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Mental Energy Kick-Off

How you start your day often impacts how productive of a day you will have. As a Support Technician, rushing into answering tickets can drain you very quickly. The Mental Energy Kick-Off is designed to help you start your day outside of tickets in a way that motivates you and gives you momentum to hit the tickets with energy. It's also an excellent way to be reminded that your work is much bigger than just being a "professional emailer".

Finding exactly what you should do for your Metal Energy Kick-off depends a lot on what motivates you about Support work, but here are some suggestions:

Documentation

We're always in need of updates to existing docs and writing of new docs. Start your day by reviewing our existing Give Docs issues and spend some time knocking a few out.

Level-Up Your WordPress Knowledge

WordPress development moves fast, and our ability to know WordPress deeply greatly improves our ability to support our users.

{% hint style="info" %} The deeper your knowledge of WordPress, the better equipped you are to support our users. {% endhint %}

Spend some time reviewing recent WordPress-focused articles, the WordPress Code Reference, or Trac to increase your general WordPress knowledge.

Another excellent way to gain more knowledge and experience with WordPress as a Support Technician is to browse and even respond to the general WordPress Support Forum. Sometimes giving your knowledge in a non-Give-centric way to the broader WordPress community also provides a mental energy boost -- it makes you feel more generous (as in "Democratizing Generosity").

Try starting with the Support topics that have no replies. Contributing in this way improves your WordPress knowledge, contributes to the wider WordPress community, and enhances your skills as a Support Technician.

Review Github Issues

Development at Give happens very quickly as well. There are new issues and features cropping up daily. Our Development Team reports their activity on Github in a very detailed and accessible manner. Reviewing existing Github issues, commits, and Pull Requests has several major benefits:

  • Improves your knowledge of coding standards and practices in general
  • Improves your knowledge of Give from a features and code perspective
  • Keeps you informed on upcoming releases and new features
  • Gives you more direct knowledge of existing issues so you can be more informed when you support our customers.

Review our guide on Contributing to Github Issues for how to do that.

Dig Into Give Core and an Unfamiliar Add-on

Part of contributing to Github Issues is also getting more familiar with Give Core and its growing list of add-ons. If you've had times where you have to provide support for an add-on that you felt unfamiliar with, the "Mental Energy Kick-off" is a great time to spend time getting more familiar with that add-on.

Take the time to setup that Add-on in your local environment. If it's a gateway or integration with a third-party app, take the time to setup a developer account for that service and fully integrate the add-on locally and test it.

This type of activity improves your skills as a support technician in several valuable ways:

  • You know the product better and therefore can support it with more detail and expertise.
  • You can review and improve existing online documentation for that Add-on or Core feature.
  • You can contribute to the Github repo with more insight on existing issues, or contribute new issues.

Communicate with the Team about your Mental Energy Kick-Off

Part of our daily routine is open and consistent communication about what we're doing throughout the day. That includes the "Mental Energy Kick-off" time. Once you're done with this time, update the team with a quick takeaway from the time you spent and what you're moving into next. Here's some examples:

  • @here Just wrapped up reading a great article on the HelpScout blog about pain-points as a Support technician (here's the link: example.com). Moving now into Unassigned.
  • @here Just finished writing some docs for Give Stripe. Moving to my Assigned since Unassigned is relatively under control already.
  • @here Just learned a ton on the WordPress Code Reference about oEmbeds -- wow! Moving to Low-Hanging Fruit in the Unassigned now.

This communication benefits the team by showing them what you're learning and letting them know that activity is happening in Unassigned.