Discussion of gissue-freshening ensued today (@bee’s now beeminding them too and I’m trying to convince @adamwolf) and we made this handy list for when Beeminder is making you freshen a gissue and you’re not sure what to do.
Start at the oldest non-snoozed gissue and, if it’s not obvious how to freshen it, go down this list until you find something that applies:
- More copyediting of the top-level description as you re-reflect on the gissue.
- Optimize the title for getting you to recall what the gissue is about.
- Are the labels good?
- Often you think of new keywords or related gissues to link to, based on other freshening.
- Move things from the comments to the top-level description.
- Split the action items into finer-grained tasks.
- Check one of them off or otherwise make some quantum of progress and mention what you did as a gissue comment.
- There’s always snoozing it if no freshening makes sense and it’s not a priority and is ok to go out of sight out of mind until we go looking for it.
- If you’ve exhausted the previous 8 things and are still agonizing, identify a pre-req gissue. Say you need to freshen gissue G and you’ve found gissue H that should happen first. Edit H to include “unsnooze G” as a checklist item, then snooze G.
- Whine to Danny (Bee’s words, not mine!) who can probably do one of the above things for you.
- If even that fails it probably means it’s time for the gissue to actually be the next priority!
(Note in particular how huge a release valve #8 – snoozing – is.)