Think For Me

I was using JIRA this morning and it tried to think for me. A few months ago we switched to JIRA issue tracking at work. ANd it is miles ahead of the disjointed system we were using before. Still, it tried to think for me to make things easier I assume. It didn’t get it right and ended up leading me down a path that caused me to re-do about five minutes of working. On my team we use four kinds of tasks: Sub-tasks (to break a story down into coding chunks), Story Test (To independently test the feature), Code Review (To share knowledge and learn from peers) and Acceptance (For the Product Team to review and accept or reject based on their Acceptance Criteria). So I got in early and I started by making a sub task for a story I am fleshing ou. I needed to make about seven more sub-tasks. I thought I was making sub tasks. Turns out the last one I made before this was of type Acceptance. For a different iOS story. Yesterday. All the sub-tasks I made were Acceptance. No big deal, just go back in and update. Done and move on. Except that this in not the first time it has happened. Maybe there should be an explicit rule: Do not try to think or remember for me unless you can do it exactly the way I would. Otherwise, keep it simple and find a way to gently remind me that the last thing I did (a minute, an hour, a day a week ago …) was valueX and give me an easy way to adjust as I see fit. I think this because, in the stream of consciousness that is daily life, I often forget what I did an hour ago or yesterday morning. I tell my Hannah that Papa’s are forgetful. Often. She tells me to set a reminder -“Siri, remind me to play Badland with Hannah Saturday AM”. Reminders are not thoughts for me. I have an explicit action I want to do in the future. There is no sense wasting thought on it now when my phone is very well suited to beep at me when its time. Thinking for me is a fuzzy, unintuitave guessing game at best. If its done poorly and I am not 100% on top of the system I am using, it will cost me more in time than it will save me in the long run. One thing I am learning is that time is a precious, limited commodity. Perceived time, what matters most to me, is also getting faster as I get older. Your perception of time between 0-1 years old is longer than your perception of time from 1-100 years old. When an application steals five minutes from me, well I have a visceral reaction to it. Thats likely why I get annoyed when I have to call outdated companies that still put me on hold inserted of taking my number, putting it in a queue and calling me back when ready. I am all for automatically letting my app think for me. Especially the mundane last settings used low hanging fruit - my app should not think for me unless it can do it reliably, the way I do it (fragile emotional state and all that included) or not at all.