After graduation in year 2000, started working as an ASP developer. Never looked back. In 20 years though, 5 lessons stick out. Here are the stories of the first time I picked them up.
Pick your battles
For a junior, a board meeting is like the club of the elite. A senior member of the company I worked for skipped one of those, a behavior I could not make sense of as a junior. When I asked him, he said if there was anything important, they would email it to him later. Then he said: you have to learn to pick your battles.
Use notepad
A team leader opened notepad to add a task to a to-do list. When I asked him why not use a proper, more complex tool. He said what meant: the tasks were complex enough, do not need one more complexity to add. Those days, notepad removed a lot of the clots that formed in my head due to thinking about a complex problem.
Eat your frog first
Or what is known as: Eat That Frog. Someone shared that from an article or a book he read, in a company meeting, just before a release. Ever since then, I tackle the most abnoxious task (my frog) early on.
Structure folder according to intent
Met a client who gave me that advice about sorting out inbox. He said, do not place your emails according to what they are, but what you intend to do with them. I took that advice to my folder structure, it has been 15 years and my folder structure did not change: "work", "bulk", "zjunk", "exe". It all starts with "zjunk", that gets burried on an external drive every once in a while. Another advice I was given: why delete files when you can buy cheep HD.
Use the point system to choose between alternatives.
A friend of mine was quiting his job, and when I asked him how he came to this decision, he showed me this way. Better shown than described:
