The jbrains Blog

Who's to blame for the reader not getting the message that the writer intended?

If you frequently find yourself wondering how the day slipped through your fingers, then you need the Two-Minute Rule.

The subtitle of the book _Getting Things Done_ is "the art of stress-free productivity".

Most people exhaust themselves trying to carry too much information in their working memory.

Some folks insist on using Word.

Getting Things Done calls them open loops: unresolved tasks where you're blocked because you are waiting for someone else.

Sometimes, to find a feature, you first have to consult a thesaurus.

When interactions "go wrong", the very thing you are most likely to complain about and try to change is the very thing that most people find hardest and most painful to change about themselves.

LinkedIn is full of strong opinions, weakly articulated.

You need iterations/sprints long enough to build certain helpful habits, but once you've built those, you might safely leave iterations/sprints behind.

"I can't use to-do lists, because when I write things down, I see how much there is to do, then I shut down and go back to bed.

Why can't you map parseInt in TypeScript?

You are probably used to interpreting deadlines as a control mechanism, especially since that's how it seems to be in software development.

Technical leaders often struggle to introduce "tricky" design concepts into their code bases, because the other programmers don't seem ready for them.

Programmers routinely complain about code being "unreadable".

When Common Practice becomes even more commonly-practised, the economic forces on software design change in a way that both creates more opportunities and makes it harder to seize those opportunities.

Many people struggle to apply the ideas in Getting Things Done, partly because those ideas seem like abstract "good things to do", rather than as simple, practical solutions to immediate problems.

Rules can cause confusion, because we try too hard to follow them.

When we limit ourselves to one outcome per test, we exert helpful pressure on our design that sometimes results in simpler code that is easier to test.

Describing the transformative benefits of _Getting Things Done_ sometimes sounds like cult indoctrination.

The old joke says that computer programmers are very good at figuring out what needs to be done, but pretty bad at figuring out what _might_ need to be done.

If you frequently find yourself wondering how the day slipped through your fingers, then you need the Two-Minute Rule.