Ask HN: Underperforming, feeling stuck

No, I don't do any meta stuff in the notebook, that would be silly. It's not a progress report, development plan or a Gantt chart. You don't show it to your peers or supervisors, you don't need to decieve anyone with it. The main purpose is self-accountability and keeping (loose) track of the things you need to approach. Micro-managing myself, so to say.

If I need to add a feature, I just come up with first obvious things that have to be done, and expand it as the problem works out or new circumstances arise. E.g. I had to add a protocol support (Modbus TCP & UDP) to the product, the list ended up like this (editorializing a bit):

  - get green light from the manager
  - read the spec for minimal conforming implementation
  - implement conforming request parsing
  - implement register read command
  - add application-specific bit X to a register
  - add application-specific bit Y to a register
  - implement UDP recv/send loop
  - test UDP part
  - implement TCP listener
  - test TCP part
  - fix zombie issue with TCP handler
  - test TCP part
  - build of product with the new feature
  - test the build
  - test the build vs real PLC

Perhaps everyone has at least some ideas what you should do when you begin on chunk of work X, so you just write them down, no matter how trivial.

Itemize feature X is often very difficult. Instead of itemizing all of feature X in one go, just figure out what the next item is that needs to be done to move towards feature X and write only that single item on the to do list.

It depends what technologies you are working with to, when I had to pickup the .NET stack I found a large portion of my days taken up just researching different little unintuitive bits and pieces.

It's possible that your day becomes to compartmentalized that you don't really have time to build up some momentum on anything? Possibly staying back longer at work might help get a bit of flow happening, I know personally if I was working a 9-5 job it would at times kill productivity with the stopping and starting the next day again overhead.

I wouldn't be so sure that perfectionism at work is such a good thing. Sooner or later you're going to hit the bottom line.

I used to have something like this problem, and it turned out to be very simple: hunger.

I had a bad habit of not eating when I was deeply into something (or deeply stressed), and my body would simply run out of fuel. I think there is something weird about my physiology that causes me to not notice hunger as much as others. So I wouldn't feel super hungry, but I'd get this spacey, apathetic, faded feeling and have trouble focusing.

The longer I waited, the worse it got. But I'd already wasted so much time, I'd feel bad 'wasting' more by taking a break and getting something to eat. So it would go on like this, sometimes for a couple days at a time.

After a few years of this I happened to meet a beautiful, loving girl who also liked to cook. She made sure I ate at least one good meal a day, and lo and behold, the focus problems largely went away. I put two and two together and nowadays when I feel the fadey feeling kick in, I know what it is and get up and get a string cheese or something.

I imagine this probably sounds ridiculous, and I think I may be the only person on earth to have this specific issue. But I just wanted to reinforce the _practices_ bit. It could be something simple. Maybe find a trusted friend or coworker to watch your work practices for a few days and tell you if anything seems odd?