Have you been to a Brazillian buffet house? At these restaurants, waiters come around constantly with some meat, and will slice it off for you if you are showing the green YES:
If you need some time to relax and digest you show red:
Sometimes it would be nice to show this card to management. For example, when you get into the programming zone, wouldn’t it be nice to say “please don’t come around with small talk right now?”
Back in the day, I put in a policy which meant that management couldn’t bug my dev team during certain hours (unless they planned a meeting in advance etc). It was amazing to see the productivity gains from this simple measure.
Don’t be scared to show the red card! :)
March 13th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
Yes, I once worked on a team where we implement a do-no-disurb time for the whole team every day, from 2pm to 4pm. It took quite a while for the analysts and testers to get used to this, but it did help get ones head down.
Unsuprisingly it was quite controversial.
March 14th, 2005 at 8:56 am
This is a really good idea. The “Rodizio” cards should be even better (for the developer) than prescheduled DND… the problem is that some developers might never show the green card!! : )
March 16th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
Giving the green or red card to management :)
May 25th, 2006 at 8:14 am
wow, it a very interesting and cute idea. i like it alot