Using critical resources

For a short period of time a few months ago I was writing a lot of PL/SQL code myself on one project. I was covering up the team of 7 DB people who had enough Oracle knowledge but never really understood business domain so were unable to write effective hotfixes to patch a mission-critical system in production. And since it was often an Emergency threatening the very core business process of the customer (we replaced their obsolete core system with the brand new platform) somebody just had to fix it.

I maintained detailed To-Do lists of all items to be taken care of and was double-checking that whatever I’m working on is the most critical NOW. I knew I only have myself to rely on and I wanted to make sure I use my own capacity for the best possible value, understanding there’s no way I could do all of it. And as a result I knew that whatever I didn’t do during a day was less important that what I did do. See the point? there will always be something that will slip thru the cracks. And there may be a lot (!) of stuff. But as long as you know that it’s of less importance compared to what was taken care of plus you know there’s no more effort you could have put in – you’re good. As good as you could be, I mean.