"Liberty" Tasks

A "Liberty task" is a small, self-contained task, ready to pick up and just start. No dependencies or blockers. It must be useful rather than make-work, and very often it is one of many similar tasks. It should not require deep thought; it is a thing which can be done, not a thing which surely could be done after figuring out how. In a codebase this might look like a list of tech debt noted over the years, or like the dozen refactorings needed before an unwieldy component can be broken up into three clean components. At home this might look like the ten yearly maintenance jobs needed to avoid early breakage, or like writing out the ingredients needed for each recipe you intend to try soon so that a legitimate shopping list can be created. 

Some years ago one of the cofounders of the company to which I sell my labor found out he had a brain tumor. He took a step back from being the CTO while he dealt with the immediate mental and physical issues, including brain surgery, but did not stop improving the company. In fact he felt his recovery would be much harder without being able to throw himself into work. But his tasks changed significantly. He didn't have, or didn't trust he could have, the needed long term concentration and focus for strategic level decision-making or complex code changes. Instead he began a six month journey of cleaning up the codebase. He knew many parts of it he disliked and knew how to fix, and they were all on his list. Once upon a time the codebase was a monolith and now it is a web of microservices, but two pieces of the monolith remained, making two of the services very messy and full of legacy code and dependencies. So every day he strove to put out at least one diff, however small, untangling the remaining dependencies.

His name is Michael Liberty, and now these tasks are known to me as Liberty tasks. They are very useful to recognize and have available when you don't have many spoons, or when someone is new to a domain, or when a project has a deadline but still has unknowns but it would be great to begin work on the project immediately.