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Discussion on: Hello, I'm a junior and I suck at organizing my work, how do you do?

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Mitch Jackson

On organizing your work:

Focus on your planning phase. Don't write code until you have a complete plan for what you're going to do and how. Build that into a checklist. Because you've done planning, your checklist items should be easier to give time estimates for. Sometimes the planning takes longer than the coding, and that's ok. My checklist usually starts with exploratory questions like "Where did X/Y data come from," "what format is this in," "What other code calls this method" etc.

On giving reliable answers:

Dedicate time to meeting/call prep. Make a list of the items you expect to bring up, and you expect to be asked about. For each of these items, a few bullet points about what information you need to convey. Try to look up anything you'll need, so you don't waste people's time while you hunt for answers. During the meeting, take notes. After the meeting, make sure anything needing further work or follow-up gets recorded on your calendar and to-do lists.

On working with your team lead:

Basically my boss told me that as a manager he is very frustrated that I do not achieve to say something like "for task X, I have achieve point a, b, c and I got d,e,f left to do which should take me Y hour".

You have a good resource here. "Boss, I appreciate the feedback you gave me about my time estimation. I want to improve this. I have been doing (this) and (that). Can you block of a little time for me on (work item) to help me improve with this?