Imagine you trained, mentally and emotionally prepared, for a 100 metre race. Bright and early in the morning, you show up at the start line, get ready, set, and dash off. By the time you should be crossing the finishing line, there’s no line in sight. Weird, maybe your perception of time is off. So you keep dashing. Still no finishing line. Your pace is not sustainable, so you slow down somewhat, but keep running. There’s a fork in the road. It’s not even a race track. A change of scenery. The road starts sloping upwards. You’re still running. Paved road turns to gravel, then to dirt. It starts raining. Dirt turns sticky. Around you is marshland. Dusk sets. Something’s wrong. This isn’t what you signed up for.
This is what happens when your execution planning falters, and a single item on your todo list masks a lot of work. You approach it as a single item, with an expectation that it’ll take a small, contained amount of time, maybe an hour, maybe a couple hours, half a day if something goes wrong. But as you work on the task, more and more details emerge, and dealing with them takes time. Yet you are still caught treating it as a “single item”, so you never take a step back, admit that it’s a multi-day project, and properly organize your execution. You start feeling frustrated that it’s taking you this long. You start getting tired and warn down, because you never planned for this slog. You can’t gain any momentum, because at any would-be-productive stretch of coding, you run into more and more unexpected, unplanned details, turns, forks in the road. All these negative feelings further grind down your visibility, making it that much harder to step back and reassess the situation.
What’s worse, is that when you do finish the work, the quality is likely to be subpar, because you never planned for the whole thing holistically, and only made design decisions reactively.
To avoid this issue, before starting any new work item on your todo list, give yourself a couple minutes to think “is this really an atomic unit of work, or is there more to it than meets the eye”. Break it down and organize your execution.
If you fail to avoid, and find yourself in the middle of this sort of mess, it’s important to detect and break out as soon as possible. Listen to your subconscious giving you hints. If you feel reluctant to start on the task, and even though the task description seems like a manageable hill, you can feel a huge mountain’s shadow looming behind it, chances are your single todo item is masking a lot of work behind it. Stop what you’re doing, put your planning hat on, analyze the item, break it down into pieces, and make an execution plan.
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