This is my first week back at work, after four weeks of vacation. I was getting used to the vacation lifestyle: pottering around, with no musts (other than keeping everybody fed and clean). The only downside (if you can call it that) was all the cakes we were eating, because every time we visited some friends or family, they’d naturally offer us some. Which is nice once in a while, but not twice a day three times a week.

The office is dead empty. I am the only person there this week. I think there might be more of us next week, but it’s not going to be a normal week, and we’re definitely not going to start on a sprint. There are hardly any phone calls, either, so I have all day to (a) focus, and (b) work on things I have long wanted to get done but never found time for.

These first three days, I’ve mostly spent refactoring and cleaning code. Small refactorings get done in the course of ordinary work, but larger chunks (half a day and up) are harder to fit in, unless there’s an immediate payoff.

The next few days, I’ll be spending more time on is planning and thinking. As with refactoring, it’s hard to find the time to focus on not-immediately-productive thinking. Prioritizing our technical debt, thinking about how to improve our processes, looking at new tools and technologies we might be able to use.