I don't know how well this works for the type of scenarios referenced in TFA.
But I'm now about 8 weeks into a massive code change in a 600k LOC C++ codebase. Roughly 3000 files that need to be manually inspected to change every instance of a forced compiler error report so that the code at that point uses a replacement datatype, or doesn't. The task is not automatable, requires a fairly deep understanding of both the problem domain and the specifics of each line, and isn't testable until every single file has been modified.
Granted, situations like this don't come up particularly often (thankfully). But things not so distant to this come up more often than one might guess, especially in open source contexts where avoidance of technical debt is allowed to be a major development priority.
When faced with tasks like this, there's no time management process that can help. You just have to start, and then keep going until its done. Every minute you get distracted or for any reason switch to another task just delays the intended eventual merge back into the main branch.
But I'm now about 8 weeks into a massive code change in a 600k LOC C++ codebase. Roughly 3000 files that need to be manually inspected to change every instance of a forced compiler error report so that the code at that point uses a replacement datatype, or doesn't. The task is not automatable, requires a fairly deep understanding of both the problem domain and the specifics of each line, and isn't testable until every single file has been modified.
Granted, situations like this don't come up particularly often (thankfully). But things not so distant to this come up more often than one might guess, especially in open source contexts where avoidance of technical debt is allowed to be a major development priority.
When faced with tasks like this, there's no time management process that can help. You just have to start, and then keep going until its done. Every minute you get distracted or for any reason switch to another task just delays the intended eventual merge back into the main branch.