The quiet month, and the three things worth doing in it
December has fewer meetings and no announcements that matter. That combination makes it the most productive month of the year for this subject.
The industry goes quiet in the second half of December. Nothing significant will be announced between roughly the fifteenth and the middle of January, and for once the calendar is on your side.
Three things are worth doing while it is quiet. None takes more than an hour, and all three are things that become impossible once January starts.
One: finish the one-page record
The 28 October post described it: what you use, what may go into it, who decided and why, what you checked. Four questions, one page.
It has to be written while you still remember this year’s reasoning. By February the « why » behind a decision made in June has gone, and what remains is a setting nobody can explain.
Two: the handover notes
From 17 November. For each automation you run: what it does, what it connects to, where the login lives, what to check when output looks wrong, and the one decision that would otherwise look arbitrary.
December is the right month because the person who built it is still here and, for two weeks, not especially busy.
Three: pick the twenty examples
From 14 November. Twenty real pieces of your own work, with a line each on what a good answer looks like.
Four significant models arrived in November and more will arrive in the spring. A company that has twenty examples on file can evaluate any of them in an hour; a company without them will read comparisons written for somebody else.
What not to do in December
Start anything. A project begun on 8 December is a project that loses its thread over the holidays and restarts in late January having consumed three weeks of goodwill.
Finish things, write things down, and leave the starting for the new year. That is not a lack of ambition; it is the only version of December that reliably works.