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When I get into a slump, it's usually because I finally finished something, and then woke up the next morning not knowing what to do.
It's too effective. I end up sitting at my computer to watch a movie, and end up finishing work in the evening. I'm nerd sniping myself, and it's not healthy. Then in the morning the madness continues. I want to make room for other things in my life. I have to Cm+Q everything in the evening.
This trick is also known as the Hemmingway rule. It is a way to fight anxiety by starting with something your brain is convinced it can get done easily. And then get the ball rolling thanks to the increased self-confidence. The opposite is finishing your day on something painfully difficult and not solved.
My old colleague Mike Rowe said it this way: "Always leave it compiling" meaning, make a change and don't test it, just start the build and walk away. So when you returned you had something to dig into (didn't build, or did and needs trying). Also, you had a good feeling that maybe what you just tried will fix the problem or whatever. So you don't go home frustrated and depressed.
> good feeling Hah, for me, these moments are some of the most stressful moments of coding! I am about to find out a very important piece of information: whether I'm done or not. It's an intense feeling of anticipation like how you feel while hearing, "We, the jury, find the defendant...". I would like to avoid stringing that out over a longer period than necessary.
For me it's little different. I usually divide the work into small chunks and tackle one by one. I may work on task 1 and 2 and leave task 3 untouched for next session. This has worked for me pretty well to get started the next session.
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That could backfire. Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. To use the metaphor, perhaps you would be forcing them to park uphill.
> Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes. But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
Ohhh, this makes sense. I must try that. Up until now I was doing the exact opposite - trying to finish the task or at least drive it toward some clean state. Mainly to not block others if I am close to completion.
Given how long ago it was, though, maybe the article was about personal projects instead of work.
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> Maybe they were in the middle of something hard that's difficult to pick up from. Certainly some of them said that, and I had to push for them to leave anyway. I also feel like that when I’m coding myself sometimes. But I think the of times when it’s actually true are vastly outnumbered by the times when it’s just an illusion, and it was obvious from the velocity and energy level that the policy worked.
I think this also creates a culture or at least impression of a culture that your boss cares about your work life balance, which, honestly, in today's world is valuable and can make your org stand out from other places where the norm is to work until you're burnt out.
It's basically the simplest possible system, and I find not only does it mean I can get started right off when I come back to it, I also have no hesitation to start something I won't be able to finish before getting up.
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William Carlos Williams would do the same thing with his writing. He wrote for exactly one hour every morning, and he would leave mid-sentence many times. He said it made it much easier to get started immediately the next day.
Or it could be that you had a brilliant idea for the rest of the sentence, but the strict rule prevents you from writing it down, and next day you can't remember it and chase it all day and still be unsatisfied in the end. Either because of lost time or because you couldn't remember/recreate it, or even both. I suppose it just goes both ways. Try not to finish sth so that you don't have the somewhat hard task to star…
You really think so? You think you spend the vast majority of your time at work doing things that are so complex they're hard to pick back up 12 hours later?