Do you have a Sh*tlist?

Have you ever been asked to suddenly come up with 10 different things in a meeting, when asked “What do you do?” or “How much work is it?”. Here’s how you can be prepared to share the list of tasks with everyone else, immediately!

Being a software developer in a highly experienced agile team, some days we find new approaches to simple problems. Today, during one of the team interactions, we discussed who does what in the team. Being in an agile team, I feel that the core should be communication. It is also very important to communicate with the team about the tasks that we are doing. But for me, a person who is not very comfortable with speaking about every little detail that I do, it’s challenging sometimes to explain the tasks. It is even more difficult when you’re supposed to coach people or delegate the workload. So, that’s the problem I encountered.

To fix this, I came up with a solution — Create a sh*tlist.

What’s a sh*tlist? Let’s look at the pseudo-code:

• Create a list of things that you want to do, or need to get done
• Add people who are involved or are working on same tech stack.
• Let them assign themselves to the task they want to do.
• Add more stuff to the list.

Now, I know this is not something new or innovative. But I think that will solve my particular problem of not being able to suddenly come up with 10 different things in a meeting, when asked “What do you do?” or “How much work is it?” Now, I can just point them to this ‘Sh*list’, and it gives a sense of clarity as well.