Tasks and Index Cards

The other day after a dental appointment, I went to the drug store to fill a prescription for my upcoming periodontal work (which was done yesterday.) While waiting for the pharmacist, I wandered over into the office supplies section and started looking for colored post-its and index cards. Post-its are prohibitively expensive, so I ended up going to Office Depot and getting some index cards and boxes. I'm going agile!

Now it comes down to deciding on my organization, which besides picking which color is which task type, also means picking what the task types are.

I was having trouble coming up with categories without either over-simplifying or coming up with way more than reasonable. Reasonable being aribitrarily determined by me to be 5, (the number of colors I have, plus white).

I came up with a long list that included:

1. Development
2. System Administration
3. Testing
4. Graphic Design
5. Copy writing
6. Writing (articles & book & blog posts)
7. Documentation
8. Planning
9. Administration (business)
   
10. Networking (interpersonal)
    
11. Research (business)
12. Research (technical)

Obviously too many for the cards. And also too many to keep straight. There's no way I could wear twelve (or more) hats. I can think of a couple more including sales, and customer work (if I ever make any sales.)

Finally I realized that if there is complexity, it is probably for lack of clarity, and I hit on the what I hope is a correct division. There's obviously the technical vs. non technical, but I chose the project specific versus business in general.

So for a project there are 5 types of tasks:

1. Planning
2. Development (Programming)
   
3. QA (Testing)
   
4. Engineering (System Administration)
   
5. Design (Graphical and Copy)
   

Planning includes both development planning (technical design) and general project planning (including requirements). Project managment would fall outside of development, potentially under administrative. Design is kindof a sloppy category which includes creative (artistic) non technical tasks.

I then decided that there are 6 categories of business tasks, of which project development is but one:

1. Administrative & Financial (running the business)
   
2. Looking for customers (marketing, advertizing, sales)
3. Building credibility (writing, networking, helping others)
4. Improving skills (training, research, experimentation)
5. Project Development (building my projects or projects for clients)
6. Operations (maintaining development and production systems -- which could include business systems as well as customer systems)

I'll put each project in it's own box, and have a task board for the current iteration. I've decided on the following colors for project specific tasks:

1. Yellow == Planning
   
2. Blue == Development (Programming)
   
3. Green == QA (Testing)
   
4. Orange == Engineering (System Administration)
   
5. Pink == Design (Graphical and Copy)

I also wanted to include Requirements on index cards. Since white is the cheapest, and requirements will change alot, I'll use white for requirements.

White graph cards will represent design, both for graphical and for technical design.

Perhaps a bit too complex still, but hopefully workable.

The trick will be to break out of project developemtn specific and include overall business tasks in each (or most) days. I'll create a business box, and treat it as a project with different task types:

1. White == Administrative & Financial
   
2. Yellow == Marketing & Sales
3. Pink == Writing & Building credibility
   
4. Green == Training & Research
   
5. Blue == Project Development
6. Orange == Operations
   

These will be different because I'll need to timebox them, or rather allocate time to each category, because they all need to be done. I need to make sure I don't spend all day in development, or research, or administrative, or networking -- at least not every day.

I think this will give me a good categorization, and be suited well towards division of labor if growth happens.