tl;dr: having a clear and prioritized list of deliverables helps you navigate uncertainty, deliver more value earlier and finish everything faster!
Hello, it's me again.
My current personal project (and frankly obsession) for the past 2 weeks has been optimizing my "DevOps Setup" (i.e. my command line and tools). I consider I'm moving pretty fast with this project and I attribute that to my enthusiasm for wanting to do something different, but to a bigger extent to my prioritized list of deliverables.
Initially I started with a list of problems with my current setup but having only that created a sense of urgency and of "omni importance". I ended up keeping this initial list to remind me of my goals but I'm directing way more attention towards the list of deliverables I made based on all the problems I wrote. It looks something like:
- [X] Sync obsidian between devices
- [X] Merge personal and work vaults
- [X] Setup a tool to manage my dotfiles in a git repo (I'm using chezmoi)
- [X] Find out easy ways to keep my work and personal environments with the same tools
- [ ] Move my current repositories to WSL
- [ ] Move from Windows Terminal to Alacritty
- [ ] Automate setting up my raspberry pi with Ansible?
- [ ] Take over the world
Specially with Linux there is a big incentive to go down rabbit holes for configuring each single thing, so having tasks with a clear Definition of Done is pretty important.
Sidenote: I'm having to control myself not to enter the specific rabbit hole of Nix and NixOS because it aligns a lot with what I value but it has a gigantic learning curve
I'm also keeping a separate list of "future goals" to limit the scope of my migration but to also not forget what ideas I have for the future (such as learning Nix)
Also in the topic of prioritization, I found that sometimes the most important tasks tend to be the most "boring" ones. In my case, I got a lot of benefits upfront from "simply" merging my Obsidian vaults and backing up my programs and dotfiles across machines, which I would have procrastinated to do since I'm very lazy.