Stuck in Place

I open up my project to get to coding, knowing full well everything that I want it to do. I do this thinking that I’m going to be super productive and get a bunch of work done. I couldn’t be more wrong. I find myself stuck in place. I’m over thinking the how, and not getting to the what. I want to implement feature A, but feature A needs to be written with the unwritten feature B in mind. I haven’t decided how to do feature B, so I start thinking about that first. Of course I can’t work on feature B because I don’t want to break or restrict feature A. This kind of cyclic dependency is what I find myself doing today.

This isn’t a problem that I have often, thankfully, but when I do have it, it can be really hard to get myself out of that rut and just start coding something. You see, the secret to getting everything to work is to stop worrying about the other components, and to just start writing something. If I break something, I can always go back and adjust. My head just won’t let me do that sometimes, and I get stuck in a block.

I’m stuck in one of those blocks right now, so I decided to write about it. The idea is not so much to share with the world my problem, but to kick loose whatever brain blockage is there keeping me from progressing further. If I do something else for a while, maybe when I come back I might be able to do something useful. I don’t know if this is really going to work for me, but at this point I’d try anything to get past my psychological block and into the realm of productivity.

Okay, I think I’ve done enough sharing for one night, I’m going to give the problem another go.