Spend Your Time Wisely

Naturally, since I love what I do for a living, I tend to spend a lot of my free time doing things like building web sites, writing utilities, etc.  One particular site I have been building is for a local business owned by a close friend.  It has been a lot of fun for me because I built it on App Engine, Google's code-in-the-cloud platform, and it gives me a chance to learn some more Python, probably my 2nd favorite language (behind C++).

Anyway, on to the point.  Recently, several tasks (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) have been "assigned" to me.  I asked the owner to put together a prioritized list of items, so I could easily just go down the list in my free time.  The idea was that the most critical items would be put at the top.  However, as I have been working down the list it is clear to me that this was a bad assumption.  I am again reminded of the question my friend Alan always asks..."How many more XXX will we sell if we do task YYY?".  In this case, the 2nd highest priority item on my list was to align cell items differently in the product listing table.  This table is three columns wide.  Items at the bottom of this table naturally align to the left.  The owner wants the item centered if there is only one in the bottom row, and left aligned if there are two.

To me, this is purely cosmetic and should have probably been the last item on the list.  Not to mention it's a bit of a pain in the butt to get items to align in a conditional manner.  But, somehow, this was #2 on my list.  Higher than the ability to delete products from the list.  Higher than adding links to previous blog entries.

Having worked on many projects where priorities have been completely screwed up, I shouldn't be too surprised.  I guess the message I'm trying to send is - if you are in a position to determine the priority of work items, do your best to make sure the ones that give you the biggest bang for the buck are at the top of the list.