I’ve previously mentioned that a Data Guardian will spend their time in three key technical areas when caring for the data environment: Availability, Performance, and Security.

But not all work is the same. Today I will talk about planned and unplanned work, or proactive versus reactive work.

Reactive versus Proactive work

Regardless of what task you find yourself doing within the key areas of Data Guardianship, you are either doing that reactively or proactively.

Is what you’re doing now planned? Or as a result of something or someone’s sudden need for help?

Most often is the case, we find ourselves driven by the needs of others.

And if we’re not careful, the unplanned reactive work is all we ever have time for.

The problem with reactive work

When we let little emergencies and other people’s “urgent” asks be the majority of our work, then we are not being good guardians of the data.

We may feel busy and get a sense of doing a good job when we move from fire to fire, solving issues.

But fighting fires every day is draining. Pager fatigue is a leading cause of burnout in our industry.

And time is the one thing we can’t get back.

If we can’t guarantee a portion of our time is spent improving the data platform, we have failed.

The desired state is proactive work

Ideally, everything we do is the result of careful planning.

We implement and test high availability strategies to ensure the database never goes down. But we would never have to use them.

We carefully design the structure of our data, and craft the perfect query patterns to get the lowest latency possible for our users. Especially as we scale.

We have locked down access to the database so effectively that hackers cry, without sacrificing performance or flexibility to our end users.

Reality check

Yes, ideally we would never get interrupted or distracted because of our careful planning.

But reality sucks.

The new feature had a bug that caused the database to crash under sudden strain.

A tornado unfortunately landed right on our datacenter.

The new Vice President of Engineering decided that we need to migrate to this cloud thing next month.

For the same reason you can’t spend your way to 100% data availability, the Data Guardian will never be completely removed from reactive work.

Conclusion

The goal of the Data Guardian isn’t to get completely out of reactive work.

Trying to do that would move us dangerously in the direction of being a Data Gatekeeper. Because the only way to remove reactive work would be if no one touched the data.

But neither is it ok to be stuck completely in reactive firefighting mode.

If you spend the majority of your time working on little emergencies, you are being wasteful and risk burnout.

So decide today to start taking control of your time so that you can be an effective Data Guardian.