Apparently I already did that

A funny thing happed to me at work the other week. I was asked to prepare a document and when I started to gather my notes I realized I had already written it. In fact I had finished it only two weeks before the request. The fact that I did it before I was asked isn’t surprising. I am getting the hang of this consulting thing and I can on occasion see some of the needs on the horizon and prepare material proactively. This of course helps to curb the late night projects and long extra hours when things are asked for on short deadlines. No the thing that was surprising was I didn’t remember writing it. At all. I couldn’t recall even starting it! What a hoot. Here I had, and it was all obvious my work, around 30 pages of documentation I couldn’t remember doing it. At least not at first. I was baffled and amused that I could play such a trick on myself. I started to wonder if I was going senile already. I didn’t think I was that old yet.

So I started to investigate a little. I verified in the document properties that I was the creator and last modifier of the document. Then I read the document, or at least skimmed it. I started to remember creating the screen shoots and even typing some of the text. Then I checked the date of the document. It was created during the week I was in workshops in Munich. That week was basically a set of meetings of which my part was very small. I gave one 20 minute presentation that was mostly a recap of much of the information that was already presented. I also had some side meeting with the team I would be working with, and worked on some defects on the objects I am in charge of. But this was enough to lead me to some conclusions to what happened with the document.

Basically I have to admit that I do not have a typical method of working. I enjoy and need distractions. In school when we did tests to find out our style of learning I was a KT learner; someone who learns by doing and needs constant stimulation. So the work style I have developed is to have tasks that I am actively working on that have close deadlines and to have other work open and in the back ground. Then if my mind starts to wonder I switch tasks for a few minutes. I started doing this when I returned to college and seemed to work well for me. I also tend to keep things open even when I am not working in case I get an idea.

For example when I was in college during programming classes I would code while watching TV. I wouldn’t seriously be dedicated to it but I would do a little bit of the boring parts of projects bit by bit. So by starting a project early and doing these pieces in little bits, by the time the deadline was coming up I only had the interesting work left and I wouldn’t get bored doing it. Sometimes I would even do more than my part of a project just because it was open in the background. I remember one partner being surprised when a couple days before a project was due I had 80% of it done. So even though my wife yells at me for always being on the computer it does have some benefits.

So this is basically what happened here. Even though I was involved in workshops and working on defects I also had this document open in the back ground. Every once in a while I would take a screen shot or type up a couple of sentences. In the course of the week I had put the entire thing together. The reason I didn’t really remember it is because I had never felt that it was “finished” so I just thought of all I had done as a work in progress or working notes. However when I reviewed it there was very little left to change a matter of 3% or so. So I was very happy to be able to turn this around quickly to client. It is fun when you surprise yourself I for time to time I think.