it's fine unless it's near…
I don't think that's the case about it being pride. It's pretty common for intelligent people to immediately forget minutiae. The fact that folk completely forget work over the weekend means they're fresh for a new week. Throw taking care of small children into the mix, and there's zero room for anything extra rattling around. "I don't remember what I did yesterday," seems more likely to really mean, "there's nothing…
>"there's nothing that anyone cares about."
Yes, but especially there's nothing that you care about. Some people find it nearly impossible to remember something that they see no value in.
My wife has tried to explain to me the difference between hand-towels, dish towels, wash-clothes, face-clothes, and so on, many times. I want to make her happy... but I just can't remember what she said five minutes later. It's like my brain rejected it in some sort of self-defense memetic immune response.
A lot of tasks at work are like that.
(I kind of vaguely have a notion of 'big towels' and 'small towels', but that's as fine a distinction as I can make.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What's going on that people don't know what task they have been working on? > Because I wake up 5 minutes before this meeting and my mental energy is spend on making coffee. Funny. I was asking about the format of the dailies, though. "How did the 'endpoint creation' task go, yesterday, KptMarchewa? Did you complete it?" is a question even a coffee-deprived sleep-addled dev can mumble an answer to.
I wouldn't put it past myself to forget an endpoint I implemented yesterday, that's why I document them as soon as I finish.
Hmm. I guess I'm trying to suggest that the format of the daily stand up, or even something about the development pipeline in these situations, are leading people to forget what they are doing day-to-day. If I were on a team where people were forgetting regularly, I'd tune the process. I find explanations like "I haven't prepared" or "There is something inherent to me" not to be satisfying. As a lead, I'd find it quite alarming, really. I mean, some people have medical conditions, and that's fine as an explanation, but as a routine? No. Something isn't going well. And, the explanation is almost certainly not "devs are at fault". Burnout is a possibility.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#36maybe don't delete the item?
that's a pretty good idea.
i was thinking it was a non-starter, but maybe it is not.
it's just that, it leaves a lot of noise, and i have a feeling that it will lead to a lot more work -- i.e. i'll just have to delete them at some point later -- maybe right after the standup?
what i really want is a simple workflow that handles it -- something like what you'd find in Todoist or similar -- without all the ceremony, drama, formatting, slow plugins, etc.
i know Notion bought some automation company. maybe they'll incorporate something.
but notion doesn't even have 2FA, so.
Re: Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?
#37maybe don't delete the item?
that's a pretty good idea. i was thinking it was a non-starter, but maybe it is not. it's just that, it leaves a lot of noise, and i have a feeling that it will lead to a lot more work -- i.e. i'll just have to delete them at some point later -- maybe right after the standup? what i really want is a simple workflow that handles it -- something like what you'd find in Todoist or similar -- without all the ceremony, dr…
add "date complete" text then use display:none when you want to hide it.