Catching Up After a Long Vacation

Tadashi Shigeoka ·  Fri, November 14, 2014

I took about a week off for my honeymoon. After being away for 7 days, I needed to efficiently catch up after returning, or I’d risk drowning in daily work tasks. So I summarized the procedure for understanding work content during my absence and actually tried it.

Catch-up Procedure

1. Read release notes

I read the release notes that the Dev team creates weekly for all employees to understand what features were released. First, I roughly grasped the overview of feature development and changes.

2. Confirm major specification additions/changes with Dev members

I had development team members teach me via chat tool Slack about points regarding specification additions/changes that could cause problems if I didn’t know about them. This reduces wasteful development rework.

3. Check Github issues and pull requests

I especially focused on reviewing those with mentions to me. After roughly finishing, I merged pull requests that could be merged one by one. After that, I reviewed unreviewed pull requests.

Summary

When I actually tried it, it was absolutely impossible to catch up on “all” changes from a week in just one day.

Realistically, I did the two things: “read release notes” and “confirm major specification additions/changes with Dev members,” and then while working on the remaining items, when questions or ad-hoc tasks came in, I handled those, and the day ended in a flash.

While it was impossible to understand everything, the realistic approach seemed to be handling tasks requested that day while using free time for catch-up.

That’s all from the Gemba.