On Friday somebody asks
how your week went.
You say fine, a bit scattered.
You mean it,
and you could not name three things
you finished.
They happened.
You simply have no access to them.
Memory is not neutral about this.
Unfinished work stays loud.
The half-written migration.
The reply you owe somebody.
The bug you reproduced and did not fix.
All of it keeps announcing itself,
because it is still open.
Finished work goes quiet
the moment it closes.
So the ledger in your head
is permanently overdrawn.
Everything outstanding is present,
and everything completed has been filed
somewhere you cannot reach
on a Friday afternoon.
That feeling is not information about the week.
It is a property of the storage.
And it is expensive.
The sense of having done nothing
is what makes you work Saturday,
accept the extra thing,
and say yes
when the honest answer was that the week
had already been spent.
You cannot argue with it from memory.
You can only outvote it with a record.
Three lines at the end of the day.
Not a plan.
Not what is left.
What moved.
Merged the retry fix.
Found the cause of the Tuesday alert.
Sat an hour with the new starter
while she did her first deploy.
It takes ninety seconds,
and the ninety seconds are not the point.
The point is that on the day you write it
you notice what actually happened,
which is usually not what you intended
and is frequently better.
Two months of those lines
will tell you things
no calendar is able to.
Which work was so small
you never counted it,
and so frequent
it quietly took a day a week.
Which problem you have now described
in eleven conversations
without it ever appearing on a plan.
The record is not for an appraisal
and it is not a defence.
It is the only honest reply available
when Friday tells you
that you spent five days
and produced nothing.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
