Programmer's Block
For the last... who knows how long... I've been struggling to get work done on a project I'm doing at the office. It's not that I can't do any work - I have no problem picking up tasks and getting them done. In fact, it seems like I go after those sort of things just to avoid working on that main project.
This seems a lot like the concept of writer's block.
I did a search on the internet and the first hit was this site. It made a lot of sense. Particularly this section:
I sit down, sketch it out and then start thinking about how great it's going to be when it's done. Boom, crash, there's the mistake. It's that vision of greatness that's a killer. Why? Because your mind gets about 100 steps ahead of reality and then when you sit down to try to turn it into a working system the mountain you've built seems too large to climb. Basically it's day-dreaming and dreams are often far removed from reality.
This sounds almost exactly like what I'm going through. This person's suggestions?
So how do you combat this? I really don't know for sure, but I do know it helps to think small. It especially helps to avoid the dangerous day-dreaming of greatness. I'm trying to consciously watch for this and kick myself every time I find myself thinking about how great something will be without actually working on it. My success has still been limited however. For instance I just came off a four day crash over the weekend. I did manage to dig myself out of it by forcing myself to just tackle a tiny little piece of a project, then the next little piece and so on. With this I was finally able to put together some good productive hours.
I'll give it a shot tomorrow and see how that works. I think it just might, because it makes a lot of sense.