A Day in the Life of a Happiness Engineer: October 8, 2014

Having a headache for most of the afternoon, I powered through as best I could.

One of my goals for this week is to process unresolved posts, which means:

• Determine the next action(s), and do them (if possible).
• If I can’t move it forward, ping the appropriate people.
• If there’s nothing else to be done, mark the thread as resolved. I leave a comment in case a commenter wants to reopen.

I don’t think we’ll get to zero this week, but we’ll have a clearer vision if we tend to the oldest items and develop a routine of processing unresolved posts regularly.

06:45 — Leg cramp woke me up, and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I reconcile YNAB with our bank accounts, and…watch the series finale of Burn Notice. I might’ve watched a few random videos on YouTube after that.

09:15 — Breakfast. Glad I bought coffee last night, the previous bag was stale.

09:35 — Read Twitter¹ scroll back.

10:25 — Read Slack scroll back and 38 P2 notifications.

11:12 — Noted how a colleague processed an internal question regarding a series of sites violating our policies. Will post a reminder to cross–reference a decision with a link to the originating thread.

11:15 — Unresolved posts count: 12.

11:40 — Scheduled items appeared in Things for today, so I switch to work through the five tasks. Rad, some were already resolved from yesterday.

13:03 — Unresolved posts count: 7. I clear the newest P2 email notifications, then take lunch. (Me want food.)

15:53 — Returned from an extended lunch, after a few errands.

17:01 — Unresolved posts count: 6. We gained one today, and a few are still pretty new and awaiting further feedback. I updated several support pages.

18:00 — I pinged a colleague to check my draft of a Trac ticket related to an unresolved thread. Fortunately, I could skip that massive thread; it wouldn’t be relevant in a few months.

18:11 — In preparation for tomorrow’s team chat, I write my proposal for about documenting all the things we do on our team.

18:40 — Sign off for dinner with Amy, and watch a couple episodes of Lost.

20:59 — Grab my laptop to write this post.

This week, I’m documenting each day along with many other Automatticians. If you’d like to follow along, we’re using the #a8cday tag. If you’re intrigued, we’re hiring!