I was thinking about issue tracking a lot for last few weeks. There are a lot of free, commercial and hosted software options that let you track your issues in this or that way. Some of the popular choices are Trac, RT, JIRA and Basecamp.
Though as far as I understand all these solutions, they are pretty passive, just like most of web applications. They are just issue databases with notification capabilities. And that made me to think in a somewhat different way.
Please note that may be I’ve just missed something that is already implemented this way and just re-inventing a wheel
So, what I am talking about? Why I’ve said that solutions I know are passive?
Well, actually—what these solutions are doing? They allow you to collect issues, update them and get notifications about changes made. Basically, that’s all. It’s pretty straightforward, works for numerous companies and individuals, but… the problem is that I’m not very self-disciplined, I’m rather enthusiast, and I could easily lose a focus and finally have problems with own daily or weekly or monthly (yikes!) plan. And as far as I can see, I’m not that alone.
So I came to a simple idea of so called nagging issue tracker (nagit). What it is about? What purpose should it serve? An idea is very simple, really:
- nagit splits assigned issues into session chunks: rightnow (tasks to be done just now, in a few hours term), today (tasks to be done today), thisweek, thismonth, thisyear.
- Once you have assigned tasks in a rightnow chunk, it’s your current chunk. When you’re done with them, today chunk is your current one, and so on.
- nagit should not allow you to view (or at least it should complicate access and make any changes impossible) for any assigned task that is not planned for the current chunk.
- nagit should nag you via popups, email, IM, SMS,
headache stimulatorabout current session’s tasks quite frequent. Frequency should be calculated using some task’s weight formula, something like:
weight(task) = (task.chunk.length_in_seconds-task.chunk.time_left_in_seconds) / task.chunk.length_in_seconds * task.importance
,
where weight and task.importance are in (0..1). If weight is higher, then nagit should remind you about this assignment more frequently.
So. Maybe you’ve got an idea. It’s still a bit rough, but it’s a concept, not a real car (YET!).
Yes, it looks that nagit is a quite aggressive application. But what if it will help me and some of you to focus on your plan (and then, get rich, happy and healthy)?
/me is experimenting with mockups.
Just a coincidence? During this sweet calm days peoples thoughts seem to start circling around similar topics. First i hit the new millenium bugtracking post and now yours. Yan Pritzker did some straight forward extrapolation of the current state-of-the-art web technology on solving the the age old bugtracking problem and i mostly agree with his post. You added the instant messenger part to the equation. That is a quite an importent new millenia technology which is missing from Yan’s original post. I propose you check his post and might join forces with him? A new millenium bugtracker must somehow offer a smart IM integration, but i’m not convinced that nagging on me is the proper way. Loosing focus is a disciplin problem and how nagging helps with that is not clear to me, but there are definitly unearthed options for huge improvments over everyhting what is existing to day. Keep conceptualizing on it and elegant solutions will materialize.
Just a coincidence? During this sweet calm days peoples thoughts seem to start circling around similar topics. First i hit the new millenium bugtracking post and now yours. Yan Pritzker did some straight forward extrapolation of the current state-of-the-art web technology on solving the the age old bugtracking problem and i mostly agree with his post. You added the instant messenger part to the equation. That is a quite an importent new millenia technology which is missing from Yan’s original post. I propose you check his post and might join forces with him? A new millenium bugtracker must somehow offer a smart IM integration, but i’m not convinced that nagging on me is the proper way. Loosing focus is a disciplin problem and how nagging helps with that is not clear to me, but there are definitly unearthed options for huge improvments over everyhting what is existing to day. Keep conceptualizing on it and elegant solutions will materialize.
Dirk,
Thanks for the link and dropping a comment!
As for what I’m try to add with this concept. It is not only about integration with IM [nagging], but also about prohibiting people working on all the tasks at the moment and just let them work on what is important NOW (items 1-3 of the list). It’s about focus.
As for losing focus. Yes, it is a discipline problem, but as I’ve said above, I’m not very self-displined (yet). And I’m sure I’m not alone with this problem. Of course no tool will make me highly disciplined, but surely there should be a technological way of helping me to achieve higher level of self-discipline.
As for nagging. As I’ve said
- yes -it’s aggressive way, and lots of people would hate this way. No problem. But may be it is a reasonabe sacrifice on the path to a higher producitivity?Hi Yurii,
I suppose you’re aware of the GTD (Getting Things Done) concept. http://www.davidco.com/pdfs/gtd_workflow_advanced.pdf It’s very close to what you described: do whatever you can immediately, delegate if you have to, defer and make a projects out of complex tasks with more than one step.
I’ve read/heard about “hard” implementations of those delayed tasks with 2 boxes of folders numbered with 1..31 for days and 1..12 for months (for the “future” tasks), where you put your tasks (in paper form presumably). But I so far wasn’t able to find anything replicating this concept online or on a single computer/PDA with easy synch between computers feature.
Evernote was my favorite for some time for tracking purposes, but I lost patience waiting for their resolution of synch issue. I use tadalist and backpack + google.calendar (for future tasks) + gmail-to-myself (for do-it-tonight tasks) + (google.notes and del.icio.us) to track my tasks and references, but clearly understand the need in “nagit” thing from one place. :)
...You might want to take a look at urbansheep’s posts about GTD in his Livejournal: http://utx.ambience.ru/users/urbansheep/gtd/
Yuri
We (developers, people) have need in quite various planning and action tracking tools. No one tool could fit everyone’s needs.
The real problem, as I perceive it, is that there are no widely accepted (as RSS or HTML or whatever) format for plan and action tracking.
Given such representation, we can develop various tools from little unix-type to behemots (if someone really needs them nowdays) that allow to do exactly what we need from them now.
But…. No accepted model – no solutions what simply plug in.
Would be glad to know that I’m wrong.
Check this out: http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD/
Good post Yurii. I wish I had more time to devote to actually building a good bugtracker instead of complaining about what’s wrong with current solutions. I think if you build a bugtracker with a pretty open API it would be easy to add in hooks for IM, twitter, or any other notification tools. In my original post I noted that tagging was a central component. If you have tagging and you have an api for hooks, you can achieve almost any workflow you like by filtering on tags. But it’s not enough to produce a bugtracker that is open to extension, one must also produce some very nice extensions for it and ship them as examples for others to produce extensions on top. acts_as_nagging, and so on :-)
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