This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Too Much To Do Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

There's a story about the project where Kent Beck began to formalize Extreme Programming, where the team was complaining that there wasn't enough time to do everything they had planned, and Kent Beck turned that around to "there's too much to do". There's only so much time, we all get only 86,400 seconds per day to work, eat, sleep, etc. We can't increase the amount of time we have per day. But with the idea that there's "too much to do", we can prioritize, defer, reduce scope, simplify, and so on. And thus, XP time-boxing and team velocity.

My "too much to do" involves books to read, writing I want to do, and a possible career change from being "just a programmer" towards teaching and mentoring and writing. With my full-time day job, it's hard for me to prioritize time for all those things. I've got a bunch of books half-read and unread. Other than blogging, I haven't done much writing-down-of-words so far. I like to relax by watching a movie or TV show or reading fiction or sometimes non-work-related non-fiction. I read blogs, mailing lists, and news on the internet instead of reading a daily newspaper.

I've trimmed my mailing lists, trimmed the blog-list, trimmed the number of TV shows I watch -- and we're in summer re-runs, so there's almost no TV shows to watch now. I suppose I could trim some more. If I "trim" my current day-job (the project ships in September, so I would wait until then), I could live off savings for a while and try to do the writing and teaching I've been thinking of. However, I like collaboration, so working alone isn't terribly attractive (If you want to collaborate with a co-teacher/co-author and you work in the SF Bay area, maybe we should get together?).

A few of the books in my to-read, to-reread, currently-reading, or partially-read pile:

• The Ruby Way, by Hal Fulton
• Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn
• Refactoring Workbook, by William Wake
• Agile Web Development with Rails, by Thomas and Hansson
• Foundations of Ajax, by Asleson and Schutta
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
• Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, by Isaacs and Walendowski
• Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook, MacOS X Edition
• Team of Rivals : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Goodwin
• The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter
• Refactoring Databases : Evolutionary Database Design by Ambler and Sadalage
• And a some more books on MySQL, SQLite, and other databases, agile software development and project management, and other topics, that are sitting too far away for me to read the titles from my chair.

Perhaps it's time for me to time-box, estimate, and prioritize my to-do list.