Post idea: "The thing after the thing"

[SeanKilleen]

Realized that a very successful strategy I've employed in multiple environments boils down to "always thinking about the thing after the thing".

Examples:

• In meetings, I try to always take notes, especially on next actions / decisions, so that we can send them out immediately after to inform people
• When onboarding, I write down the problems/questions/answers/missed steps, and try to turn it into an onboarding guide somewhere for the person after me.
• When coding,
  • I'm thinking about how to automate getting that code out into an environment since I know I'll do it a lot
  • I'm thinking about error handling and things we might hit at run-time (Defensive coding)
  • I'm thinking about logging and operational visibility and what I might wish for as a future debugger
  • I'm writing automated tests because I'm thinking about pinpointing bugs in the future or refactoring faster.

Big parallels to DevOps and "improving the work is (slightly) more important than doing the work."

Only recently realizing I owe a lot of my success to this principle. So I figure I'll write up a post to challenge people to "think about the thing after the thing", for whatever they're doing.