Paper cuts
I hate when I have a clear idea of what I want to do, but my train of thought gets derailed by a random issue that comes up. At work, a constant pain point was having to restart the local frontend server when adding/updating something in the config. This was especially frustrating for new team members and those who hadn’t touched the frontend in a while–especially since the backends automatically restarted on config changes.
This issue was around for about 8 or 9 years. The fix to automatically restart the server took took 30 minutes to apply, test, and put out for review.
These kinds of issues are the worst – they distract from the work you were trying to do, so you accept the workaround as the status quo because you’re trying to get back to what you were initally doing! You accumulate enough of these and productivity plummets – death by a thousand paper cuts!
I’m changing my process now – I keep a “paper cuts” document around, and whenever I notice a workaround that I constatnly have to apply, I add it. Telltale signs are messaging somebody with “do you remember how you solved X?” or searching through your shell history.
Save yourself and everyone else this pain, and fix those paper cuts!