I wasn’t super busy today so I spent the entire day organizing and doing things I didn’t really have time for when I was busy, stuff like:
Committing stuff to git repos
Backing up files
Deleting old files
Going through old notes to make sure I didn’t miss any request from way back when that people might actually care about
Moving emails from my inbox to various folders
Moving files around and reorganizing folders to make things easier to manage
Figuring out what to do with ad-hoc Excel files that shouldn’t be committed but may or may not need to be backed up somehow.
Renaming files that were poorly named
Oh and I’m actually not done yet, there’s more documentation to do and maybe I’ll write a script to at least automate some of this later.
Is it okay to say I spent like half my week on this? Or maybe even longer, like a week? I mean, every now and then somebody leaves and all Hell breaks lose when we try to figure out what they did so hey it’s worth it, at least to me. Oh yeah and I was running out of space too so to some extent it had to be done.
I guess my worry wasn’t so much that I was organizing, it’s just that there’s a lot to organize and it might take me a long time. I was asked to do things faster than I was able to document them so that’s another thing that might take a while too.
Who are you saying this to? Do you track your time or discuss activity with your boss? Or are you just given tasks and as long as you complete them in a reasonable time you are good?
If documenting/organizing isn’t built-in to time/resourcing expectations then that’s bad planning. I do a bit of this every week, usually on Fridays which tend to be light meeting days.
Documentation of work is important and generally time well spent. Doing it exclusively for a week seems like a lot of time unless it’s been neglected for a while. As long as you are able to cover your other job responsibilities and deadlines, would be OK in many jobs.
Would often not be OK in a consulting or other billable hours job unless clearly communicated in advance.
Okay so one innovation I did was the way I have my documentation is that I made a website using Sphinx that automatically pulls from the docstrings in my code and then I got IT to get us a server to host it. And then the documentation itself is version controlled via git. Basically a department intranet, just for us.
The justification issue is nobody else does that and they just put it in Word on some shared drive or something. All the software engineers do it my way but the actuaries do it (in my mind) the old way which is ultimately harder to maintain. On the other hand I avoid a lot of issues my coworkers have because I know how to code but other people won’t get the benefits I have unless they learn. So it seems too cumbersome to subject the actuarial department to that but to me it hinders where I want to go in my career if I’m subject to doing things the old way.
Even using basic vocabulary is a struggle for me to describe what I’m doing because people don’t know it. “docstring” for instance. Even telling my boss that we have a server and that we need to implement basic security practices was not something they wanted to think about.