I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

The action point is to write a work plan that includes your focus, desired results, and deadline. I use a Kanban board for work. I have four columns. Ready, In progress, Holding, and Done. Work that I do are in each of these columns. When I have work that needs to get done I create a ticket and put in there details for completion. With security, I don’t have the luxury always of creating a plan and working on just that to completion. Security incidents can wreck havoc on any plans. I will often start something and then have it drop due to other priorities that seem to pop up. Maybe others in security have a much more stable set of work they can accomplish. I don’t and maybe that’s a culture thing too.

One thing I am trying to be better about is creating acceptance criteria. What things do I need to complete to close the ticket. This could be considered the plan, which involves focus and desired results. The deadline is a bit more tricky. I will ask for a deadline and usually get a cold or hot response. I’m not given a deadline usually. Maybe I should set my own. I don’t. To me it’s done when it needs to get done. When I am given a deadline, my deadline is usually well ahead of the other persons deadline. I’d like to try deadlines, I’m just not sure how they work in security. Then again maybe security isn’t so special and there are other professions with similiar issues and I’m just making excuses.